2021 Interactive Brokers Review

For casual investors, sticking to Fundamentals Explorer within Client Portal is, hands down, the way to go. Our team of industry experts, led by Theresa W. Carey, conducted our reviews and developed this best-in-industry methodology for ranking online investing platforms for users at all levels. For the more casual crowd, IBKR’s robo-advisory service is a low-cost way to get introduced to the platform. Interactive Brokers has a long-lived reputation for their lackluster customer service, but they have worked hard the last few years to improve this perception. IBot is available throughout the website and trading platforms. Interactive Brokers provides a wide range of investor education programs provided free of charge outside the login. There are more than 45 courses available, with the number of courses doubling during 2019, and continuing to increase during 2020.

• The list above is indicative of the brokerage’s focus on high value accounts, financial professionals, and active traders.
• Tiered commissions start at $0.0035 per share with a minimum of $0.35 per order.
• That Interactive Brokers publishes margin rates for loans in excess of $200 million says a lot about the service from the get go.
• This includes all IB commissions, exchange fees and most regulatory fees, but not transaction fees.
• IBKR Lite lets you trade US exchange–listed stocks and ETFs for free, while IBKR Pro offers fixed pricing of $0.005 per share with a $1 minimum per order.
• Few brokers even bother to publish margin rates for amounts in excess of $2 million-$5 million.

For example, in the case of stock investing commissions are the most important fees. To get things rolling, let’s go over some lingo related to broker fees. What you need to keep an eye on are Currencies forex trading fees and non-trading fees. Not to be overlooked on the client portal is the platform’s very good stock research tools. They are located under the Research tab on a stock’s profile.

Best Futures Brokers

But it’s not the best option for passive investors who are looking for a hands-off approach to wealth-building. Interactive Brokers is an online brokerage platform offering US-based and global trading. Interactive Brokers offers numerous options for you to learn about trading and investing.

A feature called Portfolio Checker lets you assess your portfolio’s health by comparing its performance to one of about 200 global benchmarks and evaluating risk measures. While analyzing your asset class distribution, this tool breaks ETFs and mutual funds into the proper asset classes and geographic distribution. Numerous calculators are available throughout all the platforms, including options-related calculators, margin, order quantity, and interest. IBKR Lite program, which offers free trades for U.S. listed equities. Trades are routed to generate payment for order flow, which is not shared with the client.

Compare To Similar Brokers

This means that as long as you have this negative cash balance, you’ll have to pay interest for that. If you want to avoid this, you can convert your money at any time using the FXCONV function. Interactive Brokers offers many account types, which differ in the owernship and the service provided. Besides the usual brokerage commissions, https://forexarena.net/ there is an annual management fee ranging from 0.08% to 1.50%, depending on the amount you invest. In the case of stock index CFDs, all fees are incorporated into the spreads. When you trade stock CFDs, you pay a volume-tiered commission. The stock CFD fees are low, while stock index CFD fees are high in comparison with others.

You pay options fees depending on the number of contracts you trade. To have a clear picture of forex fees, we calculated a forex benchmark fee for major currency pairs. This catch-all benchmark includes commissions, spreads, and financing costs for all brokers. This is beneficial if you do a lot of trades frequently.

We also compared Interactive Brokers’s fees with those of two similar brokers we selected, Saxo Bank and Degiro. This selection is based on objective factors such as products offered, client profile, fee structure, etc. See a more detailed rundown of Interactive Brokers alternatives. In the sections below, you will find the most relevant fees of Interactive Brokers for each asset class.

Interactive Brokers Offerings

Fixed per-share pricing of $0.005 (one-half cent) per share traded with a minimum of $1 and a maximum of 1% of trade value. There are three types of commissions for U.S. equities. The Tax Optimizer tool allows a client to match specific lots on a trade-by-trade basis and maximize tax efficiency by previewing the profit and loss of each available scenario. The tax lot matching scenarios are last-in-first-out , first-in-first-out , maximize long-term loss, maximize short-term loss, maximize long-term gain, maximize short-term gain, and highest cost. You can also set an account-wide default for dividend reinvestment. You can trade share lots or dollar lots for any asset class. Additionally, for an options order, a customer may opt to enter Deliverable Value, specifying the dollar value of the stock that the customer would be assigned if the option expired in the money.

stocks are not available for fractional shares trading at this time. Interactive Brokers’ mobile app has almost all of the functionality of the web platform, though it is not nearly as extensive as TWS desktop platform.

Interactive Brokers has another browser platform called Web Trader. Surprisingly, it is very simple compared to the broker’s other trading tools. Pro customers do have to pay commissions on U.S.-listed (and foreign-listed) stocks and ETFs.

Interactive Brokers also lets you purchase portions of a company instead of paying for full shares. Fractional trading is available on both IBKR Lite and IBKR Pro, and you can use the service to pick any available US stocks. — Interactive Advisors — that specializes in automated investment management. The platform offers more than 70 portfolios built with a mixture of stocks and ETFs. Interactive Brokers offers several other notable services, including automated investment management, fractional shares, mobile apps, and research and educational content.

From its Traders’ Academy portal to content on the IBKR Quant blog, there is a wide variety of written material and accompanying video content, including quizzes. While progress tracking is not included for videos and articles, it is for quizzes, and there is at least one per lesson.

Interactive Brokers Alternatives

Commissions can be as high as 1% of trade value or as low as 35¢ for U.S. securities. While many day-trading brokers continue to charge equity commissions, Interactive Brokers is one firm that has launched $0 trading. Despite its new pricing schedule, it still provides some really good software. The broker’s Lite tier allows smaller investors to get in the game without a commission Corporate Finance Review or the activity fee of the Pro platform, and fractional share buying is geared toward them. However, if you’re using the Lite program, you won’t enjoy rates that are quite so cheap. Here rates start at 2.5 percent above the benchmark rate. That’s still much better than comparable brokerages, however, and if you don’t use margin, then it’s not a deal-breaker anyway.

In fact, the company has courses on investing, markets, and programming through its Trader Workstation application. Interactive Brokers may pique your interest if you’re an active investor looking to place regular trades on US-listed exchanges as well as international markets.

Interactive Brokers Review 2021: Pros, Cons And How It Compares

Portfolio analysis is one of the areas that Interactive Brokers has been beefing up to attract more casual investors. Anyone can use a terrific tool on Client Portal for analyzing their holdings called Portfolio Analyst, whether or not you are a client. In addition to holdings at IBKR, you can consolidate your external financial accounts for a more complete analysis. Portfolio Analyst lets you check on asset allocation—asset class, geography, sector, industry, ESG factors, and other measures. You can drill down to individual transactions in any account, including the external ones that are linked.