Continued from the other day, we're listing some decent and cheap trading sites. Now understand that since these are cheap to trade on, your best bet is to do your own DD outside and only use their site to make your trades. A trade from any of these sites = a trade from any highly advertised site. Since every complete trade needs two fees (purchase/sell), these sites save you at least $10 per complete trade. This is great since you're probably not playing with much to begin with.

                                      Level 2 Stock Quotes from 06/21/11

Here they are. You want cheap right? Of course you do, here are the ones we've looked up that are reputable, cheap, and have decent customer service:

Choicetrade: My favorite but not the greatest. Getting an account takes a couple days. You have to print out some papers and mail them in snail-mail style. At like $5 a trade, it's pretty decent. There are no extra fees for penny stocks. I don't use the site's researching platforms however. It's incredibly simple in its design, which I like because a confusing looking trade site can be dangerous when making on-the-spot trade decisions.

Zecco: I had an account with them at first, but switched because I didn't qualify for one of their promotional offers. If you add a decent amount of money into your account, you get so many free trades monthly. Not bad, but you're probably not going to be playing with several thousand dollars. $5 a trade as well ($7 for penny stocks). Nothing great about their trading platform, but that doesn't really matter. They do give incentives for having referrals. If you are great at getting referrals, you'll end up getting $75 per referral.

Tradeking: One of the better platforms with cheap trades ($5), but I traded penny stocks at the time and they tacked on some new fee for stocks less than a penny per share, which drove me away. Nowadays, it's .01 per share or 5%, whichever is less. I still use their research platform even without using them for transactions though. They also have an inactivity fee, so be careful if you open an account.

Scottrade: A decent broker site with free Level 2 (L2), which normally costs around $20 monthly elsewhere. That access to live knowledge can save/make you some money. Although their trades are $7 each (with extra fees for stocks under $1), I'd still use this for highly active, low value stocks above $1. At least use it for the L2.

Sharebuilder: Another decent broker site with a decent platform. I put this one at the bottom of the list because trades are $10 each unfortunately. The good news is there are no extra fees for penny stocks and you have the option for automatic investments if you want to use it. Also, no minimum investment!

Any individually will do fine, as will a combo. To sum up, the most important things you'll want from the trading sites you have accounts with are: cheap trade fees, no extra fees per share (as used to be common with pennies), immediate customer service (some have chat features you login to quickly and are immediately introduced to a representative), no history of blocking trades (some sites refuse trades with certain companies, particularly penny stocks and high-profile, crashing stocks), ease of moving trading accounts (some are harder than others to close), and the overall simplicity of the site.

That's all for today, tomorrow we'll continue again with some tips of what to do when you think you've found a good "gamble," I mean "investment." Continued here.