El Caballo:
I've been with MT for a few months now and touch wood, all has been as advertised. Only had one hiccup on the morning the market went belly up and everyones platform went down. Mind you, MT came up within about 1/2 hour, my commsuc feed was useless all day.
The trading platform is basic at best. Watchlists, depth, course of trades etc is all fine but the charting side of things lets it down big time. I run a another feed & package for monitoring the market and just use MT as a backup and to enter/exit trades. With the $0 commish you can easily afford to do this.
Customer service is damn good and the tech team respond to all issues and suggestions. They wrote the platform from scratch and are updating all the time. From what they've told me, updates to the charts are high on the list but I believe that #1 on the list is getting a web based platform so could be waiting a few months for the chart upgrade.
Only other thing I'd want is more order options but that's just icing as the conditional, OCO etc stuff is more than adequate for most situations.
As it's DMA the fills are exactly what they are if you were dealing directly in the underlying. I can see all of my orders hit the market in under 1/2 second.
Hope that helps!
Cheers
AV
p.s. One other thing - remember that $0 applies only to the top 500 and some of those top 500 have 100% margin. There is a huge range between 5% and 35% so as long as you concentrate on a universe of roughly 200-300 stocks you should be sweet