TD Ameritrade (tdameritrade.com) offers a full-service brokerage experience that caters to the needs of both new investors still learning the ropes and advanced day traders taking positions in a variety of asset classes.
- Update 9/19/23: Schwab has completed its merger with TD Ameritrade. Read about up to a $1000 Schwab bonus here.
It offers $0 commissions on trades, top-of-the-line educational resources, enhanced trading platforms, and a user-friendly mobile app. TD Ameritrade is one of the best solutions for new and advanced investors.
TD Ameritrade Pros & Cons
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TD Ameritrade’s Strong Points
- Free research: The Federal Reserve Economic Database, the Center for Financial Research and Analysis, and Morningstar are just a few of the highly regarded sources of third-party research that TD Ameritrade makes available to its customers.
- High-quality trading platforms: The highly regarded thinkorswim platform delivers professional-level trading on desktop and mobile. Also available are the TD Ameritrade web and mobile platforms.
- Customer service at TDAmeritrade is unrivaled, offering round-the-clock assistance by phone, text, fax, live chat, email, or social media in addition to in-person meetings at more than 250 branches.
- A wide range of low-cost mutual funds, as well as more sophisticated products like futures and forex trading, are available through TD Ameritrade.
TD Ameritrade Drawbacks
Fractional shares. Once a specialized market, fractional shares trading is now available from mainstream firms like Fidelity and Schwab. You can construct a portfolio of stocks that might otherwise be prohibitively expensive by investing in fractional shares because they allow you to do so by the dollar amount rather than the share. However, TD Ameritrade still doesn’t have this feature, so investors with smaller funds to invest might want to go elsewhere.
Who Is TD Ameritrade Best For?
- Beginner investors
- Advanced traders
- Investors seeking top education/advice
- Fund investors
As one of the bigger online brokers in the U.S., TD Ameritrade provides a variety of platforms catered to users with various degrees of experience. The web-based and mobile app platforms are user-friendly and simple to use for both passive and active investors. Because of the thinkorswim platform’s vast screening features, charting tools, and advanced analytics, it’s probably the best option for casual and day traders. TD Ameritrade’s selection of trading platforms and overall features will amaze passive investors, active investors, casual traders, and day traders alike.
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Things You Need To Know About TD Ameritrade
- No account minimum requirement at TD Ameritrade
- At TD Ameritrade, there is no commission for trading stocks. However, there is a $6.95 cost if you want to trade over-the-counter securities (those not listed on major exchanges like the NYSE).
- By providing the full spectrum of investment options, including futures, Forex, and bitcoin futures trading for qualified clients, TD Ameritrade is a market leader in providing a wide selection range.
- You’ll have a selection of 3,700 no-transaction-fee mutual funds.
- With over 500 mutual funds on its platform with expense ratios of 0.50% or less and over 1,000 with investment minimums of $100 or less, TD Ameritrade also excels in providing low-cost products for beginner mutual fund investors.
- Although TD Ameritrade doesn’t provide direct access to cryptocurrencies, it does provide crypto-based products like Grayscale Bitcoin Trust on the over-the-counter market. Additionally, qualified TD Ameritrade clients can trade Bitcoin futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).
- One fee at TD Ameritrade worth mentioning is their full account transfer fee, which is $75 if you transfer all of your assets to another brokerage. However, there are no annual or inactivity fees, or costs for partial transfers.
- TD Ameritrade also provides a trading simulator. Surprisingly, not many online brokers provide paper trading accounts, making this a fairly uncommon offering. The desktop-based paperMoney virtual simulator from TD Ameritrade is designed for experienced and frequent traders. It gives access to a margin account and $100,000 in practice money.
- Charles Schwab acquired TD Ameritrade in October 2020. The integration of the two businesses is anticipated to take 18 to 36 months.
Usability
Because TD Ameritrade prioritizes the client experience, its platforms are fluid and simple to use. TD Ameritrade uses innovation to transform the individual client experience and centers the user in the design to maximize the personal experience. Based on the user’s specific interests, TD Ameritrade web, thinkorswim, and the mobile apps are all extremely customizable.
On any of the four platforms, logging into TD Ameritrade is simple (web, mobile, thinkorswim, or thinkorswim mobile). Both the web-based and standard mobile app platforms are simple to use, which is a benefit that is especially useful for new investors.
A fully configurable dashboard called the dock tool is a feature of the TD Ameritrade web platform. When the size of the screen permits, the dock tool appears and stays on the right side of the screen while you use the left part of the site. Users typically have a choice of 13 different modules to view. Account balances, bookmarks, and streaming content like watch lists, news and events, videos, Twitter trends, headlines from Yahoo Finance, and RSS feeds are just a few examples of modules. Users can change the module order and size once they have been added to the dock. To define information preferences, they can also filter the majority of the modules.
The user’s positions and account balance are displayed on one screen in the app, making it simple and quick to monitor on market developments. Users can also scroll down the dashboard to find news about the whole market as well as details about their individual positions.
The web and mobile platforms are simple to use for active investors who seek additional market information, such as earnings, dividends, analyst ratings, and forthcoming initial public offerings (IPOs). Investors only need to key in the relevant ticker to access news, ratings, charts, and fundamental data.
Bottom Line
One of the few brokers that does everything and does it well is TD Ameritrade. Clients receive an outstanding array of services for a broker with no commission on stock and ETF trades, including portfolio-building advice, investing courses, top-notch research, trading tools, and a large selection of no-transaction-fee mutual funds.
TD Ameritrade provides a broad selection of assets, tools, and instructional resources together with industry-standard pricing, security, and dependability. Although trading across platforms is generally easy, active investors and traders will choose the thinkorswim platform’s powerful tools and features. Nevertheless, TD Ameritrade’s variety of platform choices make trading and research more accessible for investors of all stripes and levels of expertise.
The upcoming merging of TD Ameritrade and Charles Schwab should preserve the finest aspects of both market leaders, bringing fractional shares and other features to the TD Ameritrade experience while maintaining the outstanding user-centered trading and education experience.
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