Clients can trade a dizzying range of markets—from stocks on the Mexican Stock Exchange to futures on Italy’s Borsa Italiana. Note that $0 stock commissions are available on Interactive Brokers’s https://www.xcritical.com/ IBKR Lite platform for non-professional traders. Market research is one of the main benefits of Fidelity, compared to platforms that focus on providing a simple investment platform.

Consider starting a 14-day free trial to take advantage of SA’s Premium services and see if they make sense for your needs. Both of these should combine to understand which stocks make the best choices for your portfolio now and into the future. Technical analysis uses price action as an indicator for when you should buy or sell a stock. Finally, don’t assume that an exchange is available in your country, or even state, just because you can access its website.

How Should You Choose a Brokerage Account?

The platforms are versatile as they can be used on desktop, web and mobile devices (iOS and Android). This means you can seamlessly access your account when and where you need to. Merrill Edge’s high-feature trading platform is called MarketPro, and it offers a ton of elements that active traders can appreciate. The platform’s dashboard is highly customizable, allowing you to set everything up to play to your strengths with an easy drag-and-drop interface.

• How long you have been trading — or whether you’ve ever traded at all — is a big factor in the type of platform you should choose.
• Webull will appeal to the mobile-first generation of casual investors with its slick interface for desktop and mobile apps, but the brokerage also delivers an impressive array of tools for active traders.
• The company pioneered the use of computers in trading, but it wasn’t until 1993 that Interactive Brokers Inc. was incorporated as a U.S. broker-dealer.
• For example, in the stock department alone you will find thousands of shares across both US and international marketplaces.

A top trading platform may also provide streaming news and can even get you a better trade execution, helping you secure the most attractive price possible. TD Ameritradehas top rankings in our listing of the best online brokers for its mobile app and its beginner-friendly options. The latter can also pertain to new day traders learning the ropes, since TD Ameritrade has the most extensive educational https://www.xcritical.com/platform/ resources of any day trading platform in our survey. Fidelity has a generally reasonable fee schedule, with no minimum investment for many account types, including IRAs and brokerage accounts. It also offers support for fractional shares and a wide range of assets, such as stocks and bonds, mutual funds, CDs, ETFs, and forex. Unfortunately, Fidelity doesn’t enable users to invest in cryptocurrencies.

Best for mobile trading: E*TRADE

As a newbie-friendly crypto trading platform, Luno allows you to buy digital assets with a debit or credit card. Crypto trading is possible on 13 major cryptocurrencies on the MT5 platform of Oanda, including BTC, ETH, Litecoin, Binance Coin, Cardano, Chainlink, Dogecoin, Polkadot, EOS, Stellar, Tezos, and Uniswap. With the platform, traders can access customizable layouts, trade-through charts, a wide range of plug-ins, and an intuitive interface. In addition, traders can test their strategies on both live and demo accounts before committing to real funds.

In fact, major forex pairs on the trading platform require a margin of just 2%, which equates to leverage of 50x. If you consider yourself somewhat of a newbie, then you might be best suited for the native trading platform built by IG. Or, if you’re a fan of third-party platform MT4, this is fully compatible with IG. VantageFX offers its own trading platform for the web and iOS and Android mobile devices. It’s fairly comprehensive, with full screen charts, dozens of technical indicators, and seamless order entry. If you decide to stop day trading, you’ll want to contact your brokerage and ask that they remove the minimum equity requirement from your account.

Ready to get started?

So we’ve now reviewed the best trading platforms, but how do they stack up against one another in terms of fees? If you’re looking for the cheapest trading platforms with the lowest fees and no overnight fees, check out the table below. The free trading platform also supported fractional ownership, meaning that you can buy shares from just $5 via the Schwab Stock Slice feature. International stocks at the platform are facilitated via American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) and foreign ordinaries. Outside of the stock department, this top-rated trading platform also allows you to invest in ETFs, index funds, mutual funds, bonds, and more.

If you’re looking to place trades on the go, review our list of the best apps to buy stocks below. You’ll note that many of these come from established online brokers — that’s because these companies tend to offer apps with the most well-rounded capabilities for stock and options traders. When testing brokerages, we looked for tools specifically helpful to day traders, like advanced charting and order types, and rapid trade execution. In our customer service tests, we measured the time it took to get a response over the phone, by live chat and by email.