New to USA - what broker for retirement accounts?

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Vanguard's trading platform is horrendous, but if it's just for buy & hold with occasional rebalanced, that shouldn't be too big of a deal.

Scottrade is pretty good and their stock trades are $7, however they do have a huge list of NTF mutual funds as well. Many of which are very low cost index funds of all sorts.

TDameritrade is good too and they have a huge list of free ETF's.

I think Schwab and Fidelity have also gotten into the game regarding free ETF trades too.

I have accounts with the first 3 I mentioned along with IB and for a retirement account, assuming you don't want to trade futures, etc, I would recommend Scottrade or TDA.

 

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I don't feel like my lone opinion on IB is a pot shot but more of expressing my sense of not wanting to be in the same boat with a lot of highly leveraged active traders if we have a REAL black swan market disruption. 2008 and on was not that.

Yes, IB held up pretty well in 2008. But given the margin rate of 1.X% and the ability to trade so many futures products at such a good commission, IB is filled to the brim with big and active traders of those products. I was a client of IB's for a long time but have moved to more of a conservo mode.

"As of December 31, 2012, Ameritrade had 5,836,000 funded customer accounts and client assets of $481 billion." Not sure what it is now but TD has a lot of stodgy money that is parked there and that soothes me. TD Amer also has FDIC insured cash sweeps accounts though they are moving the futures stuff over to another entity so that may change, I don't know.

No offense intended to IB users, we probably won't have the type of black swan event that would knock IB out but I wouldn't want to have a lot of money parked there.

I get the concern and that's definitely on my radar screen as well. That's why I am a fan of account diversification, although it can be a pain in the ass at times.

IB looks solid enough for me to have roughly 25% of my trading funds there. They keep fairly conservative on margin requirements which I appreciate.

I simply wouldn't feel comfortable with the small shops that offer $500 e-mini margin requirements.