Fidelity: Why It’s One of Our Favorite Brokers

Our take: Fidelity has very few downsides (and trust us, we’ve looked). It’s particularly good for new or retirement investors. Fidelity has low costs, a great app, tons of educational content, top-notch research tools and excellent customer support. Unless you're looking to trade futures, Fidelity will probably work well for you.

Fidelity

5.0

NerdWallet rating

5.0

NerdWallet rating

Learn more

on Fidelity's website

View details

commission per share 

$0per trade for online U.S. stocks and ETFs

Account minimum 

$0

per options contract 

$0.65

OVERVIEWMORE DETAILS

commission per share 

$0per trade for online U.S. stocks and ETFs

Account minimum 

$0

per options contract 

$0.65

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 four major cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana 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.

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 IRA

5.0

NerdWallet rating

5.0

NerdWallet rating

Learn more

on Fidelity's website

View details

Account minimum 

$0no account fees to open a Fidelity retail IRA

IRA Match 

None

Promotion 

Noneno promotion available at this time

OVERVIEWMORE DETAILS

Account minimum 

$0no account fees to open a Fidelity retail IRA

IRA Match 

None

Promotion 

Noneno promotion available at this time

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

No IRA match

Over the last few years some brokers have started offering an IRA match. If you contribute to an IRA, the broker will match up to a certain percentage (typically 1% to 3%). These matches can earn you $200 or more if you max out your IRA for the year. Unfortunately, Fidelity is not one of the brokers who offers a 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.

Here's a look at Robinhood, plus other top-scoring brokers that match IRA contributions:

Webull	Robinhood	SoFi Active Investing
Learn moreon Webull's website	Learn moreon Robinhood's website	Learn moreon SoFi Invest®'s website
IRA Match1% on contributions (3.5% for Webull Premium subscribers)	IRA Match1% on contributions (3% for Robinhood Gold members)	IRA Match1% on contributions and 401(k) rollovers

» See all the brokers with the best IRA matches

There are cheaper robo-advisor services

If you want your money managed for you through a robo-advisor, Fidelity has one: Fidelity Go. It charges 0.25% of your assets under management, though amounts below $25,000 are free.

If you have more than $25,000, I’d go with Charles Schwab’s Intelligent Portfolios instead. Why? Because it’s free no matter how high your account balance is. Vanguard Digital Advisor is another low-cost alternative:

Fidelity Go®	Vanguard Digital Advisor	Schwab Intelligent Portfolios®
Learn moreon Fidelity's website AD Paid non-advisory client promotion	Learn moreon Vanguard's website AD Paid non-client promotion	Read reviewon NerdWallet Unpaid non-client promotion
Fees0% - 0.35%no advisory fees for balances under $25k	Fees0.15%per year (approximately)	Fees0%management fee

» See our full list of the best robo-advisors

Options contract fee

Some brokers have moved to completely free options trading, but Fidelity still charges $0.65 per contract. That's on the high side among brokers we review. For free options, consider Robinhood, Public or SoFi.

Public	Robinhood	SoFi Active Investing
Learn moreon Public's website	Learn moreon Robinhood's website	Learn moreon SoFi Invest®'s website
Options contract fee$0	Options contract fee$0	Options contract fee$0

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.

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