SmartMoney's 2009 Broker Survey

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is part of SmartMoney's annual broker survey special report. For more coverage, see "Ranking the Full-Service Brokers," "Give Your Broker This 5-Part Test," and "Should You Dump Your Broker."

What do you want from your brokerage firm? Sorry, they can't make the market march back to its old highs. But what about commissions, research, investment products and customer service?

To find the best—and worst—discount brokers in these and other categories, our 17th annual broker survey relied on our own tests, consulting-firm analysis and surveys of the brokerages themselves. No detail was too small. We noticed, for example, that WellsTrade and Banc of America charge $75 to close a retirement account—a service provided for free by some of their competitors. OptionsXpress left us on hold for nearly four minutes when we requested its interest rate on cash balances. (The company later said it shouldn't have taken that long.) But when we contacted Fidelity with a query on interest rates, the rep gave us a quick answer and even a compliment: "Good question."

Yes, it's a lot of work, but our efforts haven't gone unnoticed. For two years now, the Web site ConsumerSearch has said SmartMoney has the best broker survey among magazines and newspapers. Our category-by-category-findings: