SmartMoney's Annual Broker Survey

Best: E*Trade
Worst: ShareBuilder

Look, up in the sky! Is that a brokerage? A bank? Actually, it's both. In what could be one of the industry's bigger gambles, you can now find firms like E*Trade and Fidelity offering everything from credit cards to free online bill-paying services, and even waiving fees for ATM withdrawals at other banks. Need a place for your gold? E*Trade, Fidelity and WellsTrade can store precious metals. Even traditional discount firms, like Firstrade, Muriel Siebert and WallStreet*E, are getting into the banking game with debit cards and cash transfers. (ShareBuilder, with bare-bones offerings, is an exception.) The reason is simple, says Scottrade's Dodson, who is getting ready to launch a slew of banking services. "There's a financial incentive for us."

If you haven't noticed a lot of these perks yourself, don't be surprised. Some are available only to the wealthiest clients, and even they have to do some work to get the best breaks. Schwab offers its highest interest rate on cash balances — 2.26 percent — only if someone connects a checking and brokerage account. Otherwise, rates range from just 0.25 percent to 1.50 percent, even for those with a balance of more than $5 million. And to get free trades at Banc of America or WellsTrade, you need to keep hefty minimums — $25,000 in a bank account linked to Banc of America; $25,000 combined in bank and brokerage accounts at WellsTrade and its parent, Wells Fargo.

Best: TradeKing
Worst: Zecco

Not everyone wants to e-mail, phone or chat with his discount broker. But when you need help, will it be there? That depends. Given the fierce battle over market share recently, we were surprised that three firms never bothered to answer the questions we sent in one e-mail — even after we told them that we had a $50,000 account and were "thinking of switching to your firm." Then there was Banc of America, which doesn't list an e-mail address for queries from prospective customers and instead has a live-chat feature that's difficult to find. (Hint: You have to start applying online to open an account in order to spot it.)

We had better luck reaching reps by phone. ShareBuilder, which was recently acquired by the bank ING Direct, proved to be the slowest at picking up our calls, taking over eight minutes to answer one of them. The folks at OptionsXpress were much faster, though the firm stood out for another reason: In one of our calls, we were distracted by loud chatter in the background and even heard someone shout "Whoo!" as our rep tried to stifle giggles. CEO David Fisher says phone reps at OptionsXpress keep up-to-date with live market news and sit right outside his office, "where all the energy and excitement is. Does that create a little more background noise? Yep, it probably does."

Noise wasn't a problem at WallStreet*E, the fastest firm of the bunch. But we did get put on hold twice while reps tried to find answers to our questions, and one e-mail response was blank except for the contact information for customer service. What about the firm's live chat, which never connected us to a rep? There was a "hiccup" in the system that particular afternoon, says Don Lee, the firm's chief operating officer. But Zecco Trading, in last place, doesn't even offer Web chat. It was slow to respond by e-mail and second-slowest to pick up the phone. The company says it's investing "serious money" to improve customer service.

One firm managed to earn five stars for best overall service: TradeKing. The company recently opened a new client-service center, and the effort seems to be paying off: Live chat worked without a hitch, our e-mails got answered in a speedy average of five minutes, and a phone rep even called us back to clarify his response to one of our questions. Now, that's service.