The Account You Need May Not Exist at the Broker You Chose

This is the shortest decision on the whole site. If you are investing with a partner and the broker has no joint account, nothing else about it matters. The comparison is over before you reach the fee schedule.

What twelve brokers actually publish

The pattern in the gaps

The four brokers with no joint account are Robinhood, Webull, Public and eToro — exactly the four app-first firms in our set. They are also, with one exception, the four with no trust account and no custodial account. This is not an accident of pricing. These platforms are built around one person investing alone, and the account lineup is the clearest statement of that anywhere in their product.

eToro is the extreme case: an individual taxable account and nothing else. No IRA of any kind, which means no tax-advantaged retirement investing at all. It scores 3 out of 10 on account types in our ranking, the lowest figure on the site, and that single number carries more decision weight for most readers than every fee on its schedule.

Two situations with exactly one answer

A high-deductible health plan

Fidelity is the only broker in our set that publishes a health savings account. If you are on a high-deductible health plan and want your HSA invested rather than sitting in cash at a bank, the comparison has one entry. We are wary of sentences like that, because a set of twelve is not the whole market — but within what we have verified, there is no second option.

Self-employment income

A solo 401(k) exists at two: Fidelity and Vanguard. Its contribution limits are far above an IRA’s, which makes it the difference between sheltering a few thousand a year and sheltering a large fraction of self-employed income. If that is your situation, ten of the twelve brokers here cannot serve it, whatever their commissions are.

Why fee comparisons miss this

A fee table has a column for every fee and a row for every broker, and every cell has a number in it. An account lineup is a matrix of yes and no, most of the cells say yes, and the interesting information is entirely in the handful that say no. It is harder to render and it does not produce a winner, so it usually gets a sentence rather than a table.

It is also the dimension where the answer is least likely to change. Commissions moved to zero across the industry inside a few years. The list of wrappers a broker is set up to administer moves far more slowly, because each one is a regulatory and operational commitment rather than a price.

How to use this

1. Write down every account you expect to hold in the next five years, including for a partner or a child
2. Eliminate every broker that cannot open all of them. This is usually a shorter list than you expect
3. Only then compare cost, and compare it across the brokers that survived step two
4. If one wrapper is available at only one or two firms — an HSA, a solo 401(k) — decide whether you are willing to hold it separately, because insisting on one provider for everything may cost you the cheaper option for the rest

Nothing here says a broker with a narrow lineup is a bad broker. Robinhood publishes the cheapest options schedule we recorded and Public the cheapest margin. If a taxable account and an IRA is genuinely all you need, the gaps above cost you nothing. The point is to find that out before you fund the account rather than after.