I wanted to start a new topic on recent problems with major retail brokers.  With the recent dropping of commissions and subsequent massive influx of new retail traders (for many reasons), the major retail brokers have all run into slow downs, outages, backlogs and other failures.  I've been aware for sometime that my fills on both TOS and IB have had intermittent problems.  The recent thinkorswim outage was a real pain to me and I didn't get hurt by it, just massively inconvenienced, no doubt others were hit in the pocket book.  I'm a big fan of TOS, mainly because I've been on their system for a long time, their rates aren't the greatest but they don't have any other fees.  The problem I see is that there is no end in sight for these brokers to be overloaded.  Little or no commissions, zero or very little account size, and massive new resources needed on their part to solve the problem.
 
I don't have a problem with a minimum account size and I would even be willing to pay a little more in fees or even a monthly tithe for a platform to get better fills and steadier service.  I'm starting the broker search now, I'm not looking forward to any of this, I was happy with what I had but I don't think I have that any more.  I'll post my efforts here if anybody is interested and would appreciate feedback from others as well.

Hi guys,
I need some advice from you. I live in Netherlands and I want to open one account in US that allows me to trade options and our volatility trades. Does someone here trade from Europe? Can you give me advice on a broker that I can open my account?
Thanks