Fidelity Investments

Fidelity's headline numbers match the rest of the US market — USD 0 on online US stock and ETF orders, USD 0.65 per options contract, no account minimum, no maintenance fee, no inactivity fee. The difference is in the second tier of charges, and it consistently runs in the client's favour.

What Fidelity does not charge for, where competitors do:

• Options exercise and assignment: USD 0. Most brokers bill USD 15–25 for this. If you write covered calls regularly, this line alone is worth real money.
• Outgoing account transfer (ACATS): USD 0. Robinhood charges USD 100 for the same thing.
• Domestic wire transfer: USD 0. Schwab and Robinhood both charge USD 25.
• Buy-to-close options at USD 0.65 or less: free.

On funds, Fidelity's own mutual funds trade free and the FZROX-family index funds carry a 0.00% expense ratio — genuinely unmatched. Third-party no-transaction-fee funds are free to buy but incur a USD 49.95 short-term redemption fee if sold inside 60 days; transaction-fee funds cost USD 49.95 to buy and nothing to sell.

The expensive corners are international. A non-DTC-eligible foreign stock trade costs USD 50, foreign dividends and reorganisations cost 1% of principal, and if you settle an international trade in US dollars the FX markup starts at 100 basis points below USD 100,000, tapering to 20 bps above USD 1 million. Settling in local currency avoids the linked currency conversion, and its markup, on each trade. It is not free, though: if you buy the local currency with US dollars in your account, Fidelity says 'a currency exchange fee would still apply' to that initial exchange. For regular trading in one market, converting once and then settling in local currency 'may allow you to potentially reduce your overall trading costs', in Fidelity's words. Foreign currency wired in kind from another bank via SWIFT carries no Fidelity fee, though other financial institutions involved may charge.

Brokerage services are provided by Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC (FBS), registered with the SEC as a broker-dealer under SEC File No. 8-23292, registered with the MSRB, and a member of FINRA (CRD 7784) and SIPC. Custody and clearing sit with an affiliate, National Financial Services LLC (NFS), also a registered broker-dealer and a member of the NYSE and SIPC. Self-clearing matters more than it sounds: your securities are not sitting at a third-party clearer whose balance sheet you cannot see.

Securities accounts carry SIPC protection of up to USD 500,000 per customer, of which a maximum of USD 250,000 may be cash. This covers broker failure and the loss of custodied securities — not investment losses. Fidelity states that it holds excess-of-SIPC cover from private insurers; we could not confirm the current limits from a primary source and have therefore recorded no figure.

Cash swept through the FDIC-Insured Deposit Sweep is protected at USD 250,000 per depositor per program bank. Because the programme spreads balances across multiple banks, aggregate cover for one client can be several times that. Note that this is bank cover on swept cash, not SIPC cover on securities.

The one structural caveat is ownership. Fidelity is the primary business of FMR LLC, a privately held company controlled by the Johnson family and founded in 1946. It does not file public quarterly accounts the way Schwab does. Broker-dealer regulatory filings are public, and the firm publishes scale figures — USD 17.9 trillion in assets under administration as of Q1 2026 — but you cannot read a 10-Q. That is a transparency difference, not a solvency judgement.

Fidelity runs three surfaces, and the priority order is clear from the design of each.

Fidelity.com is the flagship, and it is built research-first. A stock page leads with the Equity Summary Score, analyst PDFs and fundamentals, with order entry alongside rather than in front. That is the correct emphasis for the audience, but it means the site can feel dense compared with a trading-led competitor.

Fidelity Trader+ — the platform previously sold as Active Trader Pro — is the downloadable desktop client. It brings pre-built market, technical and options filters, keyboard-driven order entry, multi-leg option tickets and streaming Level II data. It is a capable professional tool and is free with the account. It is not thinkorswim: chart drawing tools are noticeably weaker, and there is no backtesting engine and no strategy scripting language.

The mobile app is the quiet standout. It is consistently among the highest-rated US brokerage apps, carries an Apple Watch companion, and — unusually — does not strip out functionality relative to the web. Fractional trading, research reports and cash management all work properly on the phone.

The most important omission across all three: there is no paper trading. You cannot rehearse an options strategy or test an order type without live money. For a broker that markets itself on education, that is a strange gap, and it is the single clearest reason an aspiring options trader would keep a Schwab account alongside.

Fidelity's shelf is deep in the traditional investment classes and empty in the leveraged ones.

Equities and funds: every US-listed stock and ETF, fractional shares from USD 1 across a broad universe rather than just index constituents, and one of the largest mutual fund platforms in the world — including the four zero-expense-ratio Fidelity index funds, which have no direct equivalent anywhere else.

Fixed income: individual Treasuries, corporates, municipals, agencies and brokered CDs, with new issues and Treasuries commission-free and secondary-market bonds at USD 1 each. The fixed income research includes a tax-equivalent yield calculator, which tells you who this desk is built for.

Options: full equity and index options, with the assignment and exercise fee at zero.

International: 25 markets — Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK — with settlement in 16 currencies. That is a wider footprint than Schwab's twelve.

Crypto: Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin only, via Fidelity Digital Assets, with a spread of up to 1% and no SIPC protection.

Not available: futures, futures options, retail forex, CFDs and spread betting. If your strategy needs any of those, this is the wrong account.

For a US resident the process takes roughly ten minutes online — identity details, Social Security number, employment, a short suitability questionnaire — and there is no minimum deposit. Once a bank account is linked, most new clients can trade the same day, because Fidelity extends provisional trading availability on an electronic funds transfer before it fully clears. Options and margin are separate approvals layered on top.

Funding runs on electronic funds transfer, wire and cheque. Both are free, including the domestic wire, which is unusual. Withdrawals mirror the same rails: EFT out is free and takes one to three business days, wires arrive the same day at no charge. There is no card funding and no e-wallet support.

The hard constraint is residency. Fidelity's published policy is that it does not open accounts for new customers residing outside the United States, and it restricts services for existing customers who later move abroad — a mutual fund purchase restriction has applied to non-resident addresses since 2014. In practice that means new purchases of funds may be blocked, and in some cases clients are asked to move assets elsewhere. Americans planning to move abroad should sort out their brokerage arrangements before they change their address of record, not after.

Note also that the sister company Fidelity International (FIL) is a legally separate business serving the UK and other markets. It is not the entity described in this profile and its pricing is entirely different.

This is the category Fidelity wins outright, and it is not close.

Research. A single US stock quote page carries around seven third-party analyst PDFs — Argus, Zacks, CFRA, S&P Global and others — plus Fidelity's proprietary Equity Summary Score, which consolidates independent analyst opinion into one accuracy-weighted number rather than a simple average. The economic calendar is institutional-grade and annotated with plain-language notes on why each print matters. Fixed income research includes screening across the full bond universe and a tax-equivalent yield calculator. Screeners cover stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, options and fixed income, and none of it sits behind a subscription or an activity requirement.

Education. The Learning Center runs from account basics to multi-leg options mechanics, in written, video and webinar form, and the material is written rather than filmed-and-forgotten. Fidelity's retirement and tax planning content in particular is the reference point in the US market, which reflects the firm's origins as a fund manager and workplace-plan administrator rather than a trading venue.

The honest limitation: education without a simulator only gets you so far. There is no paper-trading environment, so the step between reading about an iron condor and placing one is taken with real money. Schwab pairs comparable material with paperMoney; Fidelity does not.

Support is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with hours varying slightly by contact method. Channels are phone, secure email, live chat and physical Investor Center branches, with service available in English, Spanish and Chinese. Published broker tests consistently rate Fidelity at or near the top for response time and for whether the answer you get is actually correct — the second measure matters more and is where cheaper brokers fall down.

The branch network is a genuine differentiator against app-first competitors. For the events that break a self-service model — an estate transfer, a trust account, a disputed corporate action, a rollover requiring a medallion signature guarantee — being able to sit down with a representative is worth more than any feature comparison suggests.

Two things to set expectations on. First, Fidelity is a very large organisation and the first line of phone support is generalist; complex options, international settlement or crypto questions often require an escalation to a specialist desk, which adds a hold. Second, like every incumbent US financial firm, Fidelity's public review-site scores are far harsher than its expert-test scores, dominated by account-restriction and transfer complaints. Expert testers rate it at or near five stars; complaint-led platforms do not. The truth is that routine service is excellent and edge cases are slow.