- Facts and Features of Five Direct-Access Brokers | Barron's
- Barron's Broker Survey 2021 Results
- Interactive Brokers Awards
- The Ascent's best online stock brokers
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Facts and Features of Five Direct-Access Brokers | Barron's
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Barron's Broker Survey 2021 Results
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Award-winning tools and services to execute your trading strategy. Open a brokerage account. Best Online Broker A Top-Rated Online Broker See what the best broker in the industry can do for you. Read More. Trades are limited to online domestic equities and options and must be used within two years. Options trades are limited to 20 contracts per trade. Offer valid for new and existing Fidelity customers opening or adding net new assets to an eligible Fidelity IRA or brokerage account. See Fidelity.
Fidelity reserves the right to modify these terms and conditions or terminate this offer at any time. Other terms and conditions, or eligibility criteria may apply. Fortunately, most of the brokers detect when you are using a new device or browser and require additional steps before you can log in. In the event unauthorized account activity is suspected, the user is prompted to answer additional security questions, and failed login attempts are limited. Mobile platforms continue to drive development at most brokers.
To make the experience seamless across platforms, brokers have, for the most part, made it possible to synchronize watchlists and trading defaults across platforms. This is most helpful when your watchlists synchronize between your desktop or laptop and your mobile device. Until this year, most brokers required you to set up watchlists separately on each platform, a tedious task that, mercifully, appears to have gone extinct. Smartwatch apps, which primarily display alerts such as trade executions, are offered by 11 of our 16 brokers. The Apple Watch is supported by 10 of our brokers; one Just2Trade supports only Android-based watches.
As has become customary, Vanguard once again rejected our overtures. We considered resorting to other means because so many readers are interested in seeing how Vanguard would stack up. But we have two newcomers: Planner Securities and Tradier, each of which has an interesting story to tell. Our primary consideration in judging these 16 firms is how they work for our readers, who are high-net-worth active investors.
Price-improvement statistics are built into our Trading Experience and Technology category. The ability to set up a personalized experience, both on a computer and with a mobile device, is a key area of focus.
Interactive Brokers Awards
Customizable reporting is a concern. TD Ameritrade moved up one spot to No. We also show the brokers that were at the extremes when we calculated the monthly cost of trading for infrequent traders, as well as for those who trade multiple times per day. You can read about our methodology at Barrons. This year, we expanded the tables displaying research and news based on reader requests. Those requests are extremely helpful in our research, so please keep them coming.
The firm is one of the rare brokerages that maintained access to international markets when others walked away. Fidelity is leading the way in making the quality of its trade executions more transparent. That gives you more back in price improvement than you pay in commissions. Its exchange-traded-fund screener now includes technical pattern recognition powered by Recognia, which lets you look for particular price events, such as a moving average crossover or, perhaps, a bullish engulfing line for candlestick enthusiasts.
Fidelity also has an ETF Compare tool, which shows you similar funds and lets you compare them side by side. ETFs that trade commission-free—91 in all at Fidelity—are indicated with an icon. Fidelity has made a concerted effort to go after the millennial market, including repackaging educational content onto its mobile site.
There are 12 programs available now, with more being added monthly. The Planning and Guidance center is designed to allow customers to focus on the future, planning for any kind of goal from college tuition to retirement to taking a long vacation. Fidelity has also added a site that allows guest access for 30 days and includes its premium research. When the 30 days are up, you can decide whether to open an account.
IB is aiming at more than just the hyperactive trader these days. In order to ease a new customer onto its flagship trading platform, the downloadable Trader Workstation, or TWS, IB has launched a layout library that includes 20 predefined setups for different styles of trading. There are templates for options traders, fundamental research, and traders who focus on the news.
To keep from getting lost in the complexity of the Trader Workstation, IB introduced an artificial-intelligence-enabled assistant named IBot, which responds to plain English questions. IBot can answer queries about price quotes, option chains, order placement, upcoming corporate events, and market activity, among other things. The portfolios combine automated investing with human oversight, and their risk-return profiles are potentially more profitable than passive index trackers.
Rather than being invested in ETFs, the portfolios, which are rebalanced quarterly, include a wide range of individual stocks. Fees top out at 0. On the Web, the experience of analyzing stocks has become more personalized in the My Stocks Overview section of its research section. Technical traders can use an enhanced scanner, which looks for classic and candlestick patterns.
The Ascent's best online stock brokers
You can even set up a scan graphically, by dragging and dropping components into the tool. One of the creature comforts we appreciate is the way TD watchlists can be generated quickly from the output of a screener and then made available to all platforms—including mobile. You can have a multiscreen setup that includes your mobile devices, and all of your data and watchlists are instantly synchronized.
The designer crew at TD has made thoughtful changes to the mobile experience, including the way long watchlists are sorted on smaller devices. Goal-setting is a key piece of this service, with five diversified model portfolios recommended by Morningstar.
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Slider bars allow the client to make adjustments at any point in the investing cycle, and display the updated results. For clients who are not projected to hit their targets, up to three tips are presented to help them get back on track. On the mobile front, OptionsHouse launched two new native mobile apps in , and is currently rolling out a new HTML5 application that can run on any device, from desktop to smartphone. The new layout is extremely flexible, and the design team worked to reduce the number of clicks and taps that it takes to get around, and to provide more functionality for active traders.
Options chains displays snap onto the screen. When placing an options order, data for the underlying stock continue to stream, keeping the trader up to date during the process of crafting a spread. The platform has switched from a proprietary charting package to one powered by third party Chart IQ, which has given OptionsHouse additional technical studies as well as fundamental data dividends, earnings, splits that display on a chart. On mobile, the platform has been redesigned so that it can be operated with one hand, either right or left, for quick access to quotes and trading.
The mobile options chain uses a tumbler for choosing strikes and dates rather than long drop-down menus. There are multiple trade analysis tools on both mobile and the HTML5 platform to make sure you know the probability of success. Charles Schwab 4 stars continues to pull tools from optionsXpress into its flagship Web platform, and in the last year has invested into its trading infrastructure to support those tools. Once the integration is complete, Schwab will offer portfolio margining, which will be a benefit to active traders who use options to mitigate risk.
The site has also been enhanced with additional personalization, such as a customizable opening view with widgets that can be dropped into the display. For active traders, StreetSmart Edge added quite a few options tools, including a nicely laid-out trading workflow. A probability calculator is built into the trade ticket. When viewing account positions, you can resubmit, close, or roll out a position into a future strike with minimal effort. One area where Schwab has made a big push is transparency around order execution and quality.
The firm has introduced a new order routing system that allows it to make direct comparisons of quality across execution venues. During the fourth quarter of , this new system ensured that This focus on execution quality is most welcome. The firm has added another level of financial planning, Schwab Intelligent Advisory, which combines professional advisors with automated portfolios. Performance details are displayed upon logging in to the Website or the mobile apps.
The apps now include a Dashboard feature that displays your portfolio, and quite a bit of information related to your holdings such as corporate events, ratings changes, and news. The events are presented based on how recently they occurred, and how impactful they are to your portfolio. When placing a trade on a mobile app, the entire process can be done on a single page rather than swiping back and forth. There is also quite a bit of customizable research and education content that can be viewed on mobile.
The charting function is slick — when you switch to landscape mode on your device, the charts are fully interactive, which includes indicators, event markers, and comparisons to peers, indexes, or sectors. Store the template and use it again for a different symbol. There was also an emphasis on long-term investing on mobile, integrating goal planning content with self-service functions.
In April, there will be a suite of mobile education modules through a partnership with Morningstar.
Back on the Website, an options strategy builder has been launched, which helps a customer filter strategies by market outlook and volatility expectations. The options order entry screen was updated as well. Life events drive the planning and goal-setting capabilities of the platform.