Online Brokers 2000: How We Crunched the Numbers

It was an avalanche. Exactly 10,566 ballots were filled out in TheStreet.com's Online Broker Survey 2000, the biggest online broker survey ever. That's a lot of data, and there are many ways to mulch it. Here, we explain how we came up with the winners.

The Voters

A reader's survey rather than an expert's survey, it was available free to any visitor to TheStreet.com from Feb. 22 through March 1. Could the brokers have filled it out themselves and asked their grandmothers to do the same? Sure. The beauty and bane of the Internet are that it's not a pure, pristine pool. ...