Which Brokerage Should You Use in 2021? My 5, Ranked
In this video, I’m going to compare 5 different brokerages by identifying their strengths and weaknesses to help you find which one is the best fit for you.
Today, I’ll be covering the following 5 brokerages: Webull, TD Ameritrade, Robinhood, M1, and Interactive Brokers. These are all brokerages that I currently have accounts with and varying levels of experience using. And this isn’t meant to be definitive rankings by any means – some brokerages I’ve used more than others, and you may feel differently based on your style of trading, and that’s totally fine. This is just my two cents.
The criteria I’ll judge each brokerage on are as follows:
Platform
Mobile App
Reliability and Order Fills
Investment Offerings
Fees
Customer Support
I’ll then give it an overall score based off of my complex and proprietary algorithm.
Let’s get into it.
Webull
Webull is up first. Known best for their free stock promotions by shill youtubers … it’s actually a pretty solid brokerage.
Platform
Like most brokerages, the platform does take a little while to get used to, but once you do, it’s pretty easy to get around, place orders, and look at your account performance. The charting tools are pretty good as well. I find it a little more limiting in tools and indicators than something like ThinkOrSwim or TradingView, but for the most part, I’m able to do what I want with it.
You can really customize your layout nicely to set it up exactly how you want.
I really like how you can easily pull up financials for the different companies you’re looking at, you can see order flow, news, and so on. For options trading, I think it’s super easy to navigate around and place orders. By default, the columns have exactly what I’m looking for, like Open Interest, Implied Volatility, and the Greeks.
You also have a screener tab where you can create your own watchlists, and even paper trade.
Overall, I like the platform for the most part. It’s certainly more advanced than Robinhood but a ways behind TD Ameritrade. All in all, I would give it an 8 out of 10.
Mobile
Let’s take a look at Webull on mobile. I personally hate trading from my phone, but when I need to, I want it to be as simple as possible for me to do. And for me, Webull has one of the best mobile apps. I can easily see my open positions, close them out, set a stop loss, or buy some more.
It’s also easy to flip to the chart view – you can easily change time frames, zoom in and out, add indicators, etc. The options chain is also pretty easy to navigate and find what you’re looking for. Checking my P&L is nice and clean, and I really like the P&L calendar view as well.
To check in on other tickers, you can simply search for it and from there, we are in our familiar chart view where we can monitor price action or enter a trade.
I’d rate this mobile app 9 out of 10 – it’s definitely my favorite one of the bunch.
Fees
There are no commissions with Webull for stocks or options. There are no account minimums or account fees, which is really nice.
When you sign up, you get a complimentary 3-month subscription to Level 2 data, but if you want it after that, it’ll cost you $2 per month. In addition to that, OPRA real-time data costs $3 per month unless you make at least 1 options trade per 30 days. Otherwise, you can get their Nasdaq Basic real-time quotes for free, which is a little limited for more advanced traders, but good enough for the large majority of retail investors.
For fees, I give it a 7.5 out of 10 – I’d rate it higher if level 2 and OPRA real-time data were free, and of course, I understand they have to make money somehow, but I’m sure they do through payment for order flow.
Reliability and Order Fills
I don’t make a ton of trades on Webull, so I personally haven’t experienced any reliability issues, and I’ve always felt my orders have filled as I expected them to. When I compare a standard market order from Webull to other brokerages I’ve used, it’s definitely better than Robinhood and anecdotally seemed pretty similar to TD Ameritrade and Interactive Brokers.
And I wasn’t sure whether to include this here or in the next section, but one of the main reasons why I love having a Webull account is for extended hours trading. You can trade after-hours and in the pre-market which is just a really nice option to have. I was busy one day and forgot to get into AMC before market close, but I was able to buy after hours for around $16 a share and made a tidy little profit.
For this, I give Webull an 8 out of 10.
Investment Offerings
Webull has your standard products of stocks and options. You can trade a handful of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, and Litecoin, and not much more. But it’s not a crypto wallet – you can’t send and receive crypto from other platforms. No futures, no forex, no mutual funds or bonds, or international trading. I think for your average retail investor, you’re able to trade what you want, but if you’re looking for more products, you may want to look at a different brokerage.
I give Webull a 6 out of 10 here.
Customer Support
I think if you have any substantial amount of money in a brokerage account, you want good customer support. I ended up emailing every brokerage’s customer support department the same basic question and seeing how quickly each broker responded to me.
Since my question was pretty basic, they did have an auto-responder instantly answer my question which was helpful, and then about 3 and a half hours later, I got a personalized response from customer support.
So while they do tout 24/7 customer support, I haven’t tried it out during off market hours. They list a phone number as well, which I haven’t called, but another journalist said they waited an hour to talk to a human on the phone.
Now if I had more serious account concerns where a brokerage outage caused me to lose money or something else, I don’t feel super confident about customer support really having my back, and I’ve read lots comments on Reddit from people frustrated with their customer support.
With all of those considerations, I give Webull a 5 out of 10.
Overall Rating
So running my super proprietary algorithm that’s definitely not just a simple spreadsheet, Webull gets a 7.25 out of 10.
Robinhood
Okay, next up is Robinhood. They’ve had a lot of bad press this year and rightfully so. I am not a big fan of Robinhood at all, and I would recommend most people look elsewhere for a brokerage. But let’s dive in a little more.
Platform
What helped Robinhood gain popularity is also something that holds it back from being a serious broker: it’s simplicity. It’s definitely a mobile-first brokerage – I don’t believe most users are logging on to their website to trade. Both look pretty similar however… but on desktop you can actually see charts a little better with volume and a handful of basic indicators like moving averages and RSI. Everything is very clean and very simple, but in my opinion, it’s over-simplified.
It’s kind of like comparing Adobe Premiere or Final Cut to iMovie. Yeah, you can edit a simple video in iMovie, and your mom probably can too, but when you want to do something a little more advanced, you’re going to want to get the F out of iMovie and into a better application.
So while the interface is pretty and easy to navigate, it’s just too limiting to be very helpful for more serious traders. I give it a 6.5 out of 10.
Mobile App
The app is great for what it does. I mean when Robinhood first launched, I don’t think any other brokerage had anywhere close to the user friendliness of Robinhood. It’s a clean interface with big buttons. You think options are too confusing? Well, Robinhood will hold your hand and you can select “yes, I think the stock is going up,” and Robinhood will tell you what you can buy in support of that hypothesis. For better or for worse, I think this app introduced many new traders to the world of stock options.
When I’m away from the computer and want to check stock prices, the app I always check first is Robinhood because it’s the fastest to log in and show my watchlist for both crypto and stocks. I don’t really trade on it much any more, but it’s nice for checking prices throughout the day.
I give their mobile app a 9 out of 10. I think if they improved their charts with indicators and more timeframes, it’d be more useful for me.
Fees
Robinhood’s other claim to fame is their commission-free trading. $0 in commission for stocks and options sounds pretty great – and it is as long as you are able to get reliability and solid order fills, which we’ll get to next.
There is no minimum account size or maintenance fees or anything like that, so that’s a plus. If you do want level 2 market data, you will need to pay $5 per month to get Robinhood Gold.
So when it comes to fees, Robinhood is pretty decent. I give it an 8 out of 10, but let’s dive in a little more.
Reliability & Order Fills
Historically, when you would make a trade with your broker, you’d pay a commission on that trade, maybe $15 or so to fill your order. So as more and more brokerages moved to the commission-free model, you should be asking “how are these brokerages generating revenue?” Remember, if platform or service is “free” then you, the customer, are the product. Just like with this video – it’s free to you, but in exchange, there will be some ads.
Much has been said about the fact that Robinhood sells your orders to market makers – a process known as payment for order flow. This is how they make the majority of their revenue and is common practice among most brokerages and in theory it shouldn’t hurt the customer, but I believe it’s been proven that it often does. Without getting into the weeds too much, I think Robinhood has atrocious reliability and order fills. On volatile stock market days, many brokerages have issues handling the increased activity on their platforms, but Robinhood seems to have the most issues most often.
Like in March of 2020, Robinhood was down for an entire day due to a system-wide outage. That is completely outrageous and reason enough to abandon using Robinhood altogether. Also, the order fills are abysmal. So many times I try to buy or sell, and I’m sitting there waiting and waiting while they attempt to fill my order. It’s just horrible. I’m giving them a 2 for Reliability and Fills and that’s being generous.
Investment Offerings
Alright, with Robinhood you have your basic stocks and options like Webull, along with fractional shares. So if you only have $100 and want to invest in Amazon which is well over $3,000 per share, well, you can buy $100 worth of Amazon which is pretty cool.
You do have basic crypto trading similar to Webull – again, it’s not a wallet, so no transferring crypto to other people or platforms.
That’s about it in terms of investments – you aren’t getting anything fancy with Robinhood. Since it does have fractional shares, it beats out Webull, with a 6.5 out of 10.
Customer Support
If Robinhood is known for commission-free trading and a nice app, it’s definitely not known for its customer service. They had pretty poor email support and never had phone support. However, in May they announced live options support from 8am to 8pm Eastern Monday through Friday with plans to expand it to 24-hour coverage which is a big step in the right direction.
After market close on Thursday, I did ask them my generic question about trading OTC stocks via email, and they responded back Friday morning, which was within 24 hours and kind of as good as I expect email support to be from any company.
I’m hoping support continues to improve, so right now I’ll give them a 6.5 out of 10.
Overall Rating
Overall, Robinhood gets a 6.4 out of 10 from me. The bottom line is if you have maybe $100 to invest and want a free stock, sign up for Webull instead and get two stocks. But really, if you do want a Robinhood account, just know they’ve had lots of issues in the past year and a half, and they’ve got a lot of work to do to improve. Don’t keep a lot of money in this account and… best of luck.
M1 FINANCE
Okay, next up is M1 Finance. This one is a bit different than the others, but I wanted to include it because it’s currently home to my long-term investment portfolio, and I think it’s a great place for a lot of people to start investing. And that’s key – this really isn’t a trading brokerage. It’s meant for simple longer-term investing.
Platform
M1 is all about Pie Investing – which is just a way of allocating your funds to different slices. You start by selecting companies or funds in which you want to invest and then adjusting the slice for each one. You can also pick from Expert Pies based off of your goals. So if you want to build out a more aggressive portfolio, you can simply do that. There are also pies that will follow the holdings and allocations of different hedge funds – so if you like Bill Ackman from Pershing Square – you can add this pie to your account.
This platform is less about charts and indicators and more about building out a portfolio with allocations that meet your investment goals.
When it comes to making the trades, M1 uses trade windows to keep their costs down – every morning at 9:30 eastern that the market is open, there is a trade window, so any changes to your portfolio have to be made before the trade window for them to take place. If you decide to change your portfolio Monday at 11am – it won’t actually make the necessary trades until the next day. So you can see how this is definitely not suited for trading and more for buying and holding.
At first, I found their platform kind of confusing in its simplicity and style, but it’s clean and easy to use. I’m liking it more and more, and I turned on auto-deposits, so every month a few hundred dollars gets deposited from my bank account to my M1 portfolio.
All-in-all, I give the platform an 8 out of 10.
Mobile App
The mobile app is quite similar to their web platform, and the only real difference I noticed was I couldn’t figure out how to add an expert pie to my portfolio. I don’t know if I’m just missing it or if it’s just not possible, but in general, the app works well and looks good, so I’ve got no other complaints. I give it an 8.5 out of 10.
Fees
With M1 there are no commissions or markups or platform fees. You can open an account with $0 and start investing with $100.
If you want the ability to trade in the afternoon as well as the morning along with other perks like borrowing money at 2% interest, you can upgrade to M1 Plus for $125 per year– but your first year is free, and then you can turn off auto-renewal after you sign up.
I give them a 9 out of 10 for this category.
Reliability & Order Fills
So since M1 trades under these trade windows, you don’t really have the same kind of control over your buys and sells as you would with other brokerages. After they make trades for you, you can look at the trade summary for the day. We can see on June 1st I got 1.90265 shares of the VONV ETF for $71.09. Looking at the chart, we can see that’s right around where VONV was in the morning of June 1st, so that seems about right to me.
Since it isn’t really a trading app, I haven’t noticed any issues with reliability either, so I’ll give them a 9 out of 10.
Investment Offerings
So with M1, you are more limited than other brokerages. There are over 6,000 exchange-listed securities. There aren’t mutual funds, bonds, options, or crypto available. They do have fractional shares which is great to have when building a buy and hold portfolio. So I will give them a 5 out of 10 here.
Customer Support
M1 does have email and phone support. I sent them my OTC question via email on Thursday afternoon, and they responded back Friday morning.
They have phone support Monday through Friday during market hours. I haven’t tried phone support, but judging by posts on Reddit, it sounds like they may be hard to get a hold of.
So I don’t have a lot to judge this by, but I’ll give them a 7 out of 10.
Overall Rating
Overall, M1 gets a 7.75 out of 10 in my book – but more on that later.
Next, we’re moving on to the next tier of brokerages. These, in my opinion, are for more serious traders. These next two are well-established and reliable.
TD Ameritrade
TD Ameritrade is the broker I’ve been most actively using for the past year and a half. What’s great about TD Ameritrade is their ThinkOrSwim platform, so let’s take a look.
Platform
Out of all the different platforms I’ve used, this one is my absolute favorite. At first it looks overwhelming and complex, but once you get used to it, it becomes second nature. I made an entire overview video about the platform which is linked here if you are interested in learning about it.
But it’s super customizable: you can put whatever windows and widgets you want just about anywhere you want to get your layout to work best for you. The charting tools are my favorite. Moving around, changing time frames, and adding indicators – it’s all really easy and quick to do. Speaking of indicators, they have a massive library of studies and strategies that you can add to your chart. They have a built-in programming language called thinkScript which allows you to create your own analysis tools, or you can do what I do which is download them from people who are much smarter than me.
So you can keep your charts clean and simple – or you can go crazy with it – whatever floats your boat.
It really is a great platform once you dive into it, but it can be resource-intensive, so it can be a little slow on older computers. This platform gets a solid 9 out of 10.
Mobile App
I don’t use the mobile app super often, but every time I try to – I kind of forget how to do simple things because the UI feels a little clunky to me. For instance, if I go to the trade tab, type in a ticker and hit enter, I get an error. Instead, you have to wait for the right ticker to show up below and then click on it. But then I’m in the order editor, and if I want to look at the chart, I’m not sure how to easily do that. Instead, I have to go to the watchlist and search for the stock to look at the chart. It’s just a little thing, but I feel like it could be streamlined better. I think that if you use the app often, you probably feel pretty comfortable moving around in the app, and it does have all the necessary features, so I give it an 8 out of 10.
Fees
There are no commissions when you trade stocks or ETFs. Options contracts have a .65 cent fee per contract. Futures have a $2.25 fee per contract. For me, it’s worth the fee – even though I spent over $3,700 in commissions year-to-date. But uhh-- I don’t recommend trading futures on here – that’s just too expensive.
But, you do get real-time data and level 2 without any additional fees.
For fees, I give them an 8.
Reliability & Fills
No broker is perfect, and TD Ameritrade certainly isn’t. There have been several times when the platform has been down during the trading day – when charts won’t load, and you can’t really do anything. These issues tend to be resolved within 30 minutes or so.
For fills, I think in general they do a pretty good job getting my order filled where I want it. Your normal market order is generally filled instantaneously. I did notice this Spring it seemed to be a bit slow filling my options orders – which is one of the reasons why I ended up opening an account at Interactive Brokers, but compared to these newer mobile-first apps like Robinhood and Webull, TD Ameritrade is certainly better.
I give them an 8.5 out of 10 for this category.
Investment Offerings
TD Ameritrade has a pretty robust list of products – stocks, options, mutual funds, futures, forex, bonds, etc. No crypto yet, but they do have bitcoin futures, and they have invested in a company called ErisX, which could open the door for TD users to trade crypto.
Just about anything I’m ever looking to trade is on here, so they get a 9 out of 10 from me.
Customer Support
TD Ameritrade has some of the better customer support out there. Their phone support is definitely superior to any of the previous brokerages I’ve mentioned. I’ve personally used the phone support, and sometimes the wait times can be the 30-60 minute range, but the people on the other end tend to be super knowledgeable and helpful.
I did message their customer support today, which is a Sunday, to see how quickly they get back via email, and it took them 18 hours. I give their support a 9 out of 10.
Overall Rating
Adding everything up, TD Ameritrade gets an 8.6 out of 10 from me. It’s what I recommend my friends sign up for if they really want to dive into trading.
Interactive Brokers
Okay, last but not least is Interactive Brokers. This is the platform I have the least amount of experience with, but it’s definitely worth mentioning as far as I know, it’s open to the most amount of countries.
Platform
With IB, you download a program called Trader Workstation and the platform to me is… a bit clunky and outdated. I honestly hate the way it looks. From its appearance, it looks like it was probably designed in the late 90s and hasn’t been redesigned since. But looks aren’t as important as other aspects when it comes to trading. Since I prefer charting on ThinkOrSwim, I tend to have Trader Workstation taking up half my screen, with ThinkOrSwim in the other half. I like having the options chain easily accessible with a small chart and order entry, P&L, and my watchlist all right here.
Again, like ThinkOrSwim, you can customize windows and panels to your hearts’ content. And again, I really haven’t spent enough time on this platform to feel 100% comfortable with everything, but it is a little more difficult for me to get the hang of than the other brokerages. Still, it is a robust and advanced platform. I give it a 7.5 out of 10.
Mobile App
I’ve honestly, rarely used this app, but it’s not bad at all. It’s easy to find what you’re looking for and check out the chart. You can even go full-screen with it… then switch over the options chain and place your order. It has the essentials, and navigating around is fairly simple. It honestly looks a lot better than the desktop app. 8 out of 10.
Fees
This is where IB gets a little more confusing than the others. They have different pricing structures based off of the plan you choose. So there’s the free, zero commission trading with no activity fees or account minimums called IBKR Lite. Then there’s fixed rate pricing which charges a low commission per share or set percent of trade value called IBKR Pro.
So if you’re a casual trader, the IBKR Lite would probably work for you which is zero commission trading. If you trade on margin or want tiered pricing for options and futures, than Pro is probably a better fit. I personally have IBKR Pro, and since I haven’t traded on there recently, I’m about to get hit with a $10 monthly fee for inactivity which I can bypass by racking up $10 worth of commissions. So that’s kind of annoying.
For Data, you do need to subscribe to them if you want them – some are free, and some are a buck fifty a month. I currently pay $6 per month for my data subscriptions.
They get a 6 out of 10 for fees.
Reliability & Fills
One of the reasons why I opened an account here was for their fills, which I heard great things about. They have their own algorithm which can try and fill your order in different ways to try and save you money, and I’ve toyed around with different settings and haven’t yet found the sweet spot. I find that when I try and buy options contracts in the middle of the bid and the ask, it doesn’t often fill. I know people that swear by their order fills, so I’m assuming it’s just user error on my part.
I haven’t experienced any downtime with Interactive Brokers, and so far, things have gone fairly smoothly here for me.
They get a 9 out of 10.
Investment Offerings
Interactive Brokers has pretty much everything TD Ameritrade has but more international products, giving you access to 135 exchanges in 33 countries. They also have fractional shares. So a solid 9.5 out of 10 here for IB.
Customer Support
They have chat, email, and phone support which is nice. When you do try to call, they definitely encourage you to search their database first, which I can understand. But you can get the phone number for support and call if needed.
I’ve read a mixed bag of customer support reviews online, and again, I’m waiting to hear back via email, but I’ll give them an 8 out of 10 for support, and if they take too long to answer via email, I’ll knock them down a point.
Overall Rating
Interactive Brokers gets an 8 out of 10 for it’s overall rating.
Now, let’s wrap up this super long video by breaking down what brokerage might be best for you.
Final Results
Here are my final ratings for each of the 5 brokerages… again, take this with a grain of salt as this is really based on my personal experiences: TD Ameritrade 8.6, Interactive Brokers 8, M1Finance 7.75, Webull 7.25, Robinhood 6.4
Honorable Mention
I also wanted to mention one more platform that I haven’t used much, but I’ve heard good things about, and that’s Fidelity. I put them on a similar playing field as TD Ameritrade – but their Active Trader Pro software, at least on Mac – was super slow and outdated. I think it was designed for PC and is being emulated for Mac, so it wasn’t great from that perspective. I know they’ve been revamping their mobile app, and hopefully their desktop app for Mac is soon to follow, but if you’re a PC user, it’s definitely worth checking out Fidelity as well.
Which One?
If this video just left you more confused on which brokerage to use than before, my bad. But I don’t think there’s really a one-size fits all approach. It really depends on what you’re looking to do. So I’ll break it down simply.
Simple Buy & Hold Portfolio
For a simple buy and hold stock portfolio, I recommend M1. I think you’ll like it.
Advanced Trading
If you want to get into more advanced trading with stocks or options, check out TD Ameritrade
Casual
For casual trading of stocks and options, I recommend Webull. It’s simple to use and extended hours trading is nice to have.
International
If you’re not based in the US and looking for a brokerage, check out Interactive Brokers.
Bonus
If you want to be miserable, sign up for Robinhood.
Final Thoughts
I hope this video helped give you an idea of what to expect from each brokerage and which one may be best-suited for you. Some of them have sign-up bonuses like free stocks, but I really recommend signing up for which one will help you the most with investing and trading regardless of any promotions.
If you would do me a favor and hit the thumbs up button on this video, consider subscribing if you haven’t already, and I’ll see you in the next one.