I plan to open a vanguard account to start investing in index funds. In addition, I would like to buy individual stocks and from what I've read it seems there are better options like e-trade, Schwab or fidelity to name a few.
As a new investor, my priority is on low commission fees as I will not be investing huge sums of money. Is this the right approach or should I be considering other factors as well? Thanks!
Schwab and fidelity (and seemingly e-trade) are quite expensive: 5-6$ per trade. Some of them have deals to give you free trades, e.g. transfer 100k to Schwab and you'll get 200 free trades for 2 years.
Schwab and Fidelity both offer free access to a good selection of commission-free ETF's, so either of those is good as a general platform for your primary (index) investments - to avoid having 2 accounts. (Also less customer service screwups, and slightly lower TER's in general.)
Interactive Brokers are probably the cheapest in general (without having to jump through hoops for free trade deals for new customers), at min $1 per trade (0.5 cents per share, but that only becomes > $1 for large orders). BUT: they charge you $10 monthly (minus trade commissions in that month) if you have less than 100k with them.
The real time quotes thing with Interactive Brokers isn't a huge deal: most people I know check prices on yahoo finance, and then enter their orders into IB. But it is slightly annoying, and the IB user interface is pretty complicated. So I wouldn't really recommend them if you can just go with one of the big ones (Schwab, Fidelity, maybe VG).
