Fidelity: Why It’s One of Our Favorite Brokers

When you’re looking for a broker to start investing, don't let the number of choices slow you down. With investing, time is money: The longer you're invested, the more your money grows. So I'll try to save you some time and tell you the same thing I tell my friends: Fidelity is likely a really good fit for many beginner and long-term investors.

Every year us NerdWallet writers cozy up with a giant spreadsheet and compare dozens of investing platforms. We look at everything from fees and investment minimums to educational resources and customer service hours. We download the apps and test out buying investments to see how easy or difficult it is. We revisit our list of products often and we stop reviewing platforms if their offering gets worse over time. Plus, as writers, we have zero incentive to recommend certain brokerages over others. Our picks are truly about what we think is best for our readers, and we mean it when we say Fidelity is hard to beat.

Here are some quick facts about Fidelity.

Fidelity at a glance

Fidelity has pretty much everything

If you’re looking for an investment account, whether that’s a standard, taxable brokerage account or a Roth or traditional IRA, Fidelity may be the answer. Here’s why.

You can bundle accounts

For the nearly 25 million people who already have a Fidelity 401(k), adding a brokerage account or IRA would be a simple and convenient next step. You’ll be able to stay organized, see all of your investments in one place and easily view your overall net worth. You’ll also be able to see the investments that comprise each account so you can avoid overexposure to any one investment. Plus, if you choose to work with a Fidelity advisor, they’ll be able to easily see and manage all of your accounts (though there is a fee ranging from 0.50% to 1.50% and a $500,000 minimum to work with an advisor through Fidelity).

Lots of investment types and free index funds

Fidelity offers a long list of investment types: stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, options, bonds and fixed income, precious metals and three cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin. Most other brokers don’t offer quite as big of a range.

But for long-term retirement investors who just want to set it and forget it, Fidelity has something very rare: index funds with no expense ratios (a fee you almost always have to pay on funds elsewhere). According to data from Morningstar, the average expense ratio for both exchange-traded funds and mutual funds was 0.34% as of 2024. Sure, that may not sound like a lot, but those fees can really add up. For instance, if you started with a $10,000 investment and added $5,000 annually for 30 years, you’d end up paying nearly $31,000 in expense ratio fees. In contrast, with a $0 fee fund you’d pay nothing.

» See how fees affect your investment with our mutual fund fee calculator

The app is surprisingly great for a legacy broker

One of Fidelity’s strongest features is its app. In fact, Fidelity won our award for the Best App for Investing this year. A lot of the apps we review are clunky and hard to navigate, especially the ones affiliated with legacy brokers. Some of the investment platforms have easy to use apps but lack the functionality, variety of investment accounts and types of investments that Fidelity offers. Fidelity’s app is super easy to use and you can do just about everything on mobile that you can on desktop. The app really excels in the following areas:

Retirement functionality: You can create retirement goals with an advanced calculator, and you can even incorporate a planning partner — a functionality I haven’t seen on many other apps.

Incorporated trading platform: Fidelity also has a more advanced trading platform called Fidelity Trader+. The platform is available through the app but also on a downloadable desktop version that includes intuitive shortcuts, a pre-built market, technical and options filters, advanced options tools and a multi-trade ticket that can store orders for later and place up to 50 orders at a time. Fidelity users can also trade over-the-counter securities and access IPOs.

There’s a big selection of account types

Fidelity also has lots of different types of investment accounts whereas other brokers sometimes only offer a few. The variety of accounts Fidelity gives you access to, on top of the platform’s overall excellence, can make a big difference when it comes to investing for particular goals. In addition to the standard taxable brokerage accounts and IRAs, you can also open the following types of accounts with Fidelity:

529 college savings plan: A 529 plan lets you invest for your child’s college education or other qualified, education-related expenses. Your investments grow tax-free, and withdrawals are tax-free too. You can use the money in a 529 plan for tuition, books, tutoring, exam fees, educational therapies for students with disabilities and continuing education.

Variety of self-employed retirement plans: If you’re self-employed, you unfortunately don’t get the benefit of an employer-sponsored retirement plan such as a 401(k). Fidelity offers SEP and SIMPLE IRAs and solo 401(k)s to help self-employed people and business owners put money away for retirement.

Health savings account: A health savings account is an investment account used to save for medical costs. HSAs have a triple tax advantage: Contributions are tax-free, the investment growth is tax-free and your withdrawals are tax-free.

Youth investing accounts: Fidelity offers several types of investing accounts for kids, including UGMA and UTMA accounts where you can invest on a child’s behalf, Roth IRAs for kids, and Fidelity Youth Accounts, which allow kids ages 13 to 17 start investing with parental supervision.

Fidelity has educational resources for all levels of investors

Fidelity's educational resources and research options are some of the strongest among the brokers we review. Fidelity features timely articles, digestible videos and guides on topics such as crypto and fighting inflation right in the app. While Fidelity is great for long-term, passive investors, if you want to dabble in more advanced trading strategies, you can learn how. The app allows you to save your favorite content from its robust library of articles so you can find it easily. There are also several newsletters of substance, including ones on crypto, women in finance and how the news relates to your financial life.

Reviewing Fidelity's IRAs

Fidelity offers both traditional and Roth IRAs, as well as several types of IRAs geared toward self-employed people. IRAs are retirement savings accounts you open on your own, independent of any retirement plan that may be offered through your employer. IRAs have significant tax advantages, and experts recommend using them when saving for retirement. You can have an IRA in addition to a standard brokerage account that you use to invest for non-retirement goals or trade stocks. Unlike other brokers, Fidelity also offers access to crypto through IRAs.

Fidelity's IRAs bring everything to the table that Fidelity's standard brokerage accounts offer: Low fees, excellent educational resources, great customer service and lots of investable assets. IRA investors in particular may be most interested in gaining access to Fidelity's retirement tools and calculators. One thing that makes Fidelity's IRAs stand out? They offer IRAs for kids and small business retirement plans. Not every broker offers these specialty IRAs.

Where Fidelity brokerage accounts fall short

Why Fidelity may not be for you

For the few investors who might be looking for something different than what Fidelity offers, such as free automated investment management or an IRA match, there are some great options.

You want a free robo-service

If you want your money managed for you through a robo-advisor, Fidelity does offer one, but I’d go with Charles Schwab’s Intelligent Portfolios instead. Why? Because it’s free. Most robo-advisors charge a fee of around 0.25% of your assets under management, meaning if they’re managing $10,000 for you, they’ll charge you $25 per year. If you have $100,000 managed, you’ll have to pay $250 per year.

» See our full list of the best robo-advisors

You want an IRA match

if you’re looking for either a super easy-to-use trading platform or an IRA match (or both!) Robinhood may be best for you. Robinhood’s platform is excellent (though we do find the platform nudging users toward prediction markets to be slightly problematic) and it offers a 3% IRA match for Robinhood Gold members. If you max out an IRA in 2026, you’ll earn a $225 match. Minus the $50 annual Robinhood Gold fee, you’re still earning $175 just for contributing to your retirement account. Who doesn’t like free money?

» See all the brokers with the best IRA matches

The bottom line

Fidelity doesn’t have many downsides: The app is great, it’s a legacy broker, it offers tons of investments and has low costs. Plus, for the many people who already have a 401(k) through Fidelity, sticking with the same broker lets you see all of your accounts in one spot. All in all, there’s not much to not like about Fidelity.