We are big fans of investing. There is nothing better than creating a passive income stream through investing and making money on your money.
Put simply, investing makes your money work for you, and there is no reason why it shouldn’t be working for you.
You’re likely reading this article to find the best online investment brokerage because you already love to invest your money and see value in putting your money on the stock market. Maybe you have already found an investment platform online, but aren’t happy with it, or maybe you are just looking to start out.
Here are a few of the best online investment platforms in the USA:
Scottrade
Scottrade easily has the cheapest trades of the popular brokerages online. At $7/trade, if you are looking for low cost Scottrade is your best bet.
A huge bonus is also that there are no annual fees with Scottrade, and they have a nice, low initial deposit of $500.00. If you don’t have a lot of money to invest but want to get started, this brokerage is a good bet.
This firm also has a high number of mutual funds when compared to it’s competitors, so there are more choices available. If you feel you may need more support from your brokerage of choice, this one has a strong brick-and-mortar presence but also has a great online service base. All of these reasons help it become one of the best investment companies for Americans.
eToro
eToro is one of our favourite investment firms. The best feature of eToro is that you can actually look up other trader’s portfolios, see their returns and copy their portfolios with their OpenBook feature.
If you refer your friends, you can earn $100, which is a nice little bonus, and when you open a trading account (for free!) you get a $20 gift card.
If you are a new investor and aren’t sure what you are doing, they have Webinars and a very extensive FAQ section to help you along as well.
E*Trade Financial
E*TRADE Financial is another popular online investment brokerage option. They maintain low cost trades (though slightly higher than Scottrade), but when you sign up you get 60 days of FREE trading.
Like eToro, they have educational resources available to help you learn more about investing and make decisions on where you want to invest your cash.
E*TRADE does not have many branches (only about 30) but if you are looking for an online platform then you likely won’t need much of a physical presence. This brokerage also has low a initial deposit at $500.00 to get you started.
There are various other online brokerages that you can invest your money in, but these few have a lot of benefits including cheap (or non existent) fees, inexpensive trades, sign up bonuses and interesting features.
We started using Scottrade and like it so far. It was pretty easy to set up and pretty straight forward to start investing. I haven’t used the other two, but they sound good as well.
A service I found through other bloggers called Loyal3 is great for long term investing. Although they have a limited variety of stocks, you can invest with as little as $10 and there are no transaction fees. Other than that I haven’t used those other services to say how I like them personally, but I have heard good things about Scottrade.
Interactive Brokers is the lowest cost brokerage out there.
$0.005/s commissions, $1 minimum. 200 shares for $1
$10k minimum deposit though.
Excellent and very comprehensive mobile and tablet apps for trading.
Thanks for all of those resources, I’ll get back to it once I am ready. 🙂
I use USAA only because I am old school and I have a hard time changing companies that I like. I do like Scott Trade though and Interactive Brokers sounds interesting.
I’ve used eToro which is my favorite among others. It’s very user-friendly and you can get easily bonus there. So far, it’s one that I can recommend for newbies. But the others are good as well.
Thanks for sharing. I’m in the market for an established broker. I’m currently with USAA, but I’d like to save on trading costs. I’ve been using Loyal3 to build up positions, and will continue until I get a nice size to roll to an established broker. Thanks again for the suggestions; I’ve never heard of eToro.
These days pretty much every online broker is the same with commissions ranging in price from $0 to about $10. About 20+ years ago there was a great disparity among the brokerage houses as full services entities charged over $300 a trade and “discount” brokers charged about $50 a trade. With all brokerages offering many of the same research tools and fast online trades I don’t see much different between any of them.