Fidelity has a well-rounded approach to your financial well-being

10-second breakdown:

Excellent features and tools to balance your nest-egg or retirement portfolio for the long-haul. You’ll also enjoy some of the best customer service of any financial institution, let alone stock brokerage.

The good:

Fidelity is world-renowned for their financial resources. Retirement, stocks, banking, education, and customer service are all huge points to their holistic view on your financial health. If you want a great place to keep all the eggs in your various baskets, there may not be a better place.

Despite ALL of the cool things you can do with this broker/financial giant, there is no account minimum to get thing rolling which is as refreshing as it is exciting.

Another great thing about this brokerage is their availability. You literally have access in almost every way. There are several physical locations all over the place, phone and email support are both available, and you can even reach out to them via their social media platforms and expect a response.

The bad:

The stock buying platform isn’t the fastest and there isn’t a way to do “quick” trades (could be a deal-breaker for day traders).

The software does have some great features, but finding them can be cumbersome on the less-than-intuitive interface.

How it works:

One of the best known financial names in the world has a stock trading platform. Fidelity can be one of the best tools for individuals and couples who are putting away and investing for their retirement. Or, you just want a trusted name (with loads of financial instruments) to hold on your your portfolio.

Opening your account will be a somewhat standard procedure and you’ll need all of the expected documents/data to get started (e.g. social or ITIN amongst other things). There is no account minimum for stock accounts which is a feature that is nice for such a well-known company. After your account is open, you’ll be able to log in and get to know your dashboard a bit.

While it sounds like this platform isn’t built for those who are on the active side, you shouldn’t jump to any conclusions too quickly. There are several pros for those investors who made regular trades. For starters, the research that you can accomplish is stellar. Even from the initial pulling up of a stock, you’ll notice the difference from your typical basic stuff and a chart. That intel is there, but so if a rating of how solid Fidelity thinks that equity may be. If you don’t necessarily trust that, maybe you could use the 12 different third party research house (MorningStar, etc.) to get a handle on your strategy.

If you’re more interested in choosing equities based on preset parameters, that’s ok. You can choose the metrics that you believe make up a winning asset and plug them in to a search style engine. The algorithm will put up equities that meet those criteria for a faster way to find potential investments (a pretty cool feature to be honest).

ETF’s aren’t left out either with third-party research and a screener for those as well. Not to mention that Fidelity offers 85 ETF’s at no-commission. It’s not as many as some, but more than others.

The research area is 100% responsive and web-based, which means that you can go full-tilt on your portfolio from any device with a decent connection (either WiFi or mobile). Whether you’re on a desktop/laptop or a mobile device it works the same. You pull up the stock/ETF/options data and there are a number of tabs and widgets to help you dive deeper into the data and really find out if it’s worth your investment.

Side Note: The company also has a mobile app that is turning some heads with it’s attractive design and functional capabilities.

To fully disclose what you may find, there are some negatives to this overall awesome company. For instance, it has had an upgrade within the past few years (which is a good thing). But some of the old features are still in play and the merger between the old navigation and the new hasn’t went over as well as users would hope. It’s not unusable by any means, but may take some time to get used to. It’s getting better and hopefully the kinks will be worked out soon.

If you are ever at a crossroads and need some help, the customer support from Fidelity is possibly the best of any other online stock platform on the market. The company is committed to making sure their clients and users are happy. You can call them, visit a local office, or send them a message on a major social network.

As far as the actual ordering process, it’s slower than most other platforms. In the fast-paced world of day trading, time can literally be money. Most other platforms have a quick trade feature, or a box that allows for trades on every page upon login. Fidelity doesn’t. Without the ability to “pull the trigger” quickly, most daily buyers and sellers as well as options traders will probably need something a bit more conducive to your style.

To gain access to their “advanced” trading program, you’ll have to maintain 36 trades in a given year. The platform is called “Active Trader Pro”. The basic research is really good so if you can’t meet this requirement, it may not be a huge deal. Active traders won’t have a problem reaching this number and the extras are definitely worth a look. You’ll get things like advanced charting and options data, but the research capabilities aren’t much improved over the standard.

If you are looking to handle more than your stocks, but still want a decently powerful research center and stock trading platform—take a long, hard look at Fidelity. If you love to trade everyday and your income depends on the speed at which you can buy stocks through the trading times, there are faster options with the same level of tools offered here.

For complete rankings of all online trading platforms, go here.

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