Investing 102

[SSLance]

I'm sure this was probably covered earlier in the thread, but maybe things have changed since then...and it's something I'm looking at now so why not ask?

Who are you all mostly using for investment accounts these days?

I grew up in the investing world where you either paid hefty commissions on every equity trade or you paid a management fee quarterly to get the free trades. These days with Etrade, TD Ameritrade, and others doing free or very low cost trades...who is the hot ticket to use?

To me, if there were several houses that offered basically the same account fee structure, I'd be interested in the one that has the best\easiest to use research tools built into the online account.