HOW THE ONLINE BROKERS STACK UP

We scrutinized investment offerings, tools, mobile apps, advice and more to find the best broker for you.

- NELLIE S. HUANG

IS your broker helping you be a better investor? That was the key question we sought to answer as we rolled out our annual online broker survey.

After all, fees don't matter much anymore. They're low everywhere.

So, what's left? Service. Does your broker provide the tools you need to help you keep track of your financial life and goals? In big and little ways, is it guiding you toward smarter investment decisions? Did you learn anything new about investing from your broker over the past year? Can you get investment advice if you want it? Can you graduate from an automated adviser to a dedicated financial adviser as you get older to get help with estate planning or Social Security? All told, we engineer our broker rankings to reward the firms that offer the most to the broadest group of investors.

To start, we limit the field to brokers that offer stock, mutual fund, exchange-traded fund and individual bond trading. That's one reason you don't see the likes of Robinhood or SoFi here you can't buy individual bonds on their platforms.

We surveyed nine firms in all: Ally Invest, Charles Schwab, E*Trade from Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, Firstrade, Interactive Brokers, J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing, Merrill Edge, and Wells Trade. T. Rowe Price, Vanguard and Citi Self Invest declined to participate. The biggest, best-known firms score better overall, you'll notice. But each firm shines in one category or another, and no firm aced every one. (To read about the best brokers for different types of investors, see page 20.)