Even pennies (or any non-pink stock) under $1.00 will cost at least $12-14 or more, depending on how much you buy.

They're service oriented, very polite. When I was lagging one day (back in 2002, which was probably Scottrade's fault) I accidentally sold more Conexant than I meant to. They reversed the trade for me, which was pretty cool.

They do have a decent number of research tools/links, but it's hard to compare what they have compared to what other brokerages have, because this is the only brokerage I've been with. They do have a new service that provides free Level 2 quotes (if you make 10 trades a month) but you have to have 25,000 bucks in your account.

You only need $500 to open an account. Like you mentioned, market orders are $7.

Another thing I like is that Scottrade doesnt kick you in the nuts if you commit a Free Ride Violation (although I havent had to take advantage of this yet). You get your cash back and just have to deposit enough funds to cover your original trade before the 3 days are up.

In regards to other brokerages...

If you have $5000 and 2 years of stock experience, I think you can open a Freetrades account (a division of Ameritrade), but you only get email support. Something like 20 commission-free trades a month...beyond that I dont know much about them. Ameritrade I think is $10.99 per trade, period -- but dont quote me on that. Anything else I dont know much about at all. There's a few others that people use here that I havent mentioned that are relatively popular.

You want to be careful with the 7 dollar trades. That is basically only if you buy and sell stocks without placing limits on your orders. As long as you are trading Major listed stocks (NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, etc) it works good and your trades go through very close to what it shows on the streamers. However if you trade non major listed stocks (Pinks, OtherOTC, , some AMEX, etc.) you could get buys and sells for a big difference in price and trust me it won't be in your favor. I found this out the hard way. One of my stocks was sold for .43 cents a share and the bid/ask was around .60 cents a share. This was a AMEX stock at that. That was the last time I did that.

If you put limit orders on the Major listed stocks than it will cost you 12 dollars and not the 7 dollars that they are so proud of. Like Phoenixx said they are very good people to deal with.

Also, If you are thinking of going with Lowtrades, I would suggest staying away from them. Not a very good platform for trading and half the time you can't make the trades you want on the Main trading platform and need to go to another section to place orders. Not good when you are trying to make a quick trade befor price movement.