Using Ameritrade and other e-trading services to trade online

Basically my father and brother both use Ameritrade to manage their ira’s and miscellaneous stock accounts, so I thought it would be best to start there with my own account. The main problem I had when signing up is that Ameritrade advertises several sign-up incentives such as x amount of free trades or x amount of money when you fund your account, what they don’t tell you is that any of those incentives come with a hefty price tag. Ex, the $100 when you fund your account is only if you deposit $25,000.00 or more on your initial deposit. Maybe I’m crazy, but that seems like a lot of money to be throwing at a company that you have never done business with before.

Anyway, so I’m using Ameritrade because my family uses it and I haven’t heard any major complaints. I like the functionality of the features they offer like the streamer suite, even if it does take a bit of getting used to the various windows and how each can interact with the others. Customer service is fast and responsive, although their support people don’t all seem to be trained the same way. Maybe I just asked some of them harder questions? But if you do talk to their help line, say yes when they ask you to fill out an email survey.. they gave me 2 free trades for answering 5 questions.wich is pretty good for getting something for free.. lets me do some extra day trading.