Perhaps Theresa or Steve could provide a recommendation of a good firm.
Sounds like he's looking for a stock brokerage; for Futures I'd just go with Lind-Waldock, they're so huge there's advantages of scale that are very important, and they take pretty good care of their customers consistently over time. Kind of like the Comerica Bank of Futures Brokerages (or maybe the Charles Schwab). I've traded with many Futures Brokerages, and there are very few of them that won't frustrate you with bad end-of-day report data, major accounting errors, brokeraging incompetency, etc. on a regular basis. Moreso than with stocks, the trading (transaction) records and backroom operations are very manually-intensive, making them error-prone (many Futures contracts originate as a peice of paper in the pit; some are going to wireless terminals now which helps). Anyway LW is one notch above in terms of the management ethos and the way the operation is run, they do pretty well but any way you cut it, it's a bit of a rough, dirty business so you're going to get your share of bad fills, slippage, and trades inserted into your account that aren't yours (unless you catch em'). From the brokerage side, like stock brokeraging, it's a technically difficult and demanding business to consistently do well in -- it's all about running an customer service operation, and can only be as good as the backroom operations behind it.
-Steve |
