Yet, despite the parity, Robinhood falls short of E-Trade’s strengths in some instances. Ally Invest and E-Trade are popular brokerage firms that have helped many people invest wisely and improve personal finance. We generally think having more information can lead to better investment decisions, and that research provided by your brokerage can be a great way to supplement your own due diligence.

TradeKing’s customer service is known for being informative, responsive, and of a high quality. Active traders also have a lot to love with E-Trade, especially given their tiered fee structure (though you have to trade a lot to get access to it). To that end, E-Trade works well with traders who have a bit more experience under their belt, and want to take advantage of some high-quality trading platforms and other research tools. Meanwhile, E-Trade’s equivalent, the advanced trading platform E-Trade PRO, is just as reputable, if not more so.

It is a basic and affordable platform with plenty of great features and potential. An advantage of E-Trade is that it gives customers the freedom to move their cash for higher interest rates. Ally Invest doesn’t share its returns with customers and doesn’t allow movement of cash to high return money markets. As mentioned before, Ally Invest, which started in 2005, purchased TradeKing in 2016. Since the acquisition, Ally has expanded the platform and has been performing consistently well with it.

Both offer a variety of investment products, including stocks, options, ETFs, and mutual funds. As a [Type] interested in opening an account with an online broker, you may be wondering which of these two brokers is the better choice for you. In this article, we will compare TradeKing and E-Trade across several key factors, including pricing, platform usability, customer support, research tools, and investment options. By the end of this article, you should have a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each broker, allowing you to make an informed decision. E-Trade is another well-known online brokerage offering a wide range of investment products, such as stocks, options, ETFs, and mutual funds.

Usability: Where Ally Invest Can’t Keep Up

A newcomer might have trouble selecting an account type on TD Ameritrade. Sorry if we are the ones to break the news to you, but Ally Financial Inc. purchased TradeKing back in 2016. The company has successfully rebranded the self-directed trading platform and has geared its services towards the Millennial generation. E-Trade has a base rate of $9.99 and a contract fee of 75 cents for options.

• We generally think having more information can lead to better investment decisions, and that research provided by your brokerage can be a great way to supplement your own due diligence.
• Using E-Trade, customers can access professional financial consultants, traders, and human representatives.
• A price comparison reveals that Ally Invest might be more affordable.

An exceptionally useful TradeKing option tool is the Contingent Order tool. Investors observe the market to make a move when certain conditions are met, usually when a stock hits a certain price. However, that can happen at any time, and if an investor isn’t watching the market when that happens, he/she could miss the opportunity.

Interest rates range from 0.01% to 0.15% — both well below the rates offered by high-ranking competitors. We believe everyone should be able to make financial decisions with confidence. Make sure you fully understand a broker’s fee schedule before opening an IRA account. Two fees that are relatively common are maintenance fees and inactivity charges.

Still, E-Trade has better mobile trading apps and cash-backs to customers and remains an attractive trading platform. Another significant comparison is that both brokers support moving cash to money market funds for higher interest earnings. The only major difference is that while both brokers earn interest incomes from customer balances and earnings on idle cash, E-Trade shares its earnings. With E-trade, you can also gain revenue by lending stocks in your account to hedge funds on a short-term basis.

The best way to choose is by looking at industry standards, and both of these online brokerage firms have good reputations. The TradeKing platform is not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), but it is insured by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). Now, instead of weighing the good and bad of different banks, people are, instead, making lists comparing online brokerage firms – like the E-Trade and TradeKing platforms.

Trading platform

High-activity traders might want to take a platform for a test drive to see if it fits their specific needs. No matter the broker, they all make placing a trade as easy as making a few clicks, which is good enough for us. Founded in 1993, The Motley Fool is a financial services company dedicated to making the world smarter, happier, and richer. As you can see in the table below, the number of funds each broker offers, and whether or not you’ll have to pay to invest in them, varies significantly by brokerage. When websites are difficult to use, people are distracted, and they might leave before they finish transactions.

Is E*TRADE really free?

However, even at their top tier, their fees don’t go below $6.99, making TradeKing the winner no matter how often you trade on E-Trade. The pricing structures of TradeKing and E-Trade almost couldn’t be more different, which is important to consider when picking an online broker. charles schwab vs etrade Between these two, TradeKing offers the most affordable trades on their own, with a $4.95 commission on stock and ETF trades that beats out most others on the market. Carolyn Kimball is managing editor for Reink Media and the lead editor for the StockBrokers.com Annual Review.

TradeKing

Whichever way you’ll go, you can trust that these companies are reputable outfits that will look after your investments and get your investments off to a good start. It’s a wonderfully guided, automated way to diversify your portfolio, especially for traders who may not know what they want to do with their assets. Education materials are also on hand for beginning traders at both companies, particularly TradeKing.

Trading costs and commissions

Steven Hatzakis is the Global Director of Research for ForexBrokers.com. Steven previously served as an Editor for Finance Magnates, where he authored over 1,000 published articles about the online finance industry. Steven is an active fintech and crypto industry researcher and advises blockchain companies at the board level. Over the past 20 years, Steven has held numerous positions within the international forex markets, from writing to consulting to serving as a registered commodity futures representative. For the StockBrokers.com 13th Annual Review published in January 2023, a total of 3,332 data points were collected over three months and used to score 17 top brokers.

Stock exchanges all over the world have traded their intense pits of human traders for dispassionate machines. All the screw-ups on Wall Street have prompted everyday investors to take money management into their own hands by using online trading accounts. E-Trade, like TradeKing, offers futures and forex trading in addition to their normal asset classes, for traders looking for more high-risk offerings. E-Trade provides 118 no-commission ETFs, while TradeKing offers none (a rather big mark against them). E-Trade also provides a similar number of no-load mutual funds, while having a larger pool of about 12,000 to choose from. Mobile solutions are also available for TradeKing and E-Trade, with TradeKing providing a free mobile app for their customers.

For example, Person A agrees to buy stock for $100 in three months. If the buyer, Person B, agrees to this and sells Person A the option, he/she must honor this price. So, if the value of that security shoots to $300, Person B must sell it Person A for that price.