044 - Top 6 Brokerages For Individual Investors To Unlock Financial Freedom

It can be hard to decide which brokerage company to go with when there's so many choices. And when you're new to investing, you may not realize which features are important and which ones aren't. 

This episode breaks down the different things to look for in your brokerage company and what attributes you may need to consider or rule out contenders based on your needs. 

For us, research, tools, access to different investments and easy site navigation are the most impoartant things. But we do cover several others like which brokerages have a low cost of entry if you have very little money to invest. 

Our to 6 brokerage companies:

1. Charles Schwab (TD Ameritrade is merging into them) - best brokerage for tools and research. Also has great robo advising and checking/debit services.
2. Sofi - best one-stop shop for all things finance.
3. Fidelity - best big brokerage with a great app. They have great robo advisory services and the most options for fractional shares.
4. E-Trade - best brokerage for those who favor bonds and want access to leading expert articles about the markets.
5. Robinhood - best small brokerage app. 
6. Vanguard - best brokerage for those who favor index funds.

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**DISCLAIMER**
Ticker metrics change as markets and companies change, so always do your own research. The content in this podcast is based on personal experience and is for educational purposes, not financial advice. See full disclaimer here.

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Transcript

Welcome to Roaming Returns, a podcast about generating a passive income through investing, so that you don't have to wait till retirement to live your passions. If you're not sure which brokerage company to invest your money with, today's episode is for you. Find out which metrics are consistently part of the best brokerages across the board, and which ones are actually important for our investing strategy.
And be sure to tune in to the end, where we rank the top six contenders. Let's get started. Okay.
Deep breath. I'm going to be impartial. I'm going to be impartial.
I'm going to be impartial and go. You're such a dork. All right, guys, we are back for the probably long-awaited brokerage account episode.
I've actually got this question quite a few times from pretty much everybody I talk to on a personal face-to-face basis. They're like, well, what brokerage account would you open up? And I'm like, that's the question you have? But it seems to be very common. It is common.
And there are tons and tons of options. Like back when we first started, there weren't that many. And man, I remember TD Ameritrade having $9.95 per trade.
And that was back when I was trying to day trade and stuff. And like you had to factor all that in. Well, they used to have ThinkorSwim too, which was really good.
ThinkorSwim was really good if you were into the chart metrics stuff. Chart analysis, the technical analysis. Yeah, which I got super nerdy.
The black screen made me happy. It was kind of like a DOS screen with like colors on it. I know.
I liked it. I liked it. Oh my god, DOS.
If you guys are too young to remember, DOS is cool. We had this game on our old super ridiculous computer in the basement that had these monkeys whipping like boomerangs or bananas or something at buildings. And you could like whack through the buildings.
You had to put like an arc and a speed in. And it was like you tried to kill the monkey on the other side. Did you ever play that game? No.
I have no idea what it's even called. I had a cool childhood. And I'm younger than you are.
How did you not play this? Because I had like Atari and Commodore and all that shit. Really, really old stuff. They know what a Commodore is.
All right. So... This was such a pain in the ass to research, just BT dubs. Because we wanted to have good information and because we generally have noticed that our criteria and metrics and our preferences are usually the opposite of what everybody else wants.
So what Tim ended up doing was he found an actual survey that was done by... Investor Business Daily conducts a survey every year about what brokerage people, like their experiences in brokerage and they rank them based on like, I don't know, 1200 or 2200 or whatever. I forget the exact number of people they survey for. But I like what they did.
What they did was they essentially took five different things at a time and they forced people to rank them on a one to five. And then they just kept giving them iterations of the same question. And they came up with a list of like 18 different attributes that people said were their highest priorities for looking for a brokerage account.
And then what they did was they actually had them do a second part where they took those metrics and they ranked their primary brokerage account against what they said was important to them. And then they scored it based on that. So it was actually pretty cool.
I thought the way that they did it. It was cool, but like the list is poppycock. We're going to get into why that that's a thing for us.
So like the top five made up about 51 percent of the actual like priority. And it was trade execution, speed slash price, website security, equity trading platform, site performance and customer service were the top five. And then the second tier, I guess the middle five made up about 26 percent.
And those were. The most important things, investment research, research tools, mobile trading platform slash as portfolio analysis and reports. If you don't know what that is, you literally can go into your portfolio.
You can do like analyze or like give me information about my portfolio and I'll actually pull up a pie chart and like tell you where where you're lacking. Like say you have too much international exposure. Well, you don't have enough U.S. equities in your your portfolio.
So I'll do like a quick synopsis and then I'll do an analysis of your portfolio and tell you what you need to change. Like all that shit's important. I don't know.
The first top five other than security. Who cares? So I was evaluating this from my perspective. I mean, we did skip the last one, which was timely information on market shifts, which I don't really think that should be something a brokerage account is giving you, because to me, a brokerage account is supposed to specialize in the trading aspect and like the analytics of the metrics of the stocks.
Well, back in the day, like all brokerage account was was instead of calling up someone on the phone saying, hey, I want to buy a thousand dollars worth of Microsoft back in the day, you'd literally just type in, I'm buying 100 shares of Microsoft. That's all. That's what I mean.
Like account was they were literally the go between between the market makers and slowly expanded over the years to encompass a whole variety of craziness. The newest one is the robo AI crap that I mean, whatever. That's what you like.
That's what you like. What we did was we made a list of what we found important. And then I took the ones that I thought other people obviously found important based on that study.
And we're going to address those because some of them don't actually relate to your brokerage account in any way, shape or form. So the first one is going to be trade execution and speed and price. And the thing is that these are kind of all the same for most of the top brokerage accounts, just because of the way the system is set up.
They're all the same for all. Yeah, they're all the same. There may be like in the day trading realm, there are certain brokerages.
I think TD Ameritrade was one of the ones with the ThinkorSwim platform because it was so to the minute real time that people would pay extra to have that service for day trading because seconds mattered. But for those of us who are doing the dividend value investing approach, you're putting in a limit order. You should be putting in you should be putting in a limit order.
And it doesn't matter when it really hits. It's like patience is more important and getting in at a good price is more important. It's not the volatility and the fluctuation.
I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it before. Entry price is paramount. Yeah.
So when they talk about price, I'm assuming this relates to the whole fee structure of trading fees. Like we were just talking about how TD Ameritrade used to charge you $9.95 per trade. And then I think it was a standard five for different ones.
And we've hopped around like I swear we've had probably like seven or eight, maybe nine different brokerage accounts at this point. And we currently have five Robinhood, Schwab, Vanguard, Wells Fargo, Wells Trade and E-Trade slash Schwab because they're combining here soon. And I know I still have accounts open with like a zero balance.
Like I still have an E-Trade account. Those are the ones that I've used. So I will tell you after I do my impartial analysis, tell you which ones suck and which ones are good.
But basically what's really, really cool when Robinhood came out, they essentially did this behind the scenes thing where they were able to offer zero trades because they were working as middlemen for wholesale market makers. Essentially, they were getting a commission on the back end that had nothing to do with the person who was investing. So it was like a hidden thing.
So there was this whole moral issue. And I think there kind of still is. But to be honest, I think that actually creates interesting partnerships and it passes on the zero trade fee to those of us investors.
I think it's a great thing personally. And it set a new standard with Robinhood doing that for basically all the other big investment firms. Like the fact that all those trading fees went to zero for any of the ETFs and stocks is phenomenal.
Now, some brokerage accounts still charge you for options, futures, obviously the assisted trades and mutual funds still have them. I know mutual funds with no loads is an option in some places, but some brokerage accounts will not have like I think some of them are options based. If that's what you're into, that would be the brokerage account you should look up to to have the zero fees in that.
That's not something that we do because we basically invest in that kind of stuff, options and futures through ETFs. So for us, it doesn't really matter. ETFs are closing their funds.
Yeah. So it doesn't really matter for us. And if you're following our investing approach, it's not going to matter for you guys either.
So price, in our opinion, kind of goes out the window as a non contender. Well, they're all the same. When it comes to the actual trading component.
So they're all zero. They're all zero for all the ones that came up as high marks and all the ones that we actually evaluated. Now, when we go to the speed of investing, we talked about how that really doesn't matter.
And if you don't have any idea what we're talking about with limit order, this is going to be your take home assignment. You need to do some research on the difference between a market order and a limit order. Tim was just explaining to me that Robinhood, it doesn't make it as transparent as it should be unless you already know to go in there to click a drop down to essentially change your order type.
You have to hit it. You have to click a drop down box to change it from a market order to a limit order. If you don't know that and you say you put $50 in Apple, it's going to trade it and market.
And essentially, speed depends on which type of order you use. If you use a market order, it's essentially telling the system that you want to buy this ASAP at current value. Speed matters.
So speed over price, volume matters as well. But if you get into something like trades like 2000 shares a day. Yeah, I was going to get to that in a minute.
But volume does matter as well with speed, because it's like if you don't have anybody trading, your trade can't make a match. And it's like those are the ones where you might have to resort to a market order or you just have to be extra patient. Sometimes have it make days and whatever to have happen.
Been in some trades where it's taken four or five days to get in what I wanted to because it only has 10,000 shares traded in a day. Yeah. And sometimes if you know it's going to bop down to a certain price, it always does.
That's the thing. Like it'll come back down. So sometimes you have to wait days, weeks.
I mean, I've waited weeks sometimes, like even in crypto. But brokerages essentially, they're across the board. You put in some of them, you'll put in whatever share quantity you want.
Some of them you'll put in whatever dollar amount you're willing to spend and it'll pop out the other number. And then you tell them whether it's a limit or or whatever. I think crypto is a little more straightforward, which I think is kind of where Robinhood's platform is.
But again, you really, really, really need to make sure you're clicking on the limit order. And then the difference, too, between the brokerage accounts versus the crypto accounts, because crypto trades 24-7. Brokerage accounts only trade between 930 and 934 is the active active time.
And it does trade from like 6 a.m. to 930 a.m. That's the call for after hours, pre-market or after market. And it does trade from 4 to 8 p.m., which is after market. Now, some brokerage accounts will allow you to do certain pre and post market stuff.
Which is actually a good thing because that's like the Wild West of equity trading. If you don't want to get raped, try not to trade during that time. If you've ever traded in the pre and post market at times, it's like the Wild West.
Like it's just the prices are all over the place. And I've noticed that in Robinhood, the prices are all over the place way, way, way more than the other brokerage accounts. And the thing is, when you do that limit order, sometimes there's another dropdown that says extended or good till filled or just day.
I made a mistake in Robinhood. Basically, I was I put in my limit price of whatever and I thought I clicked good till filled. I forget what it's called.
GTC, I think it's good to filled or good till traded or whatever. But then it also had plus extended and I didn't register that. I clicked the one that said plus extended.
So it traded during extended hours and I got fucked. Especially if you're on a market or the marketers really screw you that like if somebody has a really high sell in and you don't really tell them you don't want to buy above a certain price was just like, hey, I'm going to match you with the low hanging fruit that nobody else wants. And that's where you end up paying more than you should.
And everything with dividend investing is about you, your buy in price. So moving on from that, I think we beat that one a little bit considering this is an off topic. Website security is a big one.
And kind of in my opinion, at this point, if these are high ranked brokerage accounts, they probably have good website security. And a lot of that you can control on your end by just having a good password, strong password, doing the FDA verification crap and then using a VPN, especially if you're accessing your account, if you're on public Wi-Fi, especially, especially, especially. That's a big one.
I would also say if you're using your cell phone, no matter if you're on public Wi-Fi, I would always have a VPN attached to your cell phone. I'm just saying because that's like I don't trade on my cell phone specifically because phones seem to be easier to get into than my Chromebook. I agree with that.
So I just use a Chromebook for all my trades. And I think customer service kind of falls into that same category that if these companies are ranked high and they have high reviews and lots of people are using them, they're obviously prioritizing customer service because it's like we're living in the day and age where bad reviews are like the golden standard of do not buy. I must say, I don't know exactly what they're talking about here.
Yeah, we were looking at this from our perspective. Like, I don't even think we've ever had a need to contact customer service at this point with any of like the crazy amounts of years. We've been trading for eight years, almost probably more than that, almost eight years consistently.
And I've never once had to contact customer service about anything. So I don't know why that's so important for people like I need to be able to get a hold of them. I don't know what it's for.
But that's why a lot of people have implemented the A.I. and like chatbots and stuff. One time we had to try to get a hold of customer service because they fucked up a order from Vanguard to iTrust for her mom's retirement. That is absolutely right.
So this is a hilarious side story. So like when you go to do a rollover, you have to fill out an immense amount of paperwork, dot all your I's, cross all your T's, make sure you have all the numbers in the right boxes and all this stuff. It literally asks you how much money you're trying to roll over.
And we were doing a partial rollover when we moved it from that to the crypto account. We put my mom's stuff in. And they literally took all of the cash that Tim had available.
He had some extra cash set aside because he was waiting to get into some other stuff at better prices. And they rolled the entire thing over. And I'm like, WTF are you guys doing? And they were like, well, you have two options.
Either you have to initiate another transfer to send it back or you can live with it. I was like, screw you, Vanguard. Well, it worked out like so.
It worked out to our favor. But pretty much everything with her mom works out like this where it's always clusterfucked, but then it always turns out benefiting her in the nice in the end because her cryptocurrency IRA is going to be worth like a one point five million dollars or whatever it's going to be worth. Yeah, I wanted to.
I was able I was able to get a lot more Bitcoin whenever Bitcoin was like forty thousand, thirty thousand dollars. So and then one of the other criteria in the thing was the equity trading platform. I think what this was trying to say was just like ease of use.
And basically, if you've used one, you should be able to figure it out. And again, we were just talking about how there's certain nuances if you don't know about limit market, just watch some YouTube videos. I mean, there's certain nuances every like if you go from Schwab to Vanguard or you go from Vanguard, they're all a little different.
They each have little nuances that are different, but ultimately it's the same thing. And then Robinhood has something that we'll discuss later, like there's just certain nuances that are and then it'll vary based on if you're on desktop versus mobile, like it just is how we talk about the dividend reinvestment that to me that is more important than all this other nonsense we're talking about right now. One of the ones that was pretty low on that list, but I thought was still important to mention was the availability of account types.
And that basically is saying, like, do you want a or a non-retirement account or a retirement account? And most of the big ones have 401ks. And like I think Vanguard is a common one. Fidelity is probably a big one.
I don't know if Schwab's with a lot, but they all have options basically for for employers to use them for 401k plans. But all of them, even Robinhood and the SoFi one that we've added to the list, have the ability to do your own personal IRAs. So I don't see why this is an issue.
If people are talking about like the special steps or like the child pre-tax things and all this other stuff, the big brokerage accounts will definitely have them like Schwab, Fidelity, E-Trade probably, but probably not Robinhood in them. Maybe, maybe not something they'll probably be moving to. But that's just I don't think that really again, people are getting more and more options as we go.
They're getting nitpicky with irrelevant things, honestly, in my unbiased opinion. OK, so we're moving into the things that we actually give a crap about. So number one is going to be fees.
We already talked for her fees. Well, I put it as I put it as a top. But like one of the big ones is if you're closing accounts and you're moving money around, sometimes they'll charge you like up to seventy five dollars to actually do an account transfer.
I know when I closed my E-Trade account, I think I had to pay like seventy five dollars. I think with my zero trade, I think it was zero trade. I think I had to pay fifty dollars for or thirty five dollars for a fund transfer.
I think Schwab does a fifty dollar full account transfer. So just look those up before you pick one of these brokerage accounts like those types of things, because they're going to penalize you for leaving them. They're charging you no fees to sign up.
Most of these places have no minimums to start, no minimums to invest, no minimums or whatever. So that begs the question, why would you ever close it if it's going to charge you a fee? Some of them will charge you inactivity fees. So that's another thing you have to look at.
OK, that's a different thing. OK, so if it's inactive, you don't have it invested. Yeah, you're going to get five dollars.
So you're good as long as you're using it. So basically put a put a little bit of thought into picking your brokerage account before you sign up, especially if it's one that has these transfer fees and stuff. Even though Schwab has that fifty dollar transfer fee, like it is hands down our favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite.
And what's funny, too, is like we used to have a TD Ameritrade account. We I just got a thing in the mail the other day saying, hey, FYI, your TD Ameritrade account is rolling into Schwab. So it's like that's combining our Scott trade account, I think moved into E-Trade.
I think we're all E-Trade is now condensed. You're becoming part of. They're all condensing into like something.
Yeah, they're all kind of doing that whole subsidiary nonsense. It is what it is. Just like everything else in the world.
There's only going to be like 10 things. I mean, all of them. But then some of these smaller companies that are more like app friendly might take off.
But I mean, I will say Robinhood's done some really cool things for the entire industry, because like I said, there's zero. There's zero freaking trade fees are phenomenal, legit. Even if you're not trading that frequently, it's still amazing.
Trading fees. Again, we already talked about this, how like if you're doing futures options, whatever, it doesn't really matter. Service fees is the big one.
So the thing is, most people either don't take the time to do some research, watch some YouTube videos to figure out how to use the actual brokerage they're using or they want some assistance when it comes to buying. And that's actually where these brokerage accounts are going to make money off you. They're going to charge you for advisory services.
They're going to charge you for assisted trading. And those are those are fees that add up, especially if it's like every time you go to do something now where some of these companies have been able to cut some costs with that as they're implementing these things called robo traders. I don't know if you've heard about that.
I know a lot of people, especially the younger, it seems like Gen Zers and there's just a study that came out that the millennials want like 35 percent of millennials want robo advisors in their training. And it's like almost 50 percent of Gen Z want robo advisors in their training. So.
So these companies are putting those into place where you pay a service, you pay a fee and they basically do all the work for you. But they're only as good as like the AI programming. So choose your own adventure.
I think the best one actually came up from the research was TD Ameritrade. Charles Schwab, again, their partner companies and Fidelity actually has one. Those are the three best that stand out if you're looking for places with robo trade.
And again, TD Ameritrade is rolling into Schwab, so might just be better to go with the Schwab thing. And we'll explain why Schwab is actually a better choice, more than likely for a couple of other reasons. If it's something you care about, Fidelity does seem like a pretty good number two contender.
Yes, sure. Tim will argue that later. And that's where it starts to get important.
All other stuff's. Yeah. All right.
So take the lead. Well, investing opportunities basically like if you ever tried to buy preferred shares, you and you'll know that only certain brokerages will actually let you buy preferred shares. And they're labeled in such a way that it's crazy.
Like it'll be like Vanguard is next to impossible to figure out. ET slash PRA is the preferred share of energy transfer. And that's in Schwab.
But if you want to get it in Vanguard, it's ET underscore PRA. And if you want to get it in Fidelity, it's like ET dot PRA. So like they all have these different things, but they actually offer you the ability to buy preferred.
I can't get preferreds in Robinhood. And I don't think SoFi actually has preferreds either. I forgot to look that up.
Yeah, that's one that's fairly new to us. We added it to the list because it looks very, very, very promising in a lot of ways. We don't have an account right now, but we probably are going to set one up and tinker around with it.
But it still made the list because you got like bonds. Like if you ever tried to buy individual bonds. Yeah, they're kind of a pain.
Like Vanguard doesn't have like you would think they'd all have a just a list of all the different bonds. But that's not the case. Vanguard actually has different bonds than say Schwab has.
And Schwab has different bonds than what Fidelity will have. Like they all have different bonds. And international markets is a huge area where like some companies don't even offer you shit for international stuff.
And other ones like they make a killing on all the international trades. Yeah. So if international is something you really want to get into, like India is a big, big market or a rising market.
What was it? Emerging market. Emerging. The first study came up as showing that interactive brokers is a really, really, really good one for people who want to do the emerging market because they actually have access to 150 developed and emerging markets that are actually direct access versus what you would have to do would be like through the ETFs and the index funds.
South Korea has a market that's pretty good. Canada has a market that's pretty good. China's market is India's market's pretty good.
So like there's like when we're saying emerging markets, that's what I mean. Like you'll actually go on like the Toronto market exchange and be able to buy Canadian stocks through interactive brokers that you can't do on Schwab. And if you can do it on Schwab, they'll charge you more for it.
Lots of fees. Yeah. So but there is a way to get around that through the ETFs and the index funds.
But that's how I do it. If I'm feeling froggy about international or emerging markets, I'll just buy a like an Indian emerging market ETF or closing the fund. And I think that's probably the easiest way to do it, to like pull a basket instead of an egg and one one stock that's in that company.
It's kind of the same concept if you do like it. But if you say you live like in South Korea half the year and you know that there's a company in South Korea that's going to be rocking, then you probably should go to interactive brokers. Yeah.
Or have that as a secondary brokerage account where you can just do certain things like that. Like it is what it is. We live in America and I'm pretty fluent in the American markets.
So like, I don't like that might also be incentive for people who don't live in the U.S. So that's just an option. Like we talk to someone from Britain and I don't know what the hell their market is. Yeah.
We've actually been trying to figure that out. And I still have it. What do I buy that? I'm like, I don't know.
What do you have over there? She's like, I don't know. What do we need? And I'm like, I have what do you have? I don't know. It's like a giant circle jerk at the stop sign where they're like, you get no, you go.
No, you go. So that's that's interesting to deal with people that are in other countries. So then E-Trade is one of the ones that has the most bond options, which is really good for somebody who's more on the low risk investor profile thing, like we've talked about in a previous episode, and they want more fixed income assets.
Again, that's totally your preference. For us, we have enough bond options in Schwab that it doesn't really matter for us. But if that's something you really want, you might rather be in a bond fund than an individual bond.
But that's my personal. And then again, if you're really into the index funds, just found out through looking at some of these fee things that the index funds and some of these other things charge you on a per transaction basis if you're getting into a fund that is not actually with the brokerage account that you're with. So basically, if you're in Schwab and you're trying to invest in a Vanguard fund, they're going to charge you like seventy five dollars a pop to invest money into that, which is kind of ridiculous in our opinion.
So if you want to do a lot more of the index funds, Vanguard might actually be the brokerage account to sign up for for you. They're awesome. They can be.
That's more of a set it and forget it. Again, we've addressed that in other episodes. Not going to get into that here.
And then these options are also going to vary depending on the type of account that you're in. Like if you're in a 401k, most of them have very limited options. They'll probably just have a lot of mutual funds and index funds.
If you're in the IRAs or the non retirement accounts, like you got tons and oodles and oodles of options. So just keep that in mind. So that's somewhat important and it gets down to me.
It's all about research. Honestly, if you're income investing or value investing or contrarian investing, you have to be able to research. This is the number one research and if you can't research like it's difficult, you know what to get in.
It's difficult in certain brokerages to do research. So like if I say I'm in Vanguard for her mom's retirement account, I have to research something. I literally have to open up the Charles Schwab account so that I can research what I'm looking for for her mom at Vanguard because Vanguard research tools suck that bad.
They are horrible. Yeah. Horrible.
He was showing me that he had to click on like five different screens and then some of the stuff he like I'll type it like I'll type in, say, say you want to research Main Street Capital. She was hype in Maine. What will happen in Vanguard is it'll go to a little box like, oh, do I want to really research this? Yes, I do.
So you click on show me the profile and the profile goes to a separate page outside of what you're already in and the page takes forever to load and then you have to scroll down this humongous page. It takes like 10 minutes to read this whole page and it doesn't even have the stuff that you have to click on subtabs to get into what you need, say, for like revenue and debt and stuff like that. Whereas in Schwab, literally you just type in Maine and brings everything up on one page.
You scroll down. It's all right there in a chart. And it even evaluates the same metrics against its peers.
Like everything is on one page is concise. It's efficient. It is amazing.
That's why most of the other accounts are super cumbersome. Loathe doing the brokerage podcast because like to me, it is research, research, research, and that's all that matters. What about the next category? Tools, Tim.
Tools. Well, the tools I've already gave them the screener, so they should be able to plug that in or find a different. Hold on, let's go back up a second.
One of the things that came up as a research criteria when I was looking through those studies was talking about how there's a difference between research of company and then there's like the market research component. I asked him about this this morning because I was like, this seems like a really interesting thing that they offer, like E-Trade is since it's partnered with Morgan Stanley, they basically have the ability to get those expert, I don't know, market people with the strategies and leading top research reports and this and this and that. And I was like, Tim, I go, are these like worth anything to like talk to people about as like a cool writer for this type of brokerage account? And he's like, he's like, he's like, I look through all this.
He's like, this stuff was available through all of my like publications that I got via email up to like two months ago. I was like, that's pretty, that's a pretty big gap. There's a time lag on those, quote, professional articles.
And that might be because they have to be sure of their stuff beforehand. Normally what it is like before they'll actually put something out that shows, let's say they have an article recommending buying gold. They have to make damn sure that gold's on an upswing.
So they have to wait until gold's on an upswing before they can actually post a gold article to buy gold. Whereas if you get information from different publications, they're like, well, gold could be on an upswing. They'll give you reasons why gold could be in the upswings.
Then you go in and you research, well, let's look at some of these gold mining companies or let's look at these gold stocks. And you do that and you're like, OK, so I could see how gold would be an upswing. So I'll probably put in a limit order to get this before it pops off.
So like I think what happens, it could be useful. But I think what happens is like what happens if you've ever followed when the experts give like price targets or they upgrade from a like say a hold to a buy status, they have to make damn sure 100% that that's going to do what they know it's going to do so that doesn't affect their metrics. And so they won't actually release the data until their metrics have been reached.
So then they're behind. They're like weeks behind, sometimes months behind because they're waiting for what they said was going to happen in January to happen and say it happens in April. So they're like three months behind.
So basically, our point is that looks juicy on the surface. But when you actually dig into the details of it, from our perspective, it's not as much of an incentive. And that that is not a tipping point.
If those are the brokerage accounts that you're thinking about getting into, don't let that be your like only reason. Now, like if you're interested in my research stuff, I actually am putting out a email on Friday, which has my favorite research publications, publications that I get information from. They're pretty up to date.
They don't care about if like something they something they recommend is good or bad. Like they'll just say, oh, we made a mistake on Black Hills Electric. Sell it.
We made a mistake. They're not about being right all the time. They're just getting information out there.
And then they kind of rely on you to do the additional legwork on the research. I will have an email coming out to the list, like my best, my best publication subscriptions, websites that I get information from, emails from every day. Okay.
So tools is a like sideline, similar-ish type thing to the research component. According to that study, which I thought was kind of fascinating, Schwab hands down ticked every single one of the 30 boxes that they had them evaluate hands down. The second pretty good contenders were E-Trade and Fidelity.
They went from everywhere from like the risk tolerance questionnaire, which we talk about in another podcast over to the budgeting tools, to the retirement account calculators, to screeners, to all this other stuff like Schwab hands down blew stuff out of the water. And you know how technical we are, how much research we do. So Schwab beat, beat the pants off.
The reason that's important if you want to like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, screeners, like you can create screeners in Schwab that will fit every criteria that you're looking for. Say you want to just do value investing where you literally can create a screener that just that basically looks for value metrics. Say you're looking for a yield, like say you're looking for a 6 to 10 percent yielder that pays out monthly, you can create a specific screener for that.
Like you can't do that in like a lot of places they have they have set metrics, like it'll just be like yield will be 0 to 10 percent. You can't do individual, they're too limited, they're too limited. Most of the other ones are very broad.
It's very, very broad where a Schwab you can get down and like do like intricate detail oriented screeners, which really helps us out with what like the investing strategy that we use. All right. So moving over to the next criteria is user experience.
This is probably a big one for a lot of people. We only care about it from the point of view of is it not terrible? Like if you've ever been on PennDOT's freaking transportation site or like you want to stab yourself in the face like it is. Most states Department of Transportation sites are terrible.
Terrible. So basically our opinion is. Although I'm from Colorado and Colorado's wasn't near as bad as Pennsylvania's.
Pennsylvania's Department of Transportation website is the probably the worst I've ever seen. Yeah. And they even updated it.
And then once you figured it out before now, you're just like, how the hell do I renew my registration? I was like, what is this doing? But anyway, so as long as it's not in the terrible category, Vanguard is in the terrible category from our perspective. For brokerage account usability, make the list. Yeah, they didn't even make the list for that study whatsoever.
Vanguard didn't even make the list. I'm telling you, people think I'm full of crap. And I said, Vanguard is the worst brokerage I've ever used.
But in their defense, they actually weren't on this list because they didn't actually agree to participate. They know their shit. It's probably what it was.
But anyway, anyway, so ease of site use. So we're gonna actually use this because this is more updated information. And like Fidelity came up as a seven out of 10.
E-Trade came up as a four. Schwab came up as a three. TD came up as a five.
I'm not going to mention the other ones because they really don't matter because it's not ones that we're gonna talk about because they don't have any of the other stuff on here. Wells Fargo, they're actually better than Fidelity. Check that out.
But what's interesting is, so the next piece of user friendliness or whatever is the mobile app component. And this is something we do not use, because we don't like to do research and finance stuff on our mobile apparatus. If we ever use it, it's only for like a quick check-in.
It's never to actually do research and it's never to actually like put trades in unless we're actually traveling and it's like a one-off circumstance. But Fidelity had Fidelity ranked number one for the app, but they ranked, shut up Tim, they ranked really, really low on the user experience component, which I thought was kind of hilarious. And then Schwab wasn't terrible, but their their smartphone app is apparently atrocious.
According to that study, they said it's because you can't actually use the screener in the app, which okay, but that's not something we would be doing anyway. Like our point of view is if you're going to be getting into investing and you don't have a desktop, literally get $150 refurbished Chromebook and make it your dedicated investor tool. Because keyboards are essential, big screens are essential.
That's our opinion. It's just easier than using the phone. It's way easier than using your VPN.
And if you're not frustrated, you're not going to make a rational like emotional decisions. You're just going to do better all around. And then you don't have the security component, you can have everything saved and set up in a dedicated space to like be in that mindset.
My question is why are these bottom two agree to do the survey if they know they suck that bad? Maybe they just wanted to be part of the thing. I don't know. Like, hey, we suck.
Let's make it official. We suck this bad. Robin Hood actually came up as one of the best mobile apps.
Now that one didn't hit high on a lot of the other criteria is because it had like limited certain things, but it does have some good stuff going on in other aspects. Now, drip is something that we have really high as a criteria, which you I guess could consider part of the user. It's important.
It's like it's super important. Probably one of the most important things for income investing is knowing that your dividends, you can turn your dividends on and off whenever you want to. And what I've encountered in this is, dude, Vanguard sucks.
Robin Hood sucks. So far, I don't even think I didn't read about that one. I didn't even see that you could do the drip on there.
But you said they could. I'm assuming it sucks. So you can do it in every single one of the ones we're going to rank here at the end.
But some of them are a lot easier to do. Like Tim pulled it up how to do it in Robin Hood. And he's like, it's a 15 step thing where you have to actually he's like, hold on, I need to go back to that screen to then look over here to then look over here to then push this button.
He's like, this should not be this difficult. If you don't know what you're doing, you have to go into the frequently asked questions, frequently asked questions, and then you type in drip. And then they'll say, Oh, do you mean dividend reinvestment? And you're like, yes, that's what I mean.
That's what drip stands for. And then they'll say, well, go into this, you have to go into your account settings, investment, reinvestment, click on the drip, then turn the drip enable or disable. It's takes like eight steps.
Whereas in Schwab, he literally says, Do you want to reinvest when you're like buying a stock? And you just click Yes, in the box, and you just click a box and it does it for you. And then Vanguard's the same way Vanguard is like, it's, it's probably just as convoluted. You told me you haven't even figured out how to do it yet.
I literally have to go in there every time and do the help section and say, I want to do drip. And I was like, here goes. Oh, so it's so bad.
You can't even remember how to do it. That's bad. That's really bad.
Alright, so I added this next category for those of you who don't have a ton of money to invest. And you're going to be doing like smaller incremental stuff, because I think the low cost of entry is probably a really good criteria for a lot of people. Because that's a bar of entry for some.
Now I know a lot of the companies like I remember back when TD Ameritrade had like a minimum deposit of I want to say like five grand. I think it was $5,000. Some of them like were really high, I think it was like 25,000 50 or 30,000.
I looked up at every single one of the ones we're going to rank here at the end. And none of them actually have a minimum deposit. None of them have a holding balance requirement.
So they've all basically got competitive, I think because some of the little ones they're losing business, so they had to conform. So that's really awesome for you guys. The other feature that's an amazing thing for a lot of people is the fractional share thing.
This is huge. Anybody who's traded cryptos understands like you don't have to buy a single Bitcoin. A lot of people think you might have to buy a single Bitcoin because of the way that stocks are where you think you have to buy a single stock and need that full full price.
Like if you want to buy a full Tesla share, you have to pay the full what is it 900 whatever dollars. It's 170th right now. So that's how you get around the bond thing.
Vanguard apparently does have fractionals, but it's only for their Vanguard ETFs. I'm actually surprised they have it all to be honest. Again, ask.
I'm just saying. Fidelity came up as number one here. They're actually just as good, if not a little better than Robinhood, believe it or not.
They offer 7000 different stocks and ETFs to buy with fractionals for as little as a dollar to get started. That's incredible. And Robinhood has the exact same thing set up.
Sofi's is the same way. I think they have a little bit less options, even though they still have a lot. And there's start at the five dollar mark.
So that's actually really cool. If you need the smaller things. So E-Trade does not have the fractionals as a as an option.
So if that's something you absolutely have to have right there, that one knocks it off your list. Fractional stuff is fine and good. If you're buying like growth stocks for like say you're buying Amazon, you're buying Tesla or you're buying something that's a thousand dollars.
But generally, if you don't have enough money to buy, say you want to buy a couple of shares of Main Street Capital. If you don't have enough money, then just dump it into bullet shares and then accumulate money until you actually have enough to buy one or two shares of Main Street Capital as opposed to doing because the fractional shares like when you're doing income investing, like if you have point three shares, you're not getting shit on it anyway. So you might as well just leave it lumped up in a bullet share fund until you have enough money saved up to buy some shares of something because you're going to make more in the bullet share than you would if you're buying point two shares or something.
And I kind of think the fractional share like I did mention, I think it's kind of not for our type of investing strategy because we're not investing in the big. I just said that's a point that I need like the big people shouldn't be investing that anyways. If you're going to buy, if you want to invest in Tesla or Amazon, then you should be doing yield max.
But I'm trying to remain unbiased. And he's trying hard. He's over here like glitch it out.
So for additional perks, this is one that I added because like certain ones of these have certain stuff going on Vanguard. I don't really see where that has absolutely anything. Robin Hood's additional perk is you can actually access their ETFs that are other people.
You can't get them anywhere else. You can't get them anywhere else. If you literally want to be say in their dividend aristocrat ETF or the Vanguard, they have like some Admiral share type thing that does pretty well.
The only perk that Vanguard has is they have ETFs that you can get into that you can't get into in any other brokerage. So if you literally just want to set something in a Vanguard Admiral, what the Admiral thing is, it's kind of like an S&P index fund, but it only takes like the best of the best in the S&P and that's all it does. It generally yields like 6% to 10% a year depending on the market.
If that's what you want to do, if that's your philosophy, you probably want a Vanguard account. So that's Vanguard. Robin Hood's special perk would be probably the fractional share component.
I think they do offer a cash account. They have like they have right now in Robin Hood and they do have this periodically throughout the year. Like they'll give you $400 to roll your IRA over or they'll give you $200 to open up an interest yielding checking account.
It's not checking, it's like a cash account where it's like a checking account, but you don't have any of the actual like stuff that comes with a checking account, but it gives you some money cash back. They give you a debit card. So they do actually, they updated that.
And they'll give you like referrals. Like if you refer people, you'll get like $25 whenever they open up an account. So there are a couple perks of Robin Hood, but it does not make up for the clunkiness of everything else.
I mean the only perk of that one. They have like 10 cryptos you can invest in. I was going to say they have the crypto component and they do also have the really friendly mobile user app thing.
So if those are like big ones for you. E-Trades perks. I think that one doesn't really have a lot because I think they bank over on the Merrill.
I'm pretty sure E-Trades of the list we have E-Trades biggest perk would be their chart, their technical analysis. They have pretty good charts. Do they have good charts? Yes.
Okay. So, but I don't think they have a lot of those other extra stuff that we're going to talk about for like Schwab and stuff because they're with Merrill. And their research tools are better than both Vanguard and Robin Hood.
So like it's like you're driving a, I don't know, a Toyota with E-Trade and Vanguard is like a bicycle. A bicycle? It's a tricycle jacked up wheels. It's one of those tricycle motorbikes.
Okay. SoFi's got a freaking ton of extra perks. Like a freaking ton.
SoFi has the most perks of anything. Did you leave that site up? You didn't leave that site up, did you? No, but like they have like... Banking. You can get loans.
You can get your life insurance, your car insurance, or your homeowners insurance. You can get credit cards. Your renter's insurance to them.
I think they offer full-blown credit score analysis that's open and free and clear 24-7. Like they have 20 different cryptos you can buy. You get your student loans.
What's that called when you put them back together? Consolidated. Consolidation of your student loans. I mean, we were talking... It's 4.6 for a checking account.
Yeah, they have 4% interest APY. The savings account. And pretty much any home loan you could want.
Any loan you want, you can go through SoFi. It is backed by FDIC. Up to 2 million, right? 2 million.
I don't even know how the heck they pull that one off. There's probably some kind of backing thing going on. They have a limited cryptos like Robinhood, but they have a couple more.
They have more than Robinhood. More than Robinhood. It's five more.
I mean, it's not a big number. But still, the fact that they have so much stuff in one place. We were talking about it before from... I think SoFi is going to be the new going forward standard for a lot of different platforms.
Because it's like a one-stop shop. There you go. You can refinance your loan.
Oh, they have cashback credit cards. They have travel perks. You can do private student loans.
You can do wedding loans. You can do investing accounts. Wedding loans? What's a wedding loan? You can refinance your car.
IPO. I do like the unlimited 2% cashback credit card. I do like that.
Oh, we didn't say about Robinhood. Robinhood has actually got the IPO perk. Fidelity apparently has the IPO perk as well.
Okay. I think we've gushed on SoFi a little. They have pretty much any type of financial thing you can think of, you can get on SoFi.
In terms of loan or consolidation. It's pretty cool. Or even like savings or budgeting and stuff like that.
SoFi, I think once people get their heads out of their asses about a couple things, SoFi is going to be the bank of the future. That's why I actually have it in my IRA growth account. I have shares of SoFi.
So I do believe it is going to pop off here in the next five to ten years. I was going to say, we were talking about that one as a stock investment option for exactly the reason we talked about. Because the younger generations want the one-stop shop.
SoFi has everything on their cell phone. And SoFi has everything on their cell phone. And no one else does.
All right. So perks of Fidelity was the... So this one is actually kind of similar to Schwab. I was just looking up.
They do have checking account availability. They have a, I think, ATM reimbursement if you sign up for the one type of account. They have the, what did I say? IPO thing.
Now IPO, like if you've ever tried to invest in IPO, like why we mentioned that is because it's damn near impossible. So the fact that a couple of these places you actually have where you can, for example, Reddit just did an IPO a couple of weeks back. And you could invest in Reddit at the price before it came out on the market.
So you could have potentially made a lot of money. Although it turned out that like every IPO, what happens is as soon as it comes out, it shoots up. And then a couple of days later, it crashes.
And then like does a consolidation period. So you have to be damn sure that you know what you're getting into. Like Donald Trump just had one that came out and it's crashing left and right.
So Reddit is an IPO that if I had access to funds, I probably would have got into it because Reddit is basically, it's one of those service platforms where the more users they have, the more valuable it is. Yup. So it's one of those ones with an interesting moat.
We typically do not get into IPOs, but that would be one that we would actually consider if we had the money. So just FYI for that, that's up to you. If you're brand new, like I wouldn't even worry about the IPO thing.
Now, we actually combined Schwab and TD because they're basically the same company. I think TD is literally going to be combining into Schwab. So TD will probably no longer be a thing.
They are, like the majority of the accounts already are into Schwab. But basically, I'm not going to go into Perks of TD because it's not going to be here, but Schwab has so much going on. The whole reason I signed up for Schwab initially was because we were going to Greece six years ago.
Six years? It was six years ago. I just got a Facebook notification. We were in Amsterdam eating giant pancakes.
Time flies, huh? On our layover. And if you sign up for a checking... Smoking a pancake? If you sign up for a checking account with a brokerage account, you get access to a debit card that reimburses all ATM fees and has no foreign transaction costs. It was the whole reason I signed up for Schwab initially, and then we eventually ended up investing in with them.
I didn't even realize until recently when I threw some more money in there because I just went back to Greece that their checking account has a 0.45% interest rate on it, which is huge for a checking account. Like, it's huge. It's like double what everyone else's is.
Well, everybody else's is like 0.01, so that's really cool. SoFi's is 4.6%. I love the easy, like, roll back and forth between Schwab and the checking account because it just makes it easy. Now, that is an actual perk, and I think that was when I looked at the SoFi account, it does the same thing.
Like, when you're in the Schwab account, you literally... It'll have your brokerage account, your checking account, your IRA. Like, you literally can just click in between all three of them pretty easily. When we get into discussing Wells Fargo, you'll see why I brought that up in a second.
But, like, that's not so easy. But they have, like, I think they write free checks for you. The only thing you obviously can't do is deposit cash because they're an online bank.
So, they have zero fees, zero holdings, zero, like, all this other stuff. So, that is a bitch. So, when you want to transfer money into Schwab, you actually have to transfer it from your bank into Schwab.
So, that is a nuisance. If you have cash. But it doesn't... I kind of think we're going away from that anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
It is a nuisance. But you can pull cash out. And then, like, seriously, some of the ATM fees over in Greece were like $4 a piece.
And they're just like, boop, boop, reimburse. You should try that. I've never had a single issue.
Oh, yeah, right? Oh, my God. That would be so rude. Like, it's a twang.
We were at a casino with her brother. Oh, my God. And it was like, I don't know how much he spent on the ATM fees.
Oh, my God. He got drunk. He got so drunk the first day.
And he was up, like, all night gambling as soon as we got in Vegas. And he lost thousands of dollars. And I think he spent, like, over 200... Was it like $275 on ATM fees or something? It was some ridiculous fee.
It was something absolutely ridiculous. And then by the end of the trip, though, he, like, doubled down on blackjack, hit some crazy thing, ended up making all his money back, all the fees back, and paying for the whole trip. And he's like, I'm done.
But that's like... I would just like to test Charles Schwab's no ATM fees at a casino because it's generally between $6 and $10 to pull your money out. They probably have the fine print, like, so many of them in a day or something. They'd have to because that's just... Like, that's what I said.
That's rude. OK. So that was the last perk.
We kind of went backwards in the way of the list of how we were going to rank these things. I'm going to rank them in six is Vanguard. Of the six that we have.
And the only reason this one's even on the list is because so many people have Vanguard as their retirement account through their company. Like I said, the pros of Vanguard are the ETFs. The index.
The ETFs and indexes. You can't get in unless you're a Vanguard member. And be real careful if you're doing a rollover because they apparently don't even read their own papers.
But, like, everything else about Vanguard is just terrible. I don't even know how to, like, try to be nice about it. It is the worst.
And, like, I actually have Wells Fargo. And Wells Fargo is pretty bad. And I actually would prefer Wells Fargo to Vanguard.
Well, Vanguard is supposed to be really low on fees. And, like, we were just looking at some of the fees we have in TD Ameritrade. Or, excuse me, Schwab and Vanguard.
And Vanguard actually has a little bit higher for the year when we do the... What did you say? Their foreign? Yeah, foreign. We actually have a couple of companies that are... They're AD. They're called deposit receipts or something like that.
ADRs. That means you actually are getting foreign stock. And they just transfer it to American deposit things.
And we have to pay fees on those. And Schwab's is, like, half as much as Vanguard's. Even their low fees.
I imagine Vanguard's low fees are probably just in, like, the indexes and all those other things. So, anyway, that's number six. Number five is Robinhood.
Robinhood is good for someone that has a couple hundred dollars they're just playing around with. But if you're doing, like, a full-fledged income investing portfolio, Robinhood... I don't think it has the capabilities to do what you want. Because it takes forever to find the drip.
Like, that's one of the most important parts of income investing. It's being, like I said before, it's being able to click that drip on and off as you need. And the fact that you can't even find the freaking thing in Robinhood is highly inconvenient.
Inconvenient. I think Robinhood would probably be better for somebody who's, like, a growth investor. I have a Robinhood account.
I have, like, $450 in it. And, like, it's good for that. Like, you can hold a couple stocks and then a couple cryptos.
But other than that, like, I wouldn't recommend Robinhood. Well, one of the other reasons, too, is, like, Tim tries to find some of the stuff that we have in the other accounts in it. And, like, the YieldMax ones weren't even out.
It took months for the YieldMax to come out in Robinhood. I can't find any preferred shares in Robinhood. Preferred shares... Do they have bonds? No.
So no bonds, no preferreds. So Robinhood's more stock crypto, but even limited crypto. But they do have a bunch of nice perks, like, where you, like, if you time it right, like, say you... Like, you could have taken advantage of their IRA thing and got $400 extra.
Like, it's not complete waste. Like, you can actually get free money. And that's one of the things, like, I didn't ever mention when we did the budgeting thing.
But, like, if you hunt around in the banks, it will give you $300 to open an account as long as you put, like, $1,000 in it. That's, like, a 30% return on your $1,000. So just put $1,000 in the bank, get $350, and then... I mean, read the fine print, because they usually have holding requirements and minimums.
But Robinhood has something similar to that, where, like, if you do this or you refer people, we'll give you money. So they do have a bunch of perks in that regard. I do think they have a lot of interactive stuff.
And Coinbase kind of does something similar. If you're doing it for crypto, I would just do Coinbase. It's the easiest way, and they do all the tax stuff for you.
Agreed. Absolutely agree on that one. So the next... Yeah, no, Coinbase is trash.
The next three, it's, like, the only option you have at this point, because they keep taking stuff away from us. The next three, kind of... I'm not even sure if we have a real order for these. Did you decide on that, Tim? E-Trade's number four.
OK. I think we used it years ago. So this is, like, an outdated review of E-Trade, but I didn't... I like the chart aspect, but I don't... It didn't dazzle us, really, anything.
I don't use the charts very often. I just use the 52-week spread more than the charts. I don't really care about chart timing and do fundamentals when I'm investing.
I just want to make sure I... Yeah, charts are more important when you're day trading and penny stock stuff. And that's not what we're doing, so... And I'm sure E-Trade has plenty of perks and things that people love. I just didn't like it when I used it.
Well, I'm really confused, too, because they say that they're merging into Morgan Stanley. So they're merging into Morgan Stanley. So I don't know if they're actually going away.
But the things I was looking up is, like, they might stay as a sidestand for a while. I'm not even really clear on what the heck's going on with that. But do your own research if that one interests you for other perk reasons.
Like, that one's in the middle range just because it's better than Robinhood and Vanguard. Number three is one I never use, so I don't... I could be wrong, is Fidelity. I don't... I mean, Fidelity seems... You're doing three for them.
Yeah. Fidelity, to me, seems like Charles Schwab. And everything I've read in all the, like, all the customer investor reviews and surveys is Schwab and Fidelity are interchangeable.
Yeah, basically they're the same thing. Like, that study we were referring to actually had Fidelity as the top one. So... So, like, because I never use it, I can't really say beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's just as good as Schwab.
But I don't think it has as many perks as SoFi, which I put in number two, because SoFi has everything you could possibly want. And it has FDIC insurance up to $2 million, which is insane. Yeah.
So, SoFi and Fidelity are two we actually haven't had personal experience with yet. I will have SoFi, and probably within a year, I'll have a SoFi brokerage account. Yep.
When I get rid of my Wells Fargo, because I have Wells Fargo right now, and it's the worst. That was the one we forgot to even talk about. They are absolutely the worst.
They have these weird hidden fees. They're a pain in the butt. You cannot do the drip.
I actually prefer them over Vanguard, but that's just how... That's only because it's attached to your checking account right now. The only reason I used it is because I could just open up a brokerage account off my checking account. But I do plan, because they have really high fees and they're really Nazi-ish about that type of stuff, that... Like, to get the drip in Wells Trade, you actually have to go to a Wells Fargo branch or call their customer service and say, I need drip on my account, which is... that's ludicrous.
That's unacceptable. Like, I just absolutely refuse on principle. That's ludicrous.
And they have a bunch of fees and they don't have no fractional shares. The fact that they actually take your extra money, sell it out, and then they charge fees. Like, I actually have a moral issue with Wells Fargo at this point.
They're as bad as Bank of America, in my opinion. And then, like, if you go to the main screen in your Wells Fargo account, like, it's... you click brokerage and it brings up... Trash. It brings up all your brokerage accounts.
It doesn't, like, separate them. Like, it'd bring up your IRA and your brokerage account. Oh, really? That's really lame.
That's annoying, but luckily I know what's in what. So, basically, I'm planning to get rid of our Wells Fargo stuff. So, when I get rid of Wells Fargo, I'm probably going to transfer it over to a SoFi account.
Heck yeah! And then I will have more... I really like what SoFi's doing. Sparkling things to say about SoFi. Sparkling.
We'll do a re-review on that one. And it's not just because I do believe it's the bank of the future. But even though it is the bank of the future, it's just... I like the fact that you can get anything you want.
Yeah. Like, any... like, I think every bank should have that availability. And most banks don't.
And I think every brokerage account should offer you as much as they possibly can. So that their margins aren't affected. And it doesn't seem like they do that.
Whereas Schwab offers you so much. Charles Schwab's number one by a landslide. Like, it's not even a comparison.
Like, it's the best brokerage I've used in the eight plus years I've been doing this. It has the best research. It has the best tools.
It has the easiest... User interface. User interface. It's so nice.
And they offer you so much for the same cost that you would have any of the other ones I listed. The only thing it doesn't have is all the additional perks of, like, free money and referrals and all that fun stuff. But I'm sure they will at some point because... I imagine when we start using it on a regular basis, like, we're going to get those ATM reimbursements and stuff.
Like, I don't really care. To me, the brokerage is better. And the best part about Schwab, from what I can ascertain, I can't do this in Vanguard, is whenever we actually stop using our dividend reinvestment and I just want that to go to cash, I literally can just have it go from my brokerage account... The checking account.
Without me having to touch anything. Yep. Without him having to do anything.
Oh, the other thing I think Schwab has that I didn't remember or didn't fail to mention before was the laddering help. It helps you set up the ladder for your dividends to be even as much as possible throughout each month. And that's another thing.
Like, you can click on your portfolio performance. It'll bring up how it's going. It'll tell you where, like, what's falling behind.
What's laddered. What your expected dividends are going to be in the growth of the year. You can click on your income investment type stuff.
It'll tell you what you're getting each month. How much investment you have that's generating income. How much you'll get for this year.
Plus the projected for next year. So that's helpful. It has, like, a news thing that's awesome.
Like, if you click on the stock. Like, ARLP had a huge fuckery, like, a couple months back when we told you don't sell, buy more. Like, that popped up and it said the earnings report was awesome, but there's panic selling.
So, like, it has a lot of good news. Like, it has a really good section that's devoted just to the news about the individual company that you click on. It is so awesome.
And like I said, probably 90% of what we do as income investors is research. So you need to find what is the best mode to do your research. So if you absolutely have to have some of the other perks and you want to get a Schwab account and just put a little bit in it to have that accessibility, by all means.
So I think I'm actually low or a high. I think I've read other investors that say, like, 75% of the investing is research. I'm pretty sure it's 90 to 95%.
Like, the actual investing part is nothing. It is literally all the research. Yep, it's the research.
Most of the stuff is the prep and the research, just like everything else. And like when we did the Screener podcast, like, the Screener is so important because it literally narrows down the 20-some thousand different options to, like, a list of 200. Then you can research them individually and it's nice because you can literally click on, say you're doing BDCs, you can click on five BDCs, you can compare them on a screen.
It'll pull up all the fundamentals. It'll pull up all the financials. It'll pull up all the dividend yield, dividend growth and everything.
It's research is top notch. Muy mucho. And a quick note before we stop.
I know we just did a tech thing with crypto referrals, recommendations, whatever, last week. Crypto crashed. And the reason it crashed had nothing to do with the fundamentals.
So if you bought crypto, don't panic sell. If you didn't buy, now's a good time to buy. Especially the ones I recommended because they're all six crashed their face off by 10 to 12 percent.
So you can get the graph, you can get Filecoin, you can get all these at really good prices and then just hold them through the next eight to 10 months and you'll be fine. All right, guys. Hopefully that helps you decide on which brokerage account that you want to sign up for and get started with all this stuff if you haven't done that already.
Oh, next week's going to be Tim's favorite research tools. Yeah. So like if you don't want to sign up for the email, which is coming out Friday, we'll have that in the next week's podcast.
I'll actually discuss it. But I'd still recommend the email. I know I've said it before.
I know it gets kind of annoying, but like the email has so much information for free. It breaks everything down. So like you can invest in something right away and get dividends the upcoming week because I do the ex dividends.
Speaking of week, we actually found a weekly dividend payer recently. So I'm trying that one out. It's pretty fun.
I got two cents this week. I'm gonna see what I get next week. All right, guys, hopefully that helps you.
And we will be back next week with some awesome research tools. Yes. Bye.