Are they able to serve their customers during periods of peak market activity?What are the good points and bad points about Interactive?Anybody have an opinion on who the best broker is to do their trading through?

Sorry, haven't tried interactive yetI have heard though that Scott Trade, Fidelity and TD Ameritradehave been unable to serve their customers during the busy markets of the past few daysthis is so typical of these brokersthey do not have the infrastructure in place to serve their customers when the markets get busyand refuse to do soYet they still want to sign up as many people as possible for accounts with themSomething should be done about these shoddy practices

They have a $10,000 min to open a retail account.http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/accounts/fees/minimumDeposits.phpI have not used them. I would pick a firm that has multiple market order entry routing, and does not route to a single market. On the discount side, schwab, etrade, TD Ameritrade, are popular. Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement.

Do you mean specifically Interactive Brokers? They are an on line stock broker. They are very good if you are an active trader. They are not geared to the more casual investor but they offer access to many markets the average on line broker does not. Here is a link to their site. Read about them and see what you think.http://www.interactivebrokers.com/ibg/main.phpThe on line brokers in general do have problems with internet access during periods of very heavy market activity. At least mine do. The internet access last week slowed down a lot. I did however get my trades entered but not nearly so rapidly as I would have liked. For very cheap trading, Scottrade is considered good. TD Ameritrade is a little more expensive but they tend to have some decent tools and they handle OTC trades well. Fidelity is a lot more expensive but they have very good research tools. They do not handle OTC trades as well as Ameritrade. They do however allow a sweep of your uninvested funds into their money market accounts. Ameritrade pays zilch on univested funds.