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Great for cash

Cash is no longer trash. The average yield of taxable money-market funds now stands at 4.2%. You should be earning close to that on money in your brokerage account that isn't otherwise invested. But many brokers either pay indecently low yields on cash or make you negotiate a maze to earn market rates. E*Trade and TD Ameritrade take the prize for stinginess. Cash balances under $5,000 earn just 0.2% annually at E*Trade, and TD Ameritrade pays zip on cash balances of less than $2,000. On higher TD Ameritrade cash balances, you may choose a money fund, which recently paid 3.7%. But if you fail to ask for that fund, you earn 0.4% or less on balances of less than $25,000. Schwab has an equally complex and nearly as penurious system. If your total account is worth less than $100,000, you earn 1% on cash; if your account totals less than $500,000, the most you'll earn on cash is 2.2%.

An online brokerage should sweep your money into a money-market fund automatically -- and some do. A money fund offered by Vanguard recently paid 4.4% on cash balances; one from Wells Fargo paid 4%; one from Siebert, 3.7%; and one from TradeKing, 3.6%.

Interest rates vary less for investors who use margin -- that is, borrow money against the value of an account. We averaged the rates brokers charge on $25,000 and $50,000 loans. Siebert (7%), TradeKing (7.3%) and OptionsXpress (7.4%) were best; TD Ameritrade (9.5%), Scottrade (9.1%) and Fidelity (9.1%) ranked worst.

Web-site winners

We also looked for the features that most investors want in a broker's Web site. When you're about to place a trade, how many mouse clicks does it take to get a real-time quote? To determine your cash balance? To find out whether a fund carries a fee? To locate copies of old statements online?

We ranked the Web sites using ten criteria. Fidelity and E*Trade require the fewest clicks, and Schwab ranks close behind. Siebert's Web site is the pits, and Firstrade's and TD Ameritrade's aren't much better.

Research champs

Three of the online brokers offer a full complement of stock research. Fidelity is tops. It gives you extensive research from Lehman Brothers and Prudential Equity, plus reports from numerous smaller, independent firms. Altogether, you get as much research from Fidelity as you do from most full-service brokers.

Schwab, which ranks second in this category, emphasizes its own research. Its computer-generated Schwab Equity Ratings have performed well so far. Clients with $100,000 or more also get Goldman Sachs research. Like Fidelity, Siebert offers Prudential reports and Lehman highlights, along with a fistful of boutique research, most of it quantitative.

Is free, first-class research a high priority? Almost all of the brokers offer Standard & Poor's stock reports as well as reports from a handful of other firms. But none comes close to matching Fidelity, Schwab or Siebert in terms of quality and breadth. Of the rest, E*Trade, which offers Credit Suisse research to clients with $100,000, is best, and TradeKing, which only began operating in December 2005, ranks last.

Who stays clean

Squabbles with regulators and customers are minuses. We totaled the fines levied against each broker over the past three years by regulators, the courts and the stock exchanges. To that number, we added the money awarded to customers in arbitration proceedings. We divided that sum by the average number of trades at each firm to avoid penalizing the larger brokers.

Wells Fargo finishes last, but the score requires a caveat. Wells's full-service brokerage dwarfs its online brokerage, and full-service brokers tend to have more run-ins with clients and regulators. We divided Wells's penalties by the average daily trades of the discount and full-service units, but the firm still had the worst conduct ranking. TD Ameritrade finishes second worst.

The top clean-hands firm is Firstrade, followed by OptionsXpress, E*Trade and Scottrade. TradeKing is too new to rank. Vanguard, Schwab, Siebert and Fidelity were in the middle.