The best investing app for beginners is usually one that makes opening an account easy, keeps costs low, and provides simple tools to buy your first investments. In the US, investing apps like Interactive Brokers are popular because of its clean design and simple trading experience, and ideal if you want more education, research and long-term investing tools from day one.
We currently rate Interactive Brokers as the best stockbroker in America based on our pricing, market access, margin and customer reviews matrix. We’ve compared and tested the best major American stock brokers that offer online stock trading and investing as well as other peripheral products such as ETFs (exchange-traded funds), options and futures.
Description: Amazing technology, and always first to market with innovative trading tools. Interactive Brokers lets you trade stock on 90+ international exchanges, with $0 commission and some of the lowest financing rates in the industry.
Yes, IBKR is an excellent US stock broker, low costs, excellent market access and superb apps and platforms.
Pricing:Â Interactive Brokers is very cheap for trading stocks, especially in the IBKR Lite account, where commissions are $0 on US-listed stocks and fractional stocks. For more advanced traders, IBKR Pro commissions are USD 0.0005 to USD 0.0035 per share, but you get significant price improvements from IB SmartRouting.
If you are trading stocks on margin, Interactive Brokers have some of the lowest margin loan financing rates in the industry from USD 4.83% to USD 5.83%.
You can also actually get IBKR to pay you by letting them borrow your fully paid up stocks and letting them lend them out to short sellers, through their stock yield enhancement program.
Market Access: IBKR probably has the best market access of all the stock brokers we compare. You can trade a huge range of international stocks and IBKR has local access to over 90 stock exchanges. There are very few stocks you cannot trade on IBKR.
Apps & Platforms: Interactive Brokers’ stock trading apps and platforms are seriously good. When I traded on the desktop workstation platform, I was able to pair trade two stocks against each other.
IBKR is one of the few platforms that allows you to do this. Probably because when I interviewed IBKR founder Thomas Peterffy before testing the platforms, he told me that he thinks the most successful stock traders are ones that trade one company against another.
Customer Service:Â Because Interactive Brokers is one of the largest stock brokers in the world, customer service is largely automated and they were even using automated chatbots before the AI revolution took over.
This is a good example of how they are at the forefront of stock trading technology. However, it can be a bit of a pain trying to get through to someone on the phone if you are not a large customer with a personal stock broker.
Research & Analysis: You get lots of research and analysis from Interactive Brokers, including the IBKR Campus, for beginners to improve their stock trading. For longer-term investors, there is fundamental data on 30,000 companies and over 5,000 analyst ratings to give you an indication of whether a stock is a buy or a sell.
Yes, it is possible to make $1,000 per month from using an investing app (the equivilent of generating $12,000 per year in income). However, the amount of money you need depends on the return you earn. It’s also really important to understand that when investing there is no guarenee that you will be profitbale, as investments can go up as well as down.
For example, a portfolio earning around 6% per year would need roughly $200,000 invested to generate that level of income.
Investors typically aim for this through dividend-paying stocks, income-focused ETFs, real estate investment trusts (REITs), or a diversified stock market portfolio. The key point is that consistent investing over time usually comes first, and income tends to follow once a sizeable portfolio has been built.
Can I invest $100 and make money?
Yes, you can absolutely start investing with $100, espeically with the rise in popularity of low cost and fractional stock investing apps like Interactive Brokers.
IBKR’s US investing app offer fractional shares, meaning you can buy small pieces of expensive stocks or invest in diversified ETFs with a small amount of money. While $100 alone won’t grow into a fortune overnight, it can grow significantly over time if you continue investing regularly. The real power comes from consistency and compounding, where your returns begin to generate their own returns over many years.