Interactive Brokers stock trading makes them one of the best US stock brokers

Is Interactive Brokers a good stock broker?

Yes, IBKR is an excellent stock broker, low costs, excellent market access and superb apps and platforms.

Pricing: Interactive Brokers are 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: 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.