5 Best Brokers for Free Stock Trading of September 2024 (2024)

Interactive Brokers has long been known for its attractive pricing, international reach, extensive data, and pro-quality tools. But now it’s aggressively courting novice and everyday investors. There are two novice-friendly mobile apps, an easily navigated web portal, paper trading, and fractional shares. My big gripe is its restrictive trading permissions for leveraged ETFs, but if you don’t trade them, don’t worry about it. Read review.

With its acquisition of TD Ameritrade, Schwab's new crown jewel is the trader-focused thinkorswim suite of platforms, available on mobile, browser, and desktop app. They have sophisticated features, but it was their ease of use that elevates them above Interactive Brokers. Yes, the desktop application still has a learning curve, but I’ve found it to be a much shorter one than IBKR’s Trader Workstation. Read review.

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Fidelity took top honors overall in the StockBrokers.com 2024 Annual Awards because it does almost everything and does it well. That includes free stock trading. Few companies offer the bucketloads of free research clients can pull out of the Big Green Machine. Fido is also one of a few brokers that we review that refuses payment for order flow (PFOF), which should lead to better executions for clients. Read review.

If you’re less interested in shaving nanoseconds off your trade executions and much more interested in getting to know the companies you’re thinking of investing in and how they fit in your portfolio, Merrill Edge is my top recommendation. It presents risks and upside in the exact thoughtful way that I, as a former wealth manager, would present them to my clients. Merrill’s rich, colorful client experience sometimes comes at the cost of slow page load times, but I think the occasional wait is worth it. The proprietary Bank of America Securities research is often deeper than the generic third-party research licensed by other brokers. Read review.

Using our online brokerage comparison tool, here's a comparison of the trading fees for the best free trading platforms.

Here's a comparison of the account fees for the best free trading platforms.

Commission-free trading means the broker does not charge a fee for buying or selling a stock or exchange-traded fund (ETF). Brokers have other ways of making money, though. Most free stockbrokers make money via a practice called payment for order flow, or PFOF, a fee that generates over $1 billion each year in revenue for the industry.

Yes, you can now trade stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for free with most online brokers. Brokers are competing hard for your investing dollars. A pricing war in 2019 led to full-service brokerages cutting their commissions to $0 to compete with free trading platforms such as Robinhood. Don’t worry about them making money, though: Instead of charging commissions, almost all accept payment for order flow (PFOF), loan money and securities, earn interest on idle cash balances, and charge incidental fees.

It’s not difficult to trade fee-free. In our analysis, we conducted comprehensive tests on 17 online brokers, all of whom offer “free” stock and ETF trades. By free, they mean that they don’t charge any cost per share to trade. Brokers do pass along some trade fees charged by regulatory bodies and exchanges, but they are almost always miniscule and measured by fractions of a cent per share. Brokers may charge fees for other products and services, such as trading options, mutual funds, robo-advising, or transferring your money in or out. Some brokers also charge for penny stocks. Confused? We assess those costs in our reviews, guides, and comparisons.

Yes, trading platforms with features once only available to investing professionals are now offered to investors for free. Most of the online brokers that cater to individual investors make their trading platforms available for free simply by opening an account. There’s rarely a minimum investment required, which means you can have a zero balance and still use many of the broker’s tools. You may even be able to test-drive the trading platform with paper trading, which allows you to practice trading with pretend money.

The best free trading platforms offer $0 stock and ETF trades, easy-to-use trading apps, quality market research and education, and a diverse selection of trading tools. Our top picks for free stock trading in 2024 are Interactive Brokers, Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Merrill Edge, and E*TRADE.

Most online brokers now offer commission-free stock trading. The brokers with the best trading apps are:

• Interactive Brokers - Best overall
• E*TRADE - Best for casual traders
• Fidelity - Best app for investors and beginners
• Charles Schwab - Best for traders
• Merrill Edge - Best app for stock research

For startup brokers such as Robinhood and Webull, payment for order flow (PFOF) is the primary way of making money. With larger full-service brokers such as Fidelity and Schwab, the largest revenue source comes from sweeping the idle cash sitting in customer accounts into subsidiary banks each night. They also loan money to margin investors and charge incidental fees. Brokers also hope to upsell their commission-free stock investors into advisory services or other managed products.

Sam Levine, CFA, CMT, formerly a lead writer for StockBrokers.com, has over 30 years of investing experience and actively trades stocks, ETFs, options, futures, and options on futures. He's held roles as a portfolio manager, financial consultant, investment strategist and journalist. He holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and the Chartered Market Technician (CMT) designations and served on the board of directors of the CMT Association.

Blain Reinkensmeyer, head of research at StockBrokers.com, has been investing and trading for over 25 years. After having placed over 2,000 trades in his late teens and early 20s, he became one of the first in digital media to review online brokerages. Blain created the original scoring rubric for StockBrokers.com and oversees all testing and rating methodologies.

For this guide:

• Whenever possible, we used our own brokerage accounts for testing. For several brokers, we used a test account that was provided to us.
• We evaluated the features, tools, research, education, and data commonly used by stock investors and traders.
• We tested brokers for their ease of use and overall design.

For this guide to the best brokers for free stock trading, our research team looked closely at all costs incurred by investors, including payment for order flow and miscellaneous account fees; and rigorously tested key features such as platform usability, app ease of use, educational resources and market research. In all, we tested more than 100 features. All research, writing and data collection at StockBrokers.com is done by humans, for humans. Read our generative AI policy here.

StockBrokers.com uses a variety of computing devices to evaluate trading platforms. Our reviews were conducted using the following devices: iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, MacBook Pro M1 with 8 GB RAM running the current MacOS, and a Dell Vostro 5402 laptop i5 with 8 GB RAM running Windows 11 Pro. In testing platforms and apps, our reviewers place actual trades for a variety of instruments.

As part of our data check process, we sent a data profile link to each broker summarizing the data we had on file and the data they provided us last year, with a field for entering any data that had since changed. For the brokers that filled out these profiles, we audited the information for any discrepancies between our data and the broker’s data to ensure accuracy.

As part of our review process, all brokers had the opportunity to provide updates and key milestones in a live meeting that took place in the fall. Meetings with broker teams also took place throughout the year as new products rolled out. Insights gathered from these calls helped steer our testing efforts to ensure every feature and tool was assessed.

We tested 17 online trading platforms for this guide:

• Ally Invest review
• Charles Schwab review
• eToro review
• E*TRADE review
• Fidelity Investments review
• Firstrade review
• Interactive Brokers review
• J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing review
• Merrill Edge review
• Public.com review
• Robinhood review
• SoFi Invest review
• tastytrade review
• TradeStation review
• Tradier review
• Vanguard review
• Webull review