Volatile markets have sent investors seeking certainty as much as sizzle, well-reasoned advice as much as crowdsourced tips. The best online brokers responded with technological innovation and sophisticated analytics, with highly specialized offerings and broad-based investment guidance.
And while technology is constantly improving and evolving, the baseline for brokerage excellence remains pretty much the same: Give self-directed investors of all kinds and interests the best tools and information necessary for decision making.
For the better part of a decade, Interactive Brokers and Fidelity have consistently led the pack. This year is no different. They took first place in a tie. However, many of the other brokerages we surveyed are coming on strong. They provide products that are effective and serve customers. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Often, it comes down to an individual investor’s own ease, comfort, and habits.
Interactive Brokers / 5 Stars
It’s hard to find fault with Interactive Brokers, both its IBKR Pro active platform, and its IBKR Lite, for more retail-oriented customers. This past year, the brokerage continued to improve on everything from trading tutorials to risk analysis.
For those focused on global trading, IBKR is a must. Clients can trade directly on more than 90 stock markets worldwide, access 24 different currencies, and, as of last year, trade fractional shares in European stocks and exchange-traded funds. In March 2022, Interactive unveiled IBKR GlobalTrader, a mobile app that simplifies trading globally, and which can key with the firm’s IBKR GlobalAnalyst scanner. Its variety of news and information sources offers a distinctly international flair as well.
On another front, IBKR continues to lead in providing tools for socially responsible investing. Its centerpiece is Impact, which Interactive launched in late 2021. This assesses portfolios based on various environmental, social, and governance criteria. In March 2022 the firm unveiled Carbon Offsets, which offers carbon-footprint reduction purchases.
Coming soon is a new generation of its active trading platform, IBKR Desktop. Interactive promises a faster, more responsive user interface that it believes will allow it to roll out features more quickly. IBKR has released this new platform to a few select clients, with others to follow.
Fidelity / 5 Stars
Fidelity impresses on just about every level. A consistently superior product is matched by frequent innovations throughout its customer universe from active traders to those who have yet to make their first investment.
Year after year, Fidelity unveils new products and services designed to make investing easier, more efficient, and better ordered for a wide swath of the investing public. Two new products demonstrate this range. In June 2022, Fidelity launched Solo FidFolios. Building on fractional shares trading that Fidelity premiered two years earlier, it enables self-directed investors to create, populate, and monitor an individually crafted custom index fund.
At the other end of the investing spectrum is Fidelity Bloom, a savings and investing app aimed at young adults, which the brokerage rolled out last June. It encompasses two separate accounts, one for savings and one that tracks spending through a debit card. Bloom rewards would-be investors with $50 on the card.
Fidelity tries to engage customers (and their parents) wherever they congregate. The latest is a kids’ financial basics learning game called Pancake Empire Tower Tycoon, which debuted in April on the Roblox online platform. Last September, Fidelity joined Discord, a voice, video, and text social platform, the latest in its efforts at social-media outreach.
Fidelity also strives to stay on top of economic concerns through more traditional methods in its Learning Center. Its Inflation Hub combines inflation-related investing tips with tutorials, primers, and relevant news articles.
Charles Schwab / 4½ Stars
Schwab is on the final phases of integrating TD Ameritrade and will bring on board TD’s thinkorswim active trading platform later this year. That addition alone could allow Schwab to threaten the dominance of IBKR and Fidelity.
Schwab came close this year. It has long set the standard for customer service, something increasingly backed by an impressive array of products and information. Both its online site and its mobile app have made great strides. Both are intuitive, thorough, and extremely well presented.
E*Trade / 4 Stars
E*Trade continues to shine in certain arenas. Its mobile app rivals that of IBKR and Fidelity as the best out there. Its Power E*Trade active trading site is also state of the art.
E*Trade has built on these strengths. For Power E*Trade, it has added a live scrolling of options trading, something it calls Trade Tape. Power E*Trade investors can now create custom scans with more than 100 different criteria. And it has deepened its social-media analytics.
TD Ameritrade / 4 Stars
This will be the last full year TD Ameritrade will exist as an independent online brokerage, so it’s understandable that TD has been most focused on moving over its customers and some of its existing products to Schwab rather than unveiling new additions to its lineup. Meanwhile, it’s held its own. We didn’t discern any degradation of service, vitally important to retaining customers during a complex integration.
Merrill Edge / 4 Stars
For sheer presentation and ease of understanding, Merrill Edge remains top of the charts. That’s true for both its online site and its mobile app. For those less experienced and less active investors, Merrill Edge is hard to beat, with one big exception—it doesn’t offer fractional trading.
Webull / 3½ Stars
Webull occupies an interesting niche: younger, more active traders steeped in social media and eager for community participation. In terms of investment brokerages, Webull stands as the most sophisticated and complete of the fintech companies. Its mobile app is a technological and design marvel, although a lot of space is taken up by the posts of eager users.
Ally Invest / 2½ Stars
If Barron’s had an award for most improved brokerage, Ally Invest would be this year’s recipient. Its biggest gain came from improvements in its mobile app, which underwent a redesign and the addition of stock market research tool TipRanks. However, Ally Invest remains something of an adjunct to Ally’s banking services and has a long way to go before it rivals most other brokerages.
Robinhood / 2 Stars
Robinhood is slowly playing catch-up to its own marketing success. It has added much-needed tutorials and more news and information to its site. One nifty new feature is a 1% match on individual retirement accounts. However, this fintech, which pretty much revolutionized trading with a Tinder-like swiping approach to buying and selling shares, needs to go much further to attract more than just the gaming and betting crowd.
J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing / 2 Stars
J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing, a part of the big bank, has yet to demonstrate why anyone should use this site, other than Chase banking customers who want to put some cash into a few funds and not worry about them. There’s little evidence that JPMorgan Chase’s ample financial resources are being invested in the site.
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