The mechanics, without the marketing

Commission tables compare brokers on a dimension where they barely differ any more. Account types are where they differ enormously — and a broker that cannot open the account you need is not cheap, it is unusable.

Most broker guides start with the app. Start with the legal entity instead — it takes two minutes and it rules out more bad outcomes than anything else on the list.

Most beginner feature lists are written by people who are no longer beginners. Here is what changes outcomes in the first two years, and what does not.

Comparison tables are only as good as the question behind them. Most published ones answer a question nobody asked: which broker is best in general.

Every one of these has a published answer. The point of the list is that most people find out the answers after opening the account rather than before.

Every US broker-dealer has a public file listing its registration, its permissions and every disciplinary matter against it. It is free, it takes two minutes, and it is the single highest-value check a new customer can run — provided you know what the entries mean.

Most coverage of investor protection stops at the $500,000 figure. That is the limit, not the process — and the process contains two things that surprise people: your account is usually moved rather than paid out, and anything you owe the firm is subtracted from what it owes you.

Your shares and your Bitcoin appear on the same screen, in the same account, under the same brand. At every broker we checked that offers both, they are held by two different companies — and the second one is not the broker-dealer whose name is on the app.

The honest answer has two halves: the custody arrangements at registered US brokers are strong and checkable, and they protect you against nothing that most people are actually worried about.

One of these has a CRD number and holds your money. The other is an interface. They are frequently marketed as the same thing.

Investor protection is narrower than almost everyone assumes, and the gap between what it covers and what people think it covers is where bad decisions live.

Nobody compares brokers on the cost of leaving, which is exactly why it is where the charges survived. Two firms charge nothing. One charges $125. And at three of them, moving part of your account costs the same as moving all of it.

Currency conversion is the only cost on this site measured in orders of magnitude rather than percentage points. It is also the one most brokers do not put a number on, because it is not charged as a fee — it is taken inside the exchange rate.

Commissions went to zero and stayed there. Margin interest did not, and it is now the largest published price difference between US brokers by a wide margin — three times over, on money that does exactly the same thing wherever you borrow it.

Commission-free trading is genuine. It is also the least significant line on most fee schedules, and it has made the rest of the schedule much harder to compare.

A brokerage account is a custody arrangement with an execution service attached. Understanding it in those terms explains almost everything else about how brokers behave.

Transferring is usually simpler than people expect and almost always cheaper than selling. The mistakes are avoidable, and expensive.