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It has been a volatile ride for online investors this year. In the first five weeks of 2016, a typical stock portfolio filled with Standard & Poor’s 500 shares dropped by more than 10%. Happily, by last week, stocks had regained most of the losses, but there are no assurances that another dip isn’t right around the corner.

Given the market’s roller-coaster ride since last summer, it’s a wonder that investors’ biggest worry isn’t motion sickness. In an exclusive survey of Barron’s readers in preparation for our 21st annual ranking of the Best Online Brokers, the key worry among nearly 600 respondents was the security of personal data and assets, particularly as mobile trading gains and even devices like the Apple Watch offer entry to the markets. “My biggest concern with online trading is security. I do not use a mobile device to access brokerage accounts because I perceive that it is less secure,” noted one. Others said they were sufficiently concerned about their brokers’ security in the past year that they moved their accounts to another firm. This year’s surprising winner, Fidelity Investments, which scored well in this category, offers a robust protection guarantee to its customers.

Illo: Carl Wiens for Barron's

There is a bit of good—or maybe just less bad—news on security. The Identity Theft Resource Center identified 781 data breaches in 2015 affecting 169 million records. That was actually a tick less than the record 783 breaches logged in 2014. Only 9.1% of these incidents took place in the broad financial-services group that includes online brokers. A data breach occurs when an individual name plus a Social Security number, driver’s license number, or medical or financial record is revealed, either electronically or on paper.

Although the number of breaches may have peaked, they still occur far too frequently. Scottrade, E*Trade Financial (ticker: ETFC), Schwab Retirement Plan Services, and Fidelity all reported breaches in 2015.

As part of our review of tools and services available at leading online brokers, Barron’s started reviewing security a year ago. We’ve seen some improvement in efforts to keep the bad guys out, whether through stronger encryption or better staff training and customer education in how to avoid inadvertent data disclosure.

“We have increased our infrastructure staff and monitoring equipment, and we continuously educate ourselves on the latest techniques and methods to detect and prevent issues in a connected world that is evolving at an ever faster pace,” says Matt Wesche, a senior product manager at OptionsHouse, which also scored well in our ranking for security measures.

Sander Temme is a senior product manager at Thales e-Security, which recently won an industry award for the quality of its financial- and banking-security products. One of the keys to its success, he explains, is the number of layers of security in place. Thales’ security module performs cryptographic functions (the ciphering and deciphering of messages), with controls built in so that data can be decrypted only in a protected location that his customers choose.

AND WHAT ABOUT ONLINE BROKERS? Brokers use the tightest possible encryption schemes for the information passed between clients and their software and Websites, so hackers’ ability to monitor network traffic and identify unencrypted items has diminished. Most brokers use overlapping systems, as Temme recommends, so that a hacker would have to get through multiple levels of security in order to access customer data.

If what our readers are most nervous about is someone stealing their money, what they’re most excited about are all of the new ways in which they can manage their money using mobile devices. Only one of Barron’s top 16 online brokers this year doesn’t offer a mobile version. Platforms developed for very active traders and professionals still tend to focus on the desktop, but the rest of us increasingly place trades on phones and tablets. This past year saw expansion of mobile tools not only for placing trades, but also for researching complex options and monitoring portfolio performance.

Six brokers—including Charles Schwab (SCHW), E*Trade, Fidelity, Interactive Brokers Group (IBKR), Merrill Edge, and TD Ameritrade Holding (AMTD)—have even introduced apps for the Apple Watch. Typically, the smartwatch’s primary function is to let you know when an alert has been triggered, then to direct you to your iPhone either to place a trade or, alas, deal with a margin call.

The convenience of mobile use, however, in some ways conflicts with investor worries about security. Mobile devices are smaller, lighter, and much more likely to be lost or stolen than a desktop.

Then again, they actually offer some security advantages. Newer versions of the Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy have built-in fingerprint readers that speed the logon process—it’s the touch of an individual’s unique fingertip rather than typing a complex password that opens the app. According to Corporate Insight’s 2016 Mobile Finance research report, 44% of the financial firms they track now provide touch ID for logon. And you can ask the U.S. Justice Department about the iPhone operating system’s encryption scheme.

“Mobile-first” design is driving new products and tools, as does the ability to customize the entire brokerage experience. Barron’s online-broker evaluation emphasizes the ability to set personalized trading defaults, such as the number of shares and order type, and examines how well the broker’s site, program, or mobile app adapts to individual preferences. Can you save your favorite layout and have that follow you from your desktop to your tablet? These creature comforts are important to us.

Volatility and market stresses have tested the limits of quite a few brokers. Last August, as well as in mid-January, there were several trading days in which so many investors tried to log on that online-broker systems slowed or even stopped functioning. That led to investor frustration and missed opportunities as the markets abruptly and dramatically changed course. It’s rare for a broker to have the capacity to allow every customer to log on simultaneously to buy or sell. But a few report that they can handle that load: Interactive Brokers, Lightspeed Trading, OptionsHouse, SogoTrade, TradeStation, and TradingBlock.

NOW, TO THE RANKINGS. For 2016, Barron’s reviewed 16 firms, each of which supplied us with data and hands-on trading accounts. Charles Schwab decided to omit its optionsXpress unit from the survey since all of the relevant tools have been incorporated into its flagship brand. Just2Trade, under its new owner, WhoTrades, returned to the survey after a couple years off. The brokerage operation of Livevol, which we reviewed last year, has been acquired by Lightspeed Trading, and Capital One ShareBuilder chose to take a break from competition while it rebuilds its site. In what has become an annual rite, we reached out to Vanguard Group, but once again, it chose not to participate.

Click image to see Barron’s methodology for this year’s ranking.

To analyze 2016’s top brokers, we dove not just into their security, mobility, and social-media features but also into the depth of their investment tools and their trading capabilities. Our primary consideration in judging these 16 firms is how they work for our readers, who are high-net-worth active investors. Customization, especially of reports, is a particular focus, as is the ability to move smoothly from idea generation to trade ticket. We think it’s important for investors and traders to understand which of their strategies work—and which need a little more work.

Which brokers made it to the top this year? Three earned 4½ stars and nearly identical point totals, but we crown a new winner this year: Fidelity Investments. The winner for the previous four years, Interactive Brokers, finishes a very close second, with OptionsHouse third. A group of six brokers that offer terrific tools earned four stars: TD Ameritrade, TradeStation, Merrill Edge, TradeKing, Charles Schwab, and E*Trade. Each has a particular set of strengths.

Recognizing the breadth of these styles, Barron’s also identifies top online brokers in six categories—frequent trading, in-person service, international investing, long-term investing, services for novices, and options trading—to help you decide where you should open (or transfer) an account (see below). We also show the brokers that were at the extremes when we calculated the monthly cost of trading for infrequent traders, as well as for those who trade multiple times per day. You can read about our methodology at Barrons.com in “How We Ranked Our Online Brokers” and review the categories that informed our analysis in the tables “Barron’sOnline Broker Survey: How They Stack Up.” The latter is an exhaustive look at the tools and services each broker provides. Many of the data points added this year were inspired by questions from our readers. Thanks for helping us out.

Fidelity Investments (4½ stars) made it to the top this year due to the variety of trading and investing tools, and the quality of its trade execution. Customers can see a summary of the price improvements their trades have experienced for their account, with a display of the number of orders that were improved, as well as the total amount for the month to date, year to date, and the past 12 months. Each order that received price improvement for the previous six months can be listed and examined.

Ram Subramaniam, president of Fidelity Brokerage Services, estimates that at the end of 2015, customers received $10.44 in price improvement on a marketable limit order for 1,000 shares. Since the standard commission is $7.95 per stock order, the difference of $2.49 could pay for a cup of coffee to enjoy while you trade.

During the wildly volatile and heavy trading volume in August 2015 and January 2016, Fidelity.com suffered no downtime despite record numbers of trades and a huge spike in phone calls. “Many of our customers complimented Fidelity on its proactive approach to providing perspective during the August market volatility,” says Subramaniam. He notes that Fidelity Active Trader Pro invested heavily in technology and infrastructure during 2015, including a move to a new data center with state-of-the-art servers, nearly doubling its previous throughput levels.

Investing in the invisible back end makes the changes that Fidelity has introduced snap onto screens. In its online education center, the firm has made its content fully responsive to whatever device is being used. Its stock screener has evolved over the past year, and is visually engaging and easy to use. Rather than typing values into boxes, you can use slider bars to choose figures such as price or dividend yield. The exchange-traded-fund screener was based on the same framework and, like the stock screener, was designed with mobile devices in mind.

The stock-detail display has been updated to provide information as well as insight, including dividend analysis, earnings metrics, and social sentiment. The planning and guidance center has been redesigned and includes a Retirement Readiness score that may spur many investors into action.

For traders who qualify for Active Trader Pro, Fidelity’s downloadable trading platform, the recently launched Daily Dashboard, provides news and a heat map showing price changes for portfolio holdings. You’ll also find announcements of economic events, a morning briefing, and a list of coming Webinars. You can design a real-time alert based on technical data within ATP. One criticism: Customers only qualify for Active Trader Pro based on their level of trading. Very active traders also get access to Recognia’s technical analysis.

Options-trading functionality has been enhanced, and those who trade multi-leg options will be pleased that the commission structure has changed so that there is only one base commission charge per trade. Most brokers charge the base commission for each leg of a multi-leg options trade, which can add significantly to the cost.

Interactive Brokers earns the second spot, losing to Fidelity by a mere tenth of a point, but still meriting the same 4½ stars. Launched last year, the Investors’ Marketplace feature gives customers access to service providers (including advisors and hedge funds), research, technology, administration, and business development. The number of third-party providers seems to grow daily, and this feature makes it easy to find and compare services. To support the use of an advisor or trading service, you can partition your IB account and track the performance of each piece in real time using customizable portfolio-performance reports. You may want to trade a portion of your account actively, while putting another piece under management with one of the fund managers available in the Investors’ Marketplace section.

Click image to see how the brokers stack up in customer service.

IB continues to offer the widest access to international markets. There are also six commission-free international ETFs you can trade. You can become your own robo-advisor with the Portfolio Builder feature, which lets you select your holdings based on fundamental and technical data, as well as ratings from 11 research providers. You can back-test your strategy over four years to get a sense of how it will work.

One outstanding enhanced feature is IB’s Mutual Fund/ETF Replicator, which enables you to find a lower-cost alternative to a mutual fund with high management fees. Enter the symbol for a mutual fund and the amount you want to invest, and the Replicator will present you with lower-cost ETF possibilities. The performance analysis includes the differences in annual expenses. Other scanning tools on the platform let you easily find stocks, ETFs, bonds, options, and combinations of investments, while advanced options traders will want to use IB’s Probability Lab and Option Strategy Lab.

IB’s flagship downloadable platform, TWS Mosaic, has added “welcome tours” to introduce its many features. The Web platform has been updated, and its interface is the same across all devices, and can be translated into several different languages, including Chinese.

IB’s fees are very consistently low, and the firm does not internalize orders or sell its order flow. This transparency of pricing is something we’d like to see others emulate.

OptionsHouse finishes a close third this year, also winning 4½ stars. The updated trade ticket lets you know, in plain English, what you will pay or receive once the order is executed. You can also create an alert from a trade ticket, such as a profit target or stop loss. The new Trigger Alerts feature lets you set up an order based on a particular market move. You can, for instance, instruct it to buy 100 shares of Microsoft (MSFT) when Apple (AAPL) falls 2%. Once the trigger fires, you get an alert to send the order or ignore the message. This alert fires on all devices, including Apple Watch, though the firm warns you not to trade while driving.

You can attend a number of live Webinars, or view the archived ones on demand. Several advanced trading specialists hold “office hours,” letting you ask questions about your trading issues. OptionsHouse recently launched its dime buyback program to make it easy to close out a short options position. If an option price is $0.10 or less, you can close the position without having to pay a commission. Many traders wait for an option to expire worthless before opening a new position, but now they can get out without incurring a fee. Only a handful of brokers offer this feature (see the Costs table online in “How the Brokers Stack Up”).

OptionsHouse’s portfolio reporting is flexible and customizable, and can even be used to create new orders. You can view portfolio performance in a table or a chart, filtered by symbol, asset class, or tags you’ve created for each position. You can benchmark your customized portfolio report against any index, security, or combination of securities. For instance, if you’re looking at holdings in the energy sector, you can see how they fare against an energy ETF or index.

The brokerage is in the midst of shifting its mutual fund research from Lipper to Morningstar, and during the transition does not have a mutual fund screener. The stock, ETF, and options screeners are flexible and come up with actionable ideas. StrategySeek, one of the options-scanning tools, is actually patent protected.

Six online brokers earned four stars apiece in 2016. The diverse half dozen includes TD Ameritrade, TradeStation, Merrill Edge, TradeKing, Charles Schwab, and E*Trade.

TD Ameritrade emphasizes mobile, in which it scored very high in our ranking. The firm reports that about a third of its daily customer logins happen on phones, tablets, and watches. User support can get tricky with all the devices supported, so last year TD added a feature that makes it possible to chat with a representative directly on a mobile device. You can share your display with the representative, who can guide you to the right function. There’s also a “privacy mode” that can be set on any platform, including mobile, so that account values aren’t displayed, which is helpful if you’re trading during your commute on the train and have curious fellow passengers looking over your shoulder.

TD Ameritrade offers a huge variety of platforms, including the downloadable thinkorswim desktop. The array of possibilities approaches bewildering, and it’s impossible for us to examine every method of interacting with the technology. For customers who use a variety of the platforms, though, almost everything syncs up, from watchlists to order entry preferences. You’ll find more robust options, including research and trading tools, on the thinkorswim platform, and more long-term planning and goal-setting tools on the TD Ameritrade Website. A second Web platform, TradeArchitect, straddles the line between the standard Website and the deep set of tools found on thinkorswim. Speaking of thinkorswim, there is a major remodel in progress, designed to make it much more customizable and easier to navigate.

TD Ameritrade’s only real fault is that its standard commission structure makes it one of the most expensive brokers reviewed. The broker points out, however, that frequent traders can negotiate their own rates, which can bring the costs down. But we must base our calculations on the published rate structure, which results in its just missing out on 4½ stars.

TradeStation’s downloadable trading platform features a remarkable portfolio-analysis tool called the Portfolio Maestro, which offers real-time performance reporting that is extremely customizable. You can use it to find out what you’re trading that is profitable, and which strategies you should perhaps fine-tune – or simply avoid. TradeStation has expanded its TradingApp store, which offers both proprietary and third-party add-ons to the platform. Some are free and some require either a one-time fee or a monthly subscription; these apps include analytics, trading strategies, and additional analysis tools you can use to personalize your platform.

A sample app in the TradingApp store is the “Big Blocker,” which identifies large block trades that have hit the market. You can filter by a variety of metrics including the market value of the trade, and choose a list of symbols to track. Fills that appear to be part of block trades, typically placed by institutional customers such as mutual funds, then flow onto the list. Big Blocker gives you a feel for which stocks might be moving due to institutional activity. You can use that information to spark trading ideas. On the flip side, you can use one of the TradeStation trading algorithms to keep your large trades off the Big Blocker.

The mobile platforms and Web trading allow complex options screening and trading. Fourteen multileg strategies are built into mobile, or you can create your own. The alerting capabilities have been updated, including the ability to create an alert on a mobile app.

This is a powerful and extremely customizable platform intended for the frequent trader. If you don’t trade enough to have the $99 monthly platform fee waived, this might not be the broker for you.

Merrill Edge, with its parent Bank of America, is positioning itself as a one-stop financial shopping center. You’ll find financial advisors in most bank branches who can help open an account in a few minutes. There’s been a major push to make the Bank of America and Merrill Edge online experiences more compatible; you can accomplish most of your banking tasks from within Merrill Edge as of a recent release.

Customers with combined balances of $25,000 or more qualify for 30 free stock trades per calendar month; holding over $50,000 qualifies you for 100 free trades per month. Merrill executives say they don’t offer a list of free ETFs because it’s so easy to qualify for free trades. The freebies do not extend to options trades, however.

Merrill Edge features a long list of quality research content to its customers. There are 30 news providers available; you can select the ones you want to see under the news tab in the research center. The “Portfolio Analysis X-Ray” tool gives you an in-depth view of your portfolio performance, including diversification, sector selection, and geographical breakdown. Frequent traders can use MarketPro, which contains several new options tools including OptionsPlay. MarketPro also has integrated the Recognia technical analysis tools.

The platform and services offered by Merrill Edge are aimed at planning for life events, such as buying your first house, getting married, saving for retirement, and living in retirement. The research and education content can be customized by answering a few questions about your current life stage, all of which has been optimized for mobile viewing. The Merrill Edge “Roadmap” shows how you’re progressing toward your goals, and can aggregate external accounts if you have others tied to that goal.

TradeKing offers great value, especially for those who trade options spreads. The firm just celebrated its 10th anniversary, and has dedicated itself to taking its customers all the way through a trader’s life cycle, from novice to sophisticated. TradeKing offers two Web-based platforms, its flagship site at tradeking.com, and TradeKing Live, a customizable,streaming HTML5-based responsive platform that also performs well on mobile devices.

We’re watching TradeKing go beyond the third-party tools that it originally featured as it brings more technology in-house, which makes for a more tightly integrated customer experience. For options traders, a probability calculator and several other tools have been created. Their functionality has been expanded to take into account existing positions when calculating potential profit and loss. Upon launch, TradeKing Live features a dashboard, which can be personalized as desired. If your positions include a spread, you can quickly close it from the holdings page, or roll it to a future strike date from the options tools page. The tools section, which has been the focus of development, has expanded its charting offerings and added many new technical indicators.

TradeKing launched a professional platform, thanks to its acquisition of MB Trading last year. The platform enables you to trade futures as well as stocks and complex options using its extremely customizable functionality. The charting package in the Pro platform lets you know if you already have a position for the ticker symbol you’re studying, and it allows you to write your own technical indicators.

TradeKing Advisors, the firm’s robo-advisory service, has updated its goal-setting process so that the questions you’re asked during the setup phase vary depending on your goal. You can track your progress from either the Website or TradeKing Live. As it enters its pre-teen years, TradeKing shows signs that it is really growing up.

Charles Schwab, having folded in almost all of the tools and technology from its optionsXpress platform, chose to go it alone this year. Schwab has improved speeds for its mobile browser (it has observed about 20,000 downloads of apps per month). Using the mobile app, you can see market data along with some market movers and sector performance data prior to logging in. Watchlists and holdings are synchronized between all of Schwab’s platforms – mobile, Web, and StreetSmart Edge, the firm’s customizable platform for frequent traders.

Schwab representatives envision a customer moving from checking on the markets via the mobile app to generating trading ideas on StreetSmart Edge, to researching individual stocks on Schwab.com. I find it a little jarring to have certain features available only on StreetSmart Edge or on the Website, requiring the customer to jump back and forth from one to the other to use, say, a stock screener or the “Idea Hub” trade generator. The design of StreetSmart Edge is intended to reduce the number of mouse clicks between generating an idea and placing a trade.

All of the platforms, including mobile, feature the All-in-One Trade Ticket, which is among my favorite pieces of trading technology. You can also use the Walk Limit order type for almost every order, which lets you test the market at various prices between the bid and the ask, automatically adjusting the price over time until it executes.

Schwab’s robo-advisory service, Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, has been extremely popular, gathering close to $5.5 billion in assets since its launch just last year. Schwab offers education, tools, and services intended to take an investor through a lifetime. The company has a few hurdles ahead before optionsXpress is fully integrated into Schwab, including portfolio margining for Schwab customers: “When the integration is finally done, we want an optionsXpress customer to wake up some Monday morning to a Schwab experience, and we want them to be happy,” says Barry Metzger, senior vice president of Schwab and CEO of optionsXpress.

E*Trade has focused much of its attention on updating its downloadable Pro platform, which is aimed at active traders. There were significant upgrades to options tools, such as the Options Analyzer, which lets you explore a potential trade by dynamically editing a hypothetical scenario, such as expiry date, volatility, and other factors. The Strategy Optimizer displays options strategies that best fit your outlook, target price, and expiry date. Once you choose a strategy, a click of the trade button is all it takes to shoot it off to market. The updated Options Screener lets you look for stocks that fall into certain predefined categories, such as “Unusually High Put Volume,” which indicates a stock that is suffering a serious price drop. You can also create your own custom screen. The charting experience in Pro has been updated to include Ichimoku clouds and a calculation of the volume-weighted average price. The latter is a tool used by buy-side traders and hedge funds to ascertain price direction and overall volume.

Not all of E*Trade’s resources went to spiffing up services for hyperactive traders, though. It also released retirement planning tools across all of the firm’s platforms, including mobile and the Website. These tools pull data such as age and account balances from your account, and pick up whether you have an IRA or other retirement account with E*Trade. You can customize the widgets to reflect where you fall on the retirement timeline: starting to save, building your wealth, or living in retirement. There are calls to action on most pages, so you’ll always know where to go to take the next step.

Improving usability for the Website, Pro, and the mobile apps has been a driving force as E*Trade updates its technology. The new user orientation has been helping customers figure out which tools are available to them as it sets up a YouTube-style playlist after you answer a few questions about your experience and what you’d like to trade.

E*Trade got out of international trading last July. The firm built mutual fund trading into its mobile apps, though, after recognizing that it’s not just frequent traders who are using phones and tablets to analyze and plan trades.

The sole broker rating 3½ stars this year is Lightspeed Trading, which focuses on very active traders. Lightspeed offers a lot of personal service along with low commissions, which can be negotiated even lower based on activity. The firm considers itself a “platform-neutral execution venue,” meaning customers can choose from a number of downloadable programs, some from third parties, to access their trading engine. Among them are the firm’s own Lightspeed Trader and Sterling as well as RealTick. We looked at Lightspeed’s proprietary platform and its mobile apps.

Lightspeed’s Trader API allows clients to automate otherwise manual trading strategies by converting them into program- generated strategies. Through a Lightspeed partnership with TradeIdeas, users are able to build and back test any strategy and automate it through the Lightspeed API. The platform is quite stable – and executes very quickly.

Three stars were earned by Scottrade and Sogotrade.

Scottrade adjusted its business model during 2015, reorganizing to include banking services along with portfolio guidance. The venerable Scottrade Website is turning its focus to guidance, building tools for long-term investors rather than frequent traders. Several new screeners have been added, along with lists of ETFs and mutual funds, which change monthly to help clients choose. The new retirement tab on the Website is the first step in launching a comprehensive portal; at present, it’s a little thin.

The firm also reworked and relaunched its active trader offering, Scottrade Pro, which is powered by Interactive Brokers and includes advanced tools for options traders and active equity traders. Another Web-based platform, ScottradeElite, allows trading from charts and technical events via Recognia. Market depth data costs an additional $15 per month. It seems to us that having three such disparate platforms doesn’t help a client increase her trading acumen because she has to learn an entirely new interface with each step.

Sogotrade is working on updates to its Website to improve customer support and technology. The new site has not launched, however, so we’re basing this review on the existing site. The firm added free access to ValuEngine research reports, the SogoTrade Morning Call, and the SogoPlay application, which provides options trading ideas. The mobile platform for iOS devices, SogoApp, is nicely customizable and is based on a platform originally designed for professional traders. SogoApp feels more modern than the Website, but is quite different.

Through its clearing firm, Sogotrade’s customers can participate in a securities-lending program, which lets them loan their fully paid stock to traders who are selling the stock short. The customers earn interest during the period that the stock is loaned out. Sogotrade offers Chinese language Websites and customer service.

eOption and Firstrade merited 2½ stars, followed by the last two brokers in the survey, TradingBlock and Just2Trade, which earned 2 stars. All four brokers charge low fees, but there are holes in their offerings that won’t work for the average online investor.

eOption significantly updated its Website, and now features many more streaming tools, which is a step in the right direction. This is a deep-discount broker, and one that can save options traders in particular quite a bit in fees. The new design is very customizable and includes YouTube videos to show you how it all works. The order entry workflow is good – better than that of several brokers higher up in the rankings.

The portfolio analysis is very limited, but at these rates, you can afford to analyze elsewhere. You’ll also have to look elsewhere for research and trading ideas.

Firstrade launched an active trading platform, Firstrade Navigator, in February that features streaming data and the ability to chart technical indicators. As you click on a ticker symbol, a new tab is created so you can quickly flip from one stock to another. Navigator has some intriguing features and we look forward to its ongoing evolution.

Firstrade is also participating in a securities lending program, and has many China-based customers. The firm plans to focus more attention on its mobile platform development. It is also making a foray into robo-advisory; we expect to hear more about that very soon.

TradingBlock is planning to update its Website over the next year, and in the meantime has tools to help investment advisors manage multiple accounts. Two of the tools built into the Website, TradeBuilder and Portfolio Hedger, are quite useful. TradeBuilder ranks the top 40 options strategies generated based on an investor’s overall outlook. They are ordered by their potential profit (or loss) and probability of breaking even. Investors can then compare options strategies to alternatives such as buying the stock long or selling it short. The Portfolio Hedger scans for options strategies to protect existing equity positions. These strategies can be ranked by cost or by upside potential.

TradingBlock is a little weak on the creature comforts and portfolio analysis, and does not have a mobile offering.

Just2Trade has been relaunched and bears no resemblance to the previous platform. Customers who stuck with the site through some legal travails may have a rough time adapting to the new layout. The range of offerings is fairly limited – no mutual funds, fixed income, or complex option trading. Research is virtually non-existent outside of quotes. And the platform itself is clumsy – new windows at times seemed to open randomly when we were clicking on news headlines, for instance. Some of the wording on the site seemed clumsy as well.

On the plus side, it’s very cheap.

See “The Best Online Brokers of 2015”

E-mail:theresa@twcarey.com