Adrien

I use Scottrade. It cost $7.00 to buy or sell. There are no other fees. Customer service is good. Research tools are also good. I don’t know if they are the “best” but I don’t have any complaints with them

Drawback: they do not provide investment advice. But with a $1000 account, I doubt you will get much help from any firm.

Talen

$1K isn’t very much money to get started in individual stocks. It isn’t enough money to be diversified easily, and fees (and the spreads) will chew up your returns.

I’d suggest investing in mutual funds to start if you have this amount, and perhaps setting up an automatic monthly investment plan with the fund. An S&P 500 index or total world market index fund is a great place to start. Try Vanguard or Fidelity:

If you insist on individual stocks, you’ll want the lowest fees possible. TDAmeritrade is a great low-fee brokerage house and offers account holders a number of very useful tools.

E-trade and Scottrade are two other low-cost competitors that have good reputations:

Sharebuilder is another interesting brokerage — this one is perfect for the small investor who wants to become diversified quickly. That’s because Sharebuild supports partial shares — that is, if you want to invest $500 in a stock that is selling for $200, they’ll arrange for 2.5 shares. The fee structure is designed to be a good deal for monthly automatic investing.

(By the way, I cannot recall offhand what the minimum account is at any of these except Sharebuilder where there was no minimum the last time I checked.)

There is at least one “zero-fee” brokerage, zecco.com. I don’t have any personal experience with them so I cannot comment.

Caleb

Go with the low cost leader, zecco.com.