With a clear fee structure and few gamification tactics, the best online brokerage platforms offer a wide range of assets, numerous account types, robust research and analytical tools, strong customer support, and more, regardless of the investment amount.
Fidelity Investments is our best overall online brokerage platform for investors due to its low fees, extensive product offering, a wide range of full-service features, and a lot more, after a hundred hours worth of thorough investigation, data processing, and demonstrations of actual broker platforms. We evaluated 26 online brokers using 89 criteria, including account services, user experience, available assets, and additional features. Fidelity is just one of those criteria.
Best Overall
Why We Decided to Go With It Overall For the third year in a row, Fidelity has dominated when it comes to providing a wide range of traders and investors with essential full-service brokerage features, sophisticated tools, and low fees across continuously improved platforms.
Best for ETFs
Fidelity is our best ETF broker due to its extensive ETF offering, extensive educational content and research tools geared toward ETFs, and fractional ETF trading. Fidelity beat Charles Schwab to the top spot in this category in 2023, making it a repeat winner.
Best for Lower
Fees Fidelity has long been a leader in the industry when it comes to lower fees. For the third year in a row, it has won the award for lowest fees because of its open and compelling fee schedule.
Best for Cash
Management Choosing the best cash management brokerage account is more than just about getting the best interest rate. It also involves seamless integration with essential features of free banking and leading insurance. Fidelity’s cash management service is unrivaled in these areas, and it comes with reimbursable access to a global network of ATMs and strong passive earnings potential on cash that has not been invested.
Overview
Fidelity provides the most comprehensive product offering to meet the requirements of nearly every investor in a market where innovative businesses vie for the attention of an extremely diverse group of traders and investors. The long and illustrious history of Fidelity, with headquarters in Boston, began in 1946. As of June 30, 2024, the company had $5.5 trillion in discretionary assets, making it one of the best brokerage firms in terms of assets managed.
In 2019, Investopedia began evaluating online brokerages, and Fidelity has consistently demonstrated its dedication to enhancing its financial services. Highlights of our 2024 product demonstration with the company included enhancements to support for financial advisors, an analysis of bond liquidity, and the brand-new Fidelity Youth app. In point of fact, investors between the ages of 18 and 35 opened 43% of the 38.7 million brokerage accounts that Fidelity offers.
However, the enhancements did not end there. Additionally, Fidelity now offers a comprehensive cash management product with a plethora of banking features.
Fidelity has a stellar reputation as a broker and a vast customer service network that supports its low-cost, high-value offering, including 210 customer centers. It has long been a leader in the industry when it comes to lowering fees. It will be hard to find a better online broker than Fidelity for investors looking for a broker that doesn’t collect PFOF and keeps costs low while providing some of the most powerful tools in the business.
Why We Picked It
For beginners Charles Schwab, which bought TD Ameritrade in 2020, was known as one of the best platforms for new traders and investors even before the educational content was added to its ecosystem. After the integration was completed, Schwab now holds the top spot in this category, which TD Ameritrade had held for the previous two years. Schwab is the best option for novice investors due to its seemingly endless coaching programs and regularly scheduled live training events, which include the most extensive library of evergreen learning materials.
Overview
In April 1971, Chuck Schwab and his partners established First Commander Corporation. In 1973, they changed the name of the company to Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. Charles Schwab has grown steadily over the years, completing its acquisition of TD Ameritrade in October 2020 and expecting to complete client integration in May 2024. Schwab not only caters to its diverse customer base by offering the appropriate combination of usability, tools, education, and research, but it also does so across multiple top-tier platforms.
The sum of all client assets held by Schwab as of August 2024 was $9.74 trillion. The powerful combination of TD Ameritrade’s powerful capabilities for traders and Schwab’s exceptional product and service lineup has pushed the company even closer to the top of our comprehensive rating model with the integration of TD Ameritrade nearly complete. On April 11, 2024, Schwab made the announcement that its thinkorswim platform now supports futures, forex, and a new Portfolio Margin feature. This was one of the most anticipated additions to Schwab’s product line. However, prospective customers should be aware that spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs are offered, but crypto spot trading is still not available.
Why We Picked It for Advanced
Traders Interactive Brokers’ collection of cutting-edge analytical tools, trading technology, and asset range are, to be honest, mind-blowing. A glimpse into how Interactive Brokers equips advanced traders to capitalize on fundamental dislocations and pricing inefficiencies better than any other platform we reviewed is provided by ongoing enhancements to legacy platforms like the expertly constructed Trader Workstation (TWS) and the February 2024 addition of the next-generation IBKR desktop. This is Interactive Brokers’ third consecutive year receiving this honor.
Best for International Trading
In a nutshell, none of the 26 online brokerages we looked at even come close to providing the range of global research capabilities, access to international trading and support, and currency-based funding options that Interactive Brokers provides. For this reason, the company is our top broker for international traders for the third consecutive year.
Best for Algorithmic Trading
the development of trading technology comes an increased interest in algorithmic trading. In Interactive Brokers’ pre-built algorithms, advanced traders will find a plethora of API languages, available algorithmic paper trading accounts, and a dazzling array of other algorithmic trading features.
Best for Risk Management
Interactive Brokers is the best platform for managing portfolio risk because of its powerful rebalancing features, robust portfolio and risk analysis tools, nearly limitless opportunities for asset diversification, and access to licensed brokers.
Interactive Brokers is the best place to get stock
trading ideas for professional and retail traders looking for investing and trading ideas across the vast universe of equities over short, intermediate, and long time horizons. It brings together leading industry research vendors, proprietary search tools, and the industry’s largest universe of investable stocks to provide a nearly endless source of ideas for every investing and trading strategy.
Overview
Thomas Peterffy, the company’s current chairman, founded T.P. & Co. in 1978, when computers were first used in trading. Interactive Brokers Inc. eventually became a U.S. broker-dealer in 1993 and has since grown into one of the most comprehensive online brokerage platforms in the industry. With funding and trading capabilities in up to 27 currencies, Interactive Brokers (IBKR) provides astonishing access to 150 markets in 34 nations and support for its services in 200 nations and territories. Simply put, this provides the industry’s most extensive global coverage.
IBKR held just over $515 billion in client assets as of September 2024. The company has long been regarded favorably by both algorithmic and active traders due to its advanced trading features, highly customizable tools, low margin rates, and alpha-generating capabilities. It was one of the early adopters of technology in the financial markets. The team of industry experts at Investopedia is constantly delighted by IBKR’s innovative enhancements, which, from a purist’s perspective, just make so much sense. IBKR Desktop is the most recent product innovation from IBKR. It is a platform of the next generation that combines many of the company’s powerful trading solutions with a straightforward user interface. MultiSort, which enables users to sort data using multiple factors simultaneously, and Option Lattice, a graphical options chain display highlighting potential outliers in key metrics, are two innovative features.
Interactive Brokers has committed to making its platforms more accessible to novices, and this concept of simplicity is really where things have been getting interesting for the company. with noteworthy additions such as the expansion of educational content across a number of platforms, including its entry-level IBKR Lite platform; available investing in fractions; Interactive Brokers is quickly overtaking the industry’s best all-around brokerage platforms thanks to its user-friendly Global Trader mobile app and the innovative and useful Options Wizard tool.
Why We Decided That
It Is the Best Platform for Options Trading For the third year in a row, we decided that tastytrade is the best platform for options trading because of its options pricing structure, which includes caps on options prices and makes it the lowest-cost brokerage for high-volume, high-frequency option traders. Additionally, tastytrade tailors content and tools for its options-focused clientele.
Overview
If you ask any options trader, they will probably tell you that this kind of derivative trading is complicated and hard to learn. However, the numerous options strategies that are available to use can become potent weapons that enable traders and investors to profit from crucial factors like leverage and time decay with the right guidance. Because of its intuitive delivery of an industry-best mix of comprehensive options-focused tools and content, tastytrade maintains its position as the best broker for options. It was developed by the same people who developed the highly regarded thinkorswim platform for TD Ameritrade.
The Chicago-based tastytrade, which started out as tastyworks in 2017 and offers very competitive fees for options trading, has standout features like commission caps for large lot sizes and no trade commissions when closing positions. Fortunately for users of tastytrade, the platform that comes with these low commissions continues to be improved, adding to its already powerful delivery of options analytics, platform workflow, trade execution, and valuable digital content.
The Bottom Line
Based on our extensive research, we discovered that Fidelity is not only the best online brokerage platform overall but also outperforms the competition when it comes to ETF investing, low costs, and cash management features. Even though International Brokers is getting closer to being on par with the best all-around brokerage platforms in the industry as it works to become more user-friendly for beginners, it is still the best option for advanced trading strategies and risk management as well as international trading.
The platform and market content at Tastytrade are unrivaled for traders who intend to make options their primary investment strategy. An unparalleled collection of actionable learning materials and live training content for beginners has resulted from Charles Schwab’s integration of TD Ameritrade’s educational programs and trading personalities.
With their fantastic mobile apps, E*TRADE continues its long tradition of improving the user experience, while eToro and Public take social trading and networking to new heights as part of their highly regarded crypto and alternative offerings.
