I review brokers for SS: Here’s why Fidelity is one of our favorites

It’s January, a time we’ve arbitrarily decided is the month we get our lives together. And if investing is part of that equation for you, that’s amazing.

But sometimes the path to investing is laden with unnecessary stressors: Where should you open an account? This one has low fees, but that one offers cheaper options trading. (What even is options trading?)

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. Let me make it easy for you so you can move on to signing up for pilates or learning to bullet journal.

Every year us SS 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. So if you’re resolved to actually start investing this year, I’ll tell you the same thing I tell my friends: Fidelity is a good fit for many long-term investors.

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.

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 to work with an advisor through Fidelity).

Fidelity offers a long list of investment types: stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, options, bonds and fixed income, precious metals and crypto. 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 that’s hard to beat: 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.

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 apps affiliated with legacy brokers. Some of the investment platforms have very 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.

Strong educational resources: The app features timely articles, digestible videos and guides on topics such as crypto and fighting inflation through your investments. While Fidelity is great for long-term, passive investors, if you wanted to dabble in more advanced trading, the functionality is there, but the app isn’t confusing or cluttered like some other more advanced trading apps. Plus, there are tons of educational resources to help learn about those advanced strategies.

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.

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.

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.

And finally, 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?