I traded with Schwab through 2008. They have a platform named StreetSmart Pro, which uses technology from Cybercorp, a daytrading firm they bought 10 years ago. I liked the platform. It was very intuitive and responsive (it had a memory footprint of around 18MB, so I never really experienced the lag that I saw with java apps from other brokers that grew to 200 or 300MB, back when I had a 1GB system). Charts were clean looking, very customizable, and came up almost instantaneously. SSPro didn't offer what some daytraders want, such as futures trading (unless you were a former Cybercorp customer) and a DOM ladder interface. The way you trade is to open a level II window that has some fields and buttons at the top. The size can be defaulted, and the price can be filled in by clicking on a price in the level II display. You then click on buy, sell, or short buttons. It was fast enough for me, but I understand some daytraders need single-click order entry.
Hundreds of stocks were categorized into industries and subindustries, so you could, say, bring up a watchlist of several dozen oil drilling and exploration stocks immediately if you wanted to. Options windows could show all the greeks. Option spread windows would show real-time bids and asks, although IIRC you had to choose a particular destination rather than being shown the prices based on the NBBO. There was a reasonable alert system that could optionally be used to place orders; downside was that it only operated during regular trading hours, and if one of my long holdings popped after hours I would have wanted to know about it.
Aside from the platform: First the good: Schwab treated active traders very well. The phone was picked up within a ring or two. They never dodged questions about system failures. When one of my holdings gapped up by 40 points one day, I got a call about it from one broker there, who was proactively calling every active trader in that stock to let them know. Schwab has lots of local offices; instead of spending 10 to 15 minutes at your bank setting up a wire transfer that will get done some hours later, at Schwab you go in, hand them a check, and you're out in 2 minutes.
The bad: quotes lagged during high market activity, such as FOMC decisions. Commissions were not as low as many direct access brokers. They did not route to BOX, and in trading thousands of SPY options over several years I never got even one instance of price improvement. They did some sort of account reconciliation every day from 16:00 to 16:15, and you couldn't get stock orders executed during that time unless you direct routed to an ECN (and there were reports here, in the long Cybertrader integration thread, that you couldn't short when direct routing to an ECN). If your trade would put you beyond your overnight buying power, the order would often be subject to review by a human, which could take several minutes (and if it was a market order, it was uncancellable during this time).
