How To Find The Best Brokerage Accounts

Accountancy Resources

How To Find The Best Brokerage Accounts



Investing Author: Admin

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Finding the best brokerage account for you is very important as you want to find the provider whose fee structures and support will best meet your needs in managing your investments.  Various service providers offer different services targeted at different types of investors, so making sure that you leverage the provider best suited to you is important.

What Kind of Investor Are You?

There are several things that you should consider before you begin looking into the various service providers that are available.

  • What do you want to trade?  Are you looking to only trade stocks?  Do you want to trade forex and commodities, options, and futures?  All of the above? Different brokers cater to different markets and customers, knowing what you want to trade will help you find the best one for you.
  • What kind of investor are you?  Are you an active investor who will make many trades a day?  Are you a beginner who will need some assistance?  This will largely drive what additional features and attributes you need from a broker.
  • What’s the minimum balance that you are going to maintain in the account?  Many providers tier their service fees based on how much you keep with them so finding the right tier at the right provider is important.

Looking at Your Options

Now that you have an idea of what kind of investor you are and what you want to be doing with your brokerage account you can begin shopping for your best provider.  The first thing you are going to want to do is to find out what your monthly costs are going to be.  Based on the information you have from answering the questions above you can now look at the various providers to see what your costs will be based on your minimum balance, the number of trades a month, and what form of trading you want to do.

There are some great tools online for helping you find the best brokerage account as you can enter the information from the questions above to see what your estimated costs will be for many different providers.

These include:

  • http://www.investorguide.com/article/online-broker-comparison-guide/
  • http://brokerage-accounts.findthebest.com/
  • https://www.mint.com/brokerages/
  • http://www.nerdwallet.com/investing/best-online-broker

Extra Services

Many of the different service providers will provide you with extra services and features in addition to your brokerage account.  These can include broker-assisted trades, apps for mobile access, debit cards, and 24/7 service.  If you’re just using the account for basic trading then you can ignore these features and not let them factor into your decision making.

One feature that is often provided that many investors do like is the different research tools offered by many brokers.  Looking at the options you need to consider what tools you are actually going to use.  Do you need all the bells and whistles or do you just need a platform for trading?  Every extra that a broker provides comes at a cost so finding the broker that meets all your needs and avoiding additional costs is something you want to aim for.

After considering all of the above you’ll be ready to make an informed decision as to which broker will best meet your needs. Good luck!


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