Vladimir Senkov

Online Brokers - Best Savings Rates But Lousy Service?

I clicked on this title expecting to read about author's personal experience with one of those cheap brokerages. Instead i read about something . . . else. I'm not sure what exactly. I remember blogs and forums were mentioned.
Who was that famous guy who advised writing about what you know?
Speaking of that. What do I know? Not much, really. But when it comes to brokerages, banks or anyone else for that matter, I came to conclusion that just about everybody does, eventually, screw something up. Perhaps some more than others. Sometimes it feels like you could be better off doing business with no one but yourself :) But let's get back to reality.
Some say it is easier to deal with larger or more established firms because there could be less problems, on average. Some say it's better to deal with smaller or newer companies because someone who really wants your business will care more and will put on personal touches when it comes to customer service instead of making you fill out forms and call outsourced support centers and automated voice machines.
This is as far as I can go with generalizations. It doesn't say much of anything specifically about cheap vs expensive.
My personal experience with brokerages has been limited to just a few: DLJ direct, Etrade, Ameritrade, and more recently Scottrade and Zecco. I can't say that i really had any serious problems with any of them, although something happened with just about any of them at some point :)
I conducted a few experiments on execution and got very good results across the board.
Commissions I paid were significantly different. On a yearly basis, even a few trades here a there easily result in hundreds if not thousands of dollars in commissions.
So far, cost seems to be far more important to me than unproven possibility of having better service elsewhere.
While I'm not at all a day trader, I also have to admit that having "cheap" commissions makes new strategies available to me. For example, instead of buying relatively large blocks as I used to do, I can now cheaply execute smaller purchases and this makes building and maintaining a more diversified portfolio rather easy.
If i wanted to, i could perhaps replicate some indexes :)
As options became a lot more affordable I started using them and so far I'm pretty happy with the results. Previously most options strategies I tried were just not cost effective, now there are some that actually work OK.