One more thought which is fee structure. Most brokerages have fee structures that are graduated. By law, the breaks must be clearly defined, and offered to everyone who qualifies. Generally, those breaks are based on either trades in a specific timeframe, total assets or amount of a trade, or some combination of the three. By splitting up your money, you will have lower pricing power at all of them, which may mean that you pay more in fees.

However, IRAs have low contribution levels, these fees (such as inactivity fees) are often waived for IRA accounts. In my case, I was actually charge a few bucks in inactivity fees in my regular brokerage account at Waterhouse (becuase there were a few six-month periods where I did not execute even one trade) until my combined balances there exceeded $25k (my IRA balances counted toward the total).

I only have a TD Ameritrade, T.Rowe Price and Scottrade account. On the research front, TD Ameritrade is okay (although they claim to have a lot of new features coming), Scottrade is eh, although I haven’t used them too extensively, and T. Rowe Price is basically non-existant.

I personally use MSN Money and Yahoo Finance for my research. MSN has 10 years of financial data, and Yahoo! Finance archives conference calls on their site.

What I like about Waterhouse are the five year cash flow, income statements and balance sheets (which include shares outstanding, so you can quickly see when balance sheet improvements came from selling additional equity). Makes it easier to do screens before slogging through the 10-Ks/Qs or 20-F/6-Fs at http://www.sec.gov.

Regarding mutual funds, I mostly invest in individual stocks now, and have only held onto one fund PRCGX, Perritt MicroCap, because it is tremendously well managed, and closed to new investors. Actually, I have considered selling some of my stake, because small cap companies are going to have real difficulty growing earnings with higher and higher prime rates. If you like the fund, consider the MicroCap opportunities fund (PRCOX, I think), which has the same manager and even fewer assets.

Questions - if you open all of these accounts at all of these brokers, doesn’t it make asset allocation difficult? You now do not have one pile, but three, and reallocating among them is really difficult.

What is your opinion of other brokers you have used based on their research?

As always you should give a look to the Carnival of Personal Finance, Carnival of Investing and Carnival of the Capitalists, but here were a few relevant posts that jumped out at me to relay here.
The Daily Bacon has an article on making sense of the…

There are many great posts for this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists. I particularly enjoyed:Breakeven Point Before Real Returns at The Real Returns Circumventing Late Fee Anger at BusinesspunditCreative Job - Commute Helper at Personal Finance Advi…