Current Events > which stock broker should i open an account with?

(+) Yeah! (+)

need to stop procrastinating and finally start investing

i've been thinking of fidelity - i think for a complete newbie, they're the way to go?

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Were_Wyrm Investing

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Future_Trunks posted...

vanguard

they're okay as far as not ever really restricting stocks but they are horrible for day trading, if you plan to just buy and hold they will work.

If you feel like you may do a mix of both in the future I really like E-Trade

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Not Robinhood because they're scum

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bump

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bumpp

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I'm going to be closing out of my Robinhood myself sometime this month I would say. I might go with Ally since they have a $200 bonus if I move 25k in there and their options fees are a touch lower than the competition.

I have Vanguard for my Roth IRA and they're all right. I just moved another $6000 to that but I don't really trade with it, just buy and hold ETFs with that (have it all in BOTZ right now but going to put this 6k into VNQ)

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What are your investing goals. Safe long term investments? Day trading?

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I just opened a Fidelity account last week, they give you a lot of information but the app and the website both feel like 1999. They supposedly have some of the strongest tools operating under the hood, but I definitely think it seems better for longer term trading and investing rather than trying to flip stuff same or next day.

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Fidelity

Harpie posted...

What are your investing goals. Safe long term investments? Day trading?

both i guess

though, like, i mean, i know it's stupid as somebody who doesn't know anything yet and most newbies are probably like this, but i'm more interested in the ability to make more quicker and supplement my income in the now than the longer term stuff

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Schwab bought TD Ameritrade and they are two of the best currently so I would go with Schwab tbh.

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I'm happy with Ally

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For regular person investing, any of Charles Schwab, Vanguard, or Fidelity are great. There's very little difference among them aside from their website/app's user interfaces. But they all have little to no fees and expense ratios in their offered funds. Vanguard gets a lot of love in particular because the company's founder Jack Bogle is probably the only pure-hearted person who's ever lived in the world of finance and he's largely responsible for popularizing low-fee index fund investing. He deliberately structured Vanguard such that the company is directly owned by the customers who buy Vanguard funds, thus the company has an obvious incentive to not screw over customers in any way. In comparison, Fidelity is privately owned, and Charles Schwab is publically traded.

One thing about Vanguard is their user interface on their website does really suck though. Schwab's website I think is the best, and I think Schwab's checking account is pretty good too.

If you want to daytrade / gamble with stocks then I dunno, maybe you want another brokerage where they let you transfer money in and out immediately - as the GameStop situation has a lot of investors complaining about. I'm not going to tell someone what they should or shouldn't do with their own money but investing is a zero-sum game and so I think for most regular people daytrading won't end well. There's people a lot smarter than you and me with PhD's and bloomberg terminals who you're competing against in the best case, or people who just have insider information in the worst case.

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Fidelity lets you trade before the cash settles, you just will have a violation if you sell that stock before your cash settles.

I use etrade

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Fidelity's fine

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Ex-Kefiroth posted...

There's also nothing stopping you from opening accounts at more than one brokerage.

This is true and an often overlooked point I think... Some people say things like "Brokerage X has excellent tools you can use" but you can just make an account with no money it it to use tools like that if you wanted. And there's free tools all over the internet anyway.

But a minor point of multiple brokerages, it should be warned that when you transfer all of your assets from one broker to another (without just selling and rebuying everything obviously), the old broker often makes you pay a fee to do the asset transfer. So someone might save a little bit of change making sure they pick a good one the first time. Sometimes the new brokerage will front the fee for you. Robinhood, for example, fronts fees from incoming transfers in my experience. When I later transferred my things from Robinhood to Schwab they charged a $50 fee, which Schwab covered after I called them and asked. Some brokers might not be nice though.

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