Best Online Brokers and Trading Platforms for 2026
Find the best online brokers using our survey that compares investment offerings, tools, apps, advice and more.
- Best online broker overall
- Online brokers with the best investment choices
- Online brokers with the best tools and education
- Online brokers with the best mobile app
- Online brokers with the best advisory services
- Online brokers with the best research
- Online brokers with the best customer service and security
- Online brokers with the best commissions and fees
- Best online brokers for your specific needs
- Next-gen brokers to watch
It's a good time to be an investor. We're not just talking about the multiyear bull run that has made most market participants wealthier. It's a good time to be a customer of an online brokerage, too.
Fees have fallen sharply over the years, but most firms keep adding to their offerings — particularly in their mobile-phone apps, where younger and tech-savvier customers often head first. In short, brokerages are giving you more bang for your buck.
Yet there are real differences in the offerings. Some have a wide variety of investment choices, perfect for an investor who is, say, comfortable buying individual bonds. Others are better for newer investors with less money and less knowledge. Some target investors who focus only on stocks and options.
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How we chose the best online brokers and trading platforms
Enter the 2026 best online brokers list. We surveyed nine firms in all: Charles Schwab, E*Trade from Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, Firstrade, Interactive Brokers, J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing, Merrill Edge, Robinhood and WellsTrade. Ally Invest, Citi Self Invest, T. Rowe Price and Vanguard declined to participate.
The biggest, best-known firms score better overall, but each broker excels in one area or another. We also include information on the best brokers for different types of investors and some smaller firms not included in our rankings.
We designed our rankings to reward the firms that offer the most to the broadest group of investors. For years, we've limited the field to brokers that offer trading in stocks, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and individual bonds.
That has excluded the upstart brokerage Robinhood, which doesn't offer bond or mutual-fund trading. But take a bow, Robinhood — you're too big to ignore. Started in 2013, the firm is pushing $400 billion in assets. That's not the nearly $850 billion that Schwab hosts on its platform for self-directed investors, but Robinhood has garnered a large following in a short time.
That said, Robinhood debuts in last place in our overall rankings. That's to be expected, though, because our questions still survey the breadth of investment choices and tools for bonds and mutual funds, where Robinhood can't score points. But the firm has much to offer for investors who are focused on trading stocks, exchange-traded funds and options.
Best online broker overall
There's a new number one. Interactive Brokers has claimed the crown this year, displacing longtime champ Fidelity.
In years past, Interactive Brokers has been a top or competitive finisher in important categories — mobile applications, for one, and tools and education, to name another. This year, its edge stems from improved showings in investment choices, advisory services and fees. The firm has also continued to expand its research offerings, and it remains at the top in access to international markets.
Our survey combines objective and subjective criteria. We rely on the information that each firm provides and vet the data as best we can. We ask for the state of their platforms as of May 31, so some firms may be introducing features after that date that aren't counted here. We weigh each data point and then each category to arrive at our scores.
Below, we present the highs and lows of how the brokers performed, with categories listed in order of significance to the final score.
Online brokers with the best investment choices
The broader the range of investment offerings, from corporate bonds to mutual funds, ETFs and even cryptocurrencies, the better the broker ranked in this category.
For the first time, Interactive Brokers wins this category, one of the most heavily weighted, accounting for 20% of the final score. Fidelity is a close second.
Interactive Brokers is big on bonds; it offers a competitive number of corporate bonds traded in the secondary market (in other words, not new issues), but its robust roster of municipal bonds available to investors — more than 1 million unique issues — crushed the rest of the field by a wide margin.
Interactive continues to offer a healthy roster of mutual funds, and it gained this year by adding new features, including automated investing for ETFs.
Schwab and E*Trade make up the second tier in this category, earning points for offering access to a wide range of investment products: mutual funds, Treasuries, newly issued municipal bonds, cryptocurrencies, and fractional trading of both stocks and ETFs.
Interactive continues to offer a healthy roster of mutual funds, and it gained this year by adding new features, including automated investing for ETFs.
Fractional trading enables you to buy a fraction of a publicly traded stock or ETF. So instead of coughing up roughly $1,000 for a single share of Costco (COST), for example, you can buy a slice for a few dollars or less.
This is a plus for investors just getting started. Every firm but Merrill Edge offers fractional purchases of both individual stocks and ETFs, with most of those firms requiring a minimum purchase of $10 or less. But this year, Schwab and Interactive Brokers lowered their minimums even more, with Schwab trimming its minimum fractional-share purchase to $1 from $5, and Interactive Brokers cutting its minimum to one penny from $1. Every broker offering the service has thousands of choices — but Interactive Brokers, offering 11,000 stocks, is tops.
Our survey shows that the biggest online brokers have realized they have to offer cryptocurrency trading to keep customers happy. In 2025, only Interactive Brokers and Fidelity offered direct trading of crypto (not just crypto ETFs). This year, Schwab and E*Trade join the list, as does newcomer Robinhood.
Investors who tend to hold a lot of cash should be pleased with Fidelity and WellsTrade. As of May 31, they paid interest rates that top 3% in their sweep accounts, which transfer your extra cash to interest-bearing investments. Several of the brokers, including E*Trade, Merrill Edge and Schwab, pay close to nothing.
Robinhood, Merrill Edge and J.P. Morgan lagged in this category, for different reasons. Robinhood doesn't offer mutual funds and bonds, giving it a zero score on multiple questions. Merrill Edge has a below-average mutual fund count and limited bond inventory, particularly municipal IOUs, compared with peers in our survey. Similarly, J.P. Morgan offers fewer choices and higher minimums for fractional share purchases and fewer corporate bonds as well.
Online brokers with the best tools and education
Whaddya know? Investors hunger for knowledge that'll help them make more money and retire well. In this category, which accounts for 20% of the final score, we asked firms whether they offered certain tools or calculators that assist in a variety of financial goals: How much should I save for college tuition? How am I doing on retirement savings? How much should I withdraw each year?
We also asked about tools that can help with the selection of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs and the like — things such as portfolio analyzers, as well as screens for stocks, ETFs and mutual funds. And we asked about investor education, delivered via articles, educational videos, webinars, podcasts and live events.
Schwab and Interactive Brokers triumph in this category. The two offer a wide range of calculators and tools, from the most common — stock, ETF, mutual fund and bond screeners — to ones that several other firms we surveyed do not offer, such as risk-management resources.
Schwab stands ahead of Interactive Brokers on one measure in this category: It has a bond-laddering tool, and Interactive does not. Bond laddering is an investing strategy that involves buying multiple bonds of staggered maturities — it's a good way to build and maintain a simple bond portfolio. Of note, however, is that Schwab's tool is limited to certificates of deposit and Treasuries. (E*Trade and Fidelity also offer bond-laddering tools, for CDs, Treasuries, muni bonds and corporate bonds.)
Education was a big part of this category's score, too. Here, Interactive Brokers floods the zone, counting more than 3,000 articles and 3,000 videos on its site. But if podcasts are your thing, both E*Trade and Schwab produce more, with E*Trade up to more than 400 episodes. (E*Trade's count includes podcasts from parent company Morgan Stanley.)
Though not as voluminous as Interactive Brokers' collection, the libraries of materials at Fidelity and Schwab offer strong educational resources. Schwab is one of only two brokers in the survey to offer live in-person educational events to customers; Merrill Edge is the other.
WellsTrade, Firstrade and Robinhood all produce educational content to some degree, but the quantity of their offerings pales in comparison to the other firms. None offer podcasts, and WellsTrade has no video, either.
Online brokers with the best mobile app
Once upon a time, mobile apps were an afterthought. Brokerages only rolled out new mobile features after launching them on the web platform. Now, many firms are introducing new features app first, desktop second, because many of their customers use the app almost exclusively for trading, research and planning. For example, WellsTrade has deployed new features such as fractional trading and the reinvestment of dividends on the app first.
As a result, apps are getting better — and we should expect more from them. That's why this category makes up 20% of the final score. Stock or fund trades on your smartphone are table stakes. We dug deeper, asking whether the tools on the brokers' web platform are available in the mobile app. Increasingly, with the exception of large, complex charts, the answer is yes.
Interactive Brokers holds the gold medal in mobile. It answered "yes" to nearly every query we asked. The firm says its app allows customers to compare their portfolio performance to 354 benchmarks, but many of those are actually ETFs that represent sectors — sometimes narrow ones — against which you can measure your portfolio. The median number of traditional indexes among the other firms we queried is three. Firstrade, Robinhood and WellsTrade don't offer any benchmarking.
Interactive Brokers holds the gold medal in mobile. It answered "yes" to nearly every query we asked.
Interactive Brokers also offers a tool to calculate annual IRA required minimum distributions and a debt-management tool in its smartphone app. Merrill Edge is the only other broker to offer an RMD tool in-app; WellsTrade is the only other broker to offer a debt-management tool.
E*Trade and J.P. Morgan are next in mobile. They both allow trading of stocks, bonds, ETFs, options and mutual funds. They're two of only three apps that allow in-app bond trading; Interactive Brokers is the other. They also shine in screening tools, offering predefined filters across asset classes.
E*Trade has a stock screener giving users the ability to choose their own criteria. J.P. Morgan has that, and one for bonds, too.
Schwab ranks sixth in the mobile category, but the firm has been improving its app over the past 12 months, adding the ability to compare your portfolio's performance against a benchmark, a tool to graph portfolio performance, and access to stock research reports.
Any changes to settings and layout preferences you make in the app automatically apply to your account on the web platform, too. (Schwab, E*Trade and Interactive Brokers are the only firms to offer automatic syncing between the two platforms.) Still, Schwab lags the competition for the breadth of tools available on the mobile app.
Robinhood's mobile app won plenty of points for stock-trading tools, but it lagged in this category largely because it doesn't allow you to trade mutual funds or bonds (we know, it's a recurring refrain), and questions about those investments made up a chunk of the category score.
Online brokers with the best advisory services
We focus our survey on do-it-yourself investors, but also recognize there may come a time when folks want some help. Most brokerages offer different tiers of service, largely based on how much money you bring to the table for them to manage.
At the low end, you can get a digital, automated service, often called a robo adviser. You can blend that digital offering with a little human advice — we call that a hybrid offering.
Then, there's a more full-service account, which at the top end can get you customized portfolios as well as a dedicated investment adviser.
The advisory category accounts for 12.5% of the final score in total. But the category score comprises three different parts: one score each for digital, hybrid and full-service offerings. Digital or robo advisory services make up half of the overall category score; hybrid, one-third; and full-service, one-sixth. (Our scoring system evaluated only the services at each firm, not the portfolio returns.)
The range of advice varies at each firm. Firstrade doesn't offer any investment advice at all, while Robinhood offers only a robo adviser. J.P. Morgan doesn't have a robo product, but it offers a hybrid service as well as full-service-type plans through J.P. Morgan Wealth Management. Merrill Edge has a robo (Merrill Guided Investing) and a hybrid (Merrill Guided Investing with Advisor). But it doesn't offer full-service advice through Merrill Edge itself.
Fidelity, which has offerings in all three tiers, takes the prize in our advisory category. It's helped by some of the lowest account minimums. The firm's Fidelity Go digital-only adviser requires just $10 to get started, and it's free for balances under $25,000. Exceed that amount, and you pay 0.35% a year, but you get what Fidelity describes as "unlimited one-on-one coaching calls."
A second digital-only service, Fidelity Managed FidFolios, has a $5,000 minimum balance and allows investors to choose among three actively managed strategies and four direct indexing portfolios. With direct indexing, you buy shares in the individual stocks that make up a benchmark — unlike buying shares in an index fund. The approach allows investors to better capture tax losses in individual stocks to offset capital gains elsewhere.
Even Fidelity's hands-on advisory services have accessible investment minimums. The firm requires just a $50,000 minimum balance to open an account managed by a team of advisers. And a relatively low $100,000 will get you a dedicated adviser in its Fidelity Strategic Disciplines service, but those portfolios are limited to single-asset strategies — either all stocks or all bonds. Other firms require balances of $500,000 to $1 million for a dedicated adviser; some don't offer one at all.
Merrill Edge takes second place in the overall category. Its robo service, Merrill Guided Investing, was competitive with the digital advisory services that scored best in this subset (Fidelity, Interactive Brokers and Schwab). But in the subset of hybrid advisory products, Merrill's offering stood out and ranked first in large part because its $20,000 minimum to invest was the lowest for a hybrid advisory in our survey.
Schwab placed third here. Its robo product, Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, offers a whopping 81 ETF portfolios to choose from. The minimum is $5,000, however — the highest for any digital-only adviser. It doesn't offer a hybrid product, but its full-service advisory offering includes the use of bond and options specialists and estate-planning experts.
WellsTrade finished fourth in this category, in part because it doesn't directly offer dedicated advisory services. Its $500 minimum requirement for its robo service, Intuitive Investor, is neither cheap nor steep. But compared with other robo services, Intuitive Investor also lost a bit of standing because its robo portfolios hold only ETFs; at E*Trade, Fidelity and Robinhood, digital advisory portfolios can also hold mutual funds and stocks. WellsTrade's robo-human hybrid offering expands the investment options and has a minimum investment of $25,000 (also in the middle of its peers).
Interactive Brokers finishes fifth almost entirely on the strength of its digital advisory product, as it has no offering of human-only advisers. Its $100 minimum to invest is the lowest aside from Fidelity ($10) and Robinhood ($50). Interactive's robo also has the second-highest number of standard portfolios to choose from: 69 (behind Schwab's 81).
J.P. Morgan, ranked sixth in the category overall, requires a minimum balance of $100,000 for its highest level of advisory service, and that comes with a dedicated human adviser, as well as access to bond and options specialists and estate-planning experts. (E*Trade and Schwab offer similar breadth of expertise at their highest level of service.)
Customers of J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors, the firm's hybrid product, can get remote advice from advisers via video and phone. It has a $25,000 account minimum, a typical hybrid balance requirement.
E*Trade's full-service advice offering, from Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, also has plenty of bells and whistles, such as access to bond and options specialists and estate-planning experts. The minimum balance is $5,000, and to get a dedicated adviser you need $500,000.
Online brokers with the best research
To make the best investing decisions, it helps to have access to data and analysis. That might mean fundamental analysis, such as examining a company's financial statements and industry trends to evaluate its potential as an investment. Or it could be technical analysis, the practice of identifying a stock's trends or patterns in price charts to inform investment decisions. Often, it's a combination of both.
For this category, which represents 12.5% of the final score, we asked the brokers to list the research sources they offer their customers for specific single stocks and funds. Our wish list included analyst reports for a smattering of widely held stocks and funds, including Apple (AAPL), Honeywell International (HON), Alibaba Group Holdings (BABA) and Fidelity Contrafund (FCNTX).
We also asked about how many reports the brokers offered each year to customers that provided forward views on the stock and bond markets, and general market commentary or analysis.
E*Trade draws on the analyst team from parent company Morgan Stanley; Merrill Edge can offer reports from the securities firm owned by parent Bank of America. Schwab has developed its own Schwab Equity Ratings.
Firms that offered all that as well as proprietary research scored the best in this category. Merrill Edge, E*Trade and Schwab are all bunched at the top. E*Trade draws on the analyst team from parent company Morgan Stanley; Merrill Edge can offer reports from the securities firm owned by parent Bank of America. Schwab has developed its own Schwab Equity Ratings. All three offer proprietary stock and bond market outlooks and market commentary. The combination of outside reports and research from their own squads allows the three to offer a breadth of voices.
As in other categories, Interactive Brokers offers a multitude of resources, providing outside research on individual stocks from myriad providers. It also offers ample amounts of economic outlooks and market commentary. That helps it place fourth in this category, even though it doesn't have its own research department and doesn't offer any proprietary research.
J.P. Morgan and WellsTrade offer some proprietary research, particularly market outlooks. But they trail the pack because they offer fewer outside research reports than their peers. WellsTrade relies on Wells Fargo Investment Institute commentary, which is robust in general market outlooks and commentaries for stocks, bonds and other assets, but WellsTrade doesn't offer views from other firms on any of that.
Although Fidelity offers a host of outside reports and authors' market commentary, it has no in-house research on individual stocks or funds to provide its customers, so it ranks below average in this category. Firstrade and Robinhood are at the bottom, with just a handful of outside reports and no proprietary research.
Online brokers with the best customer service and security
As online brokerages offer more bells and whistles, there's a good chance you'll have a question. You may be willing to chat with a bot, or you may want a little human touch, whether via messaging, email or a good old-fashioned phone call.
For this category, which makes up 10% of the final score, we asked about the average telephone hold time for a customer service representative and average response time for email and chat. We also asked how often a customer was able to get an answer at the first point of contact.
Our category winner: Schwab. It's one of just two firms to offer 24/7 phone and chat service (Firstrade is the other). Schwab boasts a faster-than-average phone hold time, and it competes well on response times for chat and emails: 56 seconds for chat responses (below average) and 24 hours for email responses (roughly average). The firm's only weakness: It lags peers in the percentage of calls that are resolved at first contact — 68%, compared with a median of 86% among the firms that responded.
Merrill Edge and Fidelity ranked second and third, respectively, for customer service. Merrill leads in first-contact resolution and the speed at which it executes trades. Its weakness: Merrill doesn't offer email support. Fidelity has the longest training program for employees among firms that disclosed that information to us (not all did). It provides 24/7 phone support but only operates its live chats for half that time (84 hours a week). Fidelity does not disclose its rate of first-contact resolution.
WellsTrade improved a number of its metrics. Its average chat response time of 30 seconds was second-best, as was its 91% rate of first-contact resolution. But for average phone hold time, an area where most firms clocked in around 30 seconds or less, WellsTrade reports 96 seconds, one of three firms to exceed one minute. Interactive Brokers came in at 122 seconds; E*Trade, 68 seconds.
Firstrade supplements its 24/7 service by reporting the fastest email response time of all the brokers at 9.5 hours. But its phone hold time and chat response time are middling to below average.
We also give credit to brokers for physical offices. That helps bank-affiliated brokers such as J.P. Morgan Self-Direct, which counts its JPMorgan Chase Bank offices, and Merrill Edge, which includes Bank of America branches. Schwab and Fidelity have offices, but far fewer than the bank-brokers. Firstrade, E*Trade, Interactive Brokers and Robinhood have few to none.
Security accounts for one-tenth of this category's score. All the brokers offer two-factor authentication, combining a password with extra verification, such as your fingerprint or a code sent to your smartphone. At this point, we'd be worried if a brokerage firm didn't do that. But only E*Trade, Interactive Brokers and J.P. Morgan make that step mandatory.
All brokerage customers are covered by SIPC insurance, which protects your cash and securities up to $500,000 (with a $250,000 cash limit) per type of account if a brokerage firm fails. Six of the brokers go further and guarantee 100% of a customer's losses from unauthorized activity; Interactive Brokers, Robinhood and WellsTrade do not.
Online brokers with the best commissions and fees
Fierce competition has flattened a lot of online-brokerage fees, so this category counts for just 5% of the final score. One of the least-visible costs to investors is the profit a firm makes on bond transactions, often found in the markup, or the difference between the price a broker-dealer pays for a bond and the price at which it sells the bond to an investor.
J.P. Morgan leads the fees category, but the competition was extremely tight. Its win doesn't mean the firm charges the lowest fees for everything — in some cases, its levies were more middle of the pack. But in the aggregate, relative to the firms we surveyed, J.P. Morgan's low costs stand out.
The firm doesn't charge a markup on corporate or Treasury bonds, although it does on municipal bonds. It also doesn't charge to buy or sell mutual funds online, and it has relatively low interest rates on margin accounts, used by investors who borrow money to purchase securities. J.P. Morgan does, however, have the most expensive fees in the group for sending domestic or overseas wire transfers — something few investors may have to worry about.
E*Trade, a close second in this category, also charges no mutual-fund transaction fees and no markups or commissions on bonds. Its rates on margin accounts, however, lag peers.
Robinhood got dinged in this category because it doesn't sell bonds or mutual funds, and many of our questions are specific to those investments. But where it does compete, it fares well. A broker-assisted trade of stocks or ETFs is free; every other broker charges at least $19.95 for the service. The fee to buy or sell 10 options contracts is free at Robinhood, too (and at Firstrade). Other brokers levy a $6.50 fee to trade 10 contracts. Robinhood also has some of the best margin-account interest rates.
Brokerage firms may get a small payment for order flow, money they receive for routing trades to certain securities dealers. That may result in slightly less favorable prices when you buy and sell. Six of the nine firms say they accept payment for order flow; Merrill Edge, J.P. Morgan and WellsTrade say they do not.
Fidelity, long a low-cost leader among online brokers, told us this year it's accepting payment for order flow for stock trades, and it charges a markup on corporate and municipal bond trades. That's a key reason the firm ranked in the bottom half of this category.
Best online brokers for your specific needs
Best for investors who want to set it and forget it. At Fidelity and Interactive Brokers, investors can set up automated investing plans to buy both stocks and ETFs that designate a certain amount of money to invest at a regular interval. Merrill Edge and E*Trade have automated investing for ETFs, but not stocks.
Best bank-and-broker benefits. The benefits program at Merrill Edge has been rechristened BofA Rewards. Merrill counts combined balances at the bank and brokerage to qualify for extras. It takes a $30,000 balance to earn some rewards, such as a 0.10 percentage- point discount on digital advisory fees with Merrill Guided Investing. Customers with a combined minimum balance of $100,000 or more get a 0.15 percentage-point discount on advisory fees.
There are other perks, such as discounts on mortgages and extra rewards on credit card purchases, that get better with higher balances.
Best for individual-bond buyers. Interactive Brokers offers the greatest number of municipal bonds of any firm in our survey. E*Trade has the best selection of corporate bonds, however, offering nearly twice as many as any competitor. Those two firms, along with J.P. Morgan Self-Directed, are the only ones who let you trade bonds on the go, via their mobile app.
Avoid hidden costs with E*Trade, which doesn't charge any markups or commissions on corporate and municipal bonds and Treasuries.
Best for mutual-fund investors. Firstrade, Interactive Brokers and Schwab offer a robust selection of mutual funds with no transaction fee. E*Trade and J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing don't charge a fee to buy or sell mutual funds but offer fewer of them.
Best for options traders. Active options investors have two choices for the best pricing: Firstrade and Robinhood. Contracts are fee-free at each firm. The other firms we surveyed charge a 65-cent fee per contract.
Best for cash hoarders. Some of the firms in our survey offer a measly 0.01% yield on idle cash sitting in brokerage accounts. But Fidelity and WellsTrade each paid more than 3% interest as of May 31.
Best for margin traders. For investors who like a little leverage, Robinhood charges 4.8% interest on a margin-account balance of $99,999. For the same balance, seven of the nine firms in our survey charge between 10.4% and 12.2%. Among smaller brokers, Public bests Robinhood, with a 4.75% margin rate.
Best for ESG investors. If you prioritize environmental, social and governance issues, Merrill Edge, Interactive Brokers and E*Trade are the only firms in our survey that say they offer ESG reports for both individual stocks and funds.
Best for expats and night owls. Interactive Brokers, catering to citizens and residents of nearly every country, enables clients in faraway time zones to trade eligible U.S. stocks and ETFs nearly 24 hours a day, five days a week (there's a 10-minute break at 3:50 a.m. Eastern Standard Time). For round-the-clock investors in the U.S., Schwab and Robinhood also offer "24/5" trading (with pauses), and Firstrade offers trading from 8 am to 4 am EST on weekdays.
Next-gen brokers to watch
The last time we looked at firms that were outside our rankings, we put Robinhood at the little kids' table, even though it had likely outgrown it. We've promoted Robinhood, but there are other up-and-coming firms that merit consideration, particularly if you don't need a full suite of investment choices and advisory offerings.
Most of the online brokerages we rate are owned and operated by investment firms that started in the pre-internet (or even pre-computer) era. By contrast, the firms here are digital natives, allowed to build their offerings from scratch, with a focus on what younger, more tech-savvy investors prefer, including artificial intelligence tools.
eToro provides access to U.S. stocks, exchange-traded funds, options and more than 100 cryptocurrency assets. Appropriate for a company born in an era of social media, it highlights opportunities to learn from other customers' strategies. Investors can see thoughts, opinions and even portfolios of other eToro customers in a "social feed." Its "CopyTrader" feature allows a user to automatically replicate the investment strategies of others on the platform. (Investors can stop copying and begin to manage their own portfolio at any time.)
Public is trying to position itself between the big, legacy brokers and newer digital-first firms. The company says it has customers who trade hundreds of times a day as well as customers who trade once a year. Unlike other young firms, Public allows customers to buy U.S. Treasuries and corporate bonds.
The company recently rolled out "Generative Assets," a tool that uses AI to produce portfolio recommendations based on quantitative data — say, free cash flow — as well as qualitative considerations, such as CEO attributes. Public also boasts some of the lowest interest rates on margin borrowing: 4.75% on a $99,999 balance.
TastyTrade says it's a platform that was "built by traders, for traders" and caters to active investors. Many of its customers make trades every day and frequently buy and sell options tied to their longer-term core positions, according to the firm. Customers can trade options 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
To help investors manage risk, TastyTrade says it provides a visual risk-analysis tool that provides real-time portfolio stress tests on existing positions and potential trades. It also offers options backtesting to simulate how potential trades have performed in the past.
WeBull tries to serve both newbies and experienced traders. The firm is all-in on AI, first introducing an AI-powered investing assistant called Vega that summarizes company reports and financial news and provides personalized portfolio insights. WeBull then opened up its platform to outside AI applications including ChatGPT, Claude and others so investors can use those programs to analyze their portfolios.
Note: This item first appeared in Kiplinger Personal Finance Magazine, a monthly, trustworthy source of advice and guidance. Subscribe to help you make more money and keep more of the money you make here.
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David Milstead joined Kiplinger Personal Finance as senior associate editor in May 2025 after 15 years writing for Canada's Globe and Mail. He's been a business journalist since 1994 and previously worked at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, the Wall Street Journal, and at publications in Ohio and his native South Carolina. He's a graduate of Oberlin College.