I eliminated ETrade from my list. So Sharebuilder, TDAmeritrade, Scottrade are what's left. Not many trades so $7 vs $10 isn't a big deal, and I figure I hope to keep at least $500 invested so the minimum with Scottrade may not be a problem.
I thought Sharebuilder was $7 trades, but I'm trying to verify, there may be some restrictions (auto-trading only?). I think they are throwing you $50 if you join right now. But I just noticed they may tack on .007 per share on a trade of under $1.00 market value...so 1000 shares would be another $7 in addition to the $6.95...did I do that right? LOL Scottrade looks to be .005 per share. Perhaps TDAmeritrade with the $10 trade fee won't have the surcharge.
Sharebuilder has two different schemes-- you can buy stock at real-time for like $7, or for $4, you can set up a scheduled trade. I haven't used the real-time stuff, but wiith the scheduled trades, you say "I want $200 worth of Norfolk Southern" and then they'll draw the money out of the account, and process all such orders once a week. If you miss Tuesday, you have to do the order the next Tuesday, This is obviously not suitable for trying to time the market exactly, but it's very convenient for their intended use case, which is to set up recurring purchases-- "I want $200 worth of Norfolk Southern once a month, every month, on the second tuesday of the month". IIRC, all sales are done at real-time, and I know when I tried to buy a penny-stock, they said it couldn't be bought through the scheduled purchase system. The specific stock was very sparsely traded-- an average volume of something like $200 per day. The real-time fees used to be mich higher, like $20, but are now $7 or so.