Investopedia’s 2022 Best Online Brokers Awards (2024)

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TD Ameritrade continued its commitment to investor education and user-friendly tools, making it our top pick for beginners. Its paper-trading platform is a great launching pad for its robust online investing platform, which has tools for investors and traders of all levels. Its mobile platform is one of the easiest to use in the industry, and its smooth user interface translates to desktops and tablets, too.

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TD Ameritrade has two apps that together form the best overall mobile app offering. First, the thinkorswim mobile app is designed to make it easy for traders to manage existing positions and open new ones. Second, the TD Ameritrade Mobile App is intuitive and powerful enough to use as the primary trading platform—potentially creating a generation of app-only traders who never touch the desktop versions.

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Tastyworks once again takes the top spot as the best broker for options trading, given its flexible tools and intuitive platforms. It’s more advanced than other options platforms but offers new traders educational pathways with great content and features that help them improve. Tastyworks may not be the options platform traders start on, but many end up there as they become more skilled.

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In an era of no commissions for stock and ETF trading, the race to the bottom is short. Still, Fidelity finds ways to give its customers price improvement by eliminating payment for order flow, and sweeping uninvested cash into money market funds. Other brokers do this, but Fidelity’s overall price improvement is top-notch in the industry.

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Interactive Brokers (IBKR) remains our top pick for advanced day traders for the third consecutive year. Its offering of international exchanges, cryptocurrency, and incredibly low margin rates, plus some of the best tools and charts in the industry, sets it apart in a very competitive field. It also has superior order execution and pricing, which are must-haves for advanced traders.

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This was the year crypto went mainstream among retail investors and traders, creating more exchange options than ever before. Still, Coinbase wins for its ease of use, wide selection of major crypto tokens and alt-coins, and its research and educational offerings. Security is paramount for crypto-investors, and while Coinbase suffered a breach in March 2021, it worked quickly to fix the flaw and fully refund affected customers.

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Interactive Brokers (IBKR) stands apart from its competitors in offering the most robust access to international markets of any online broker. IBKR offers the widest pool of assets and markets and the tools to trade them. It also makes a point of connecting as many electronic exchanges as possible, allowing customers to trade equities, options, and futures around the world and around the clock.

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The ETF landscape became highly competitive for online brokers in 2021, but Charles Schwab stood out thanks to the strength of its ETF screener combined with the quality of its overall offering. Schwab offers robust educational materials and portfolio analysis tools for everyday investors that make investing in ETFs simple. We like that Schwab also has more complex offerings and products for advanced investors as well.

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Ease-of-use was paramount for online brokers as millions of new traders entered the market this past year. E*TRADE stood apart from the competition in this new category, thanks to its paper trading platform that mirrors its Power platform, as well as providing pre-built portfolios. E*TRADE also has a wealth of educational materials and market-related information that are easy to find and navigate.

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With so many new traders and increased trading activity, customer service took on a renewed level of importance this year. Most online brokers provide good-to-great customer service, but TD Ameritrade stands out as best-in-class for its commitment to 24/7 availability, its virtual client service agent “Ted” and its direct-message availability on platforms such as Apple Business Chat, Meta Messenger, X (formerly Twitter) Direct Messages, and WeChat in Asia.

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Options trading was on fire in the first half of 2021 as traders took advantage of pricing imbalances across the stock market. Webull has offered some of the lowest cost options strategies in the industry, alongside a robust set of tools at no cost to its customers. As one of the lowest-cost brokers around, Webull stands out for extending affordability into the options market.

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