 Hey guys, Shane here. So in this video I'm gonna go over the top five stock brokers for 2019 and beyond because in the last few years a lot of things have changed for the online brokerages so it's very important for you to stay up to date and in this video I'm going to try to include every person that could be watching this video so it won't matter if you're from the US or you're international or maybe you don't have very much money, maybe you have a lot of money to invest, maybe you want to invest long term or you want to just do day trades and maybe you're an experienced investor or maybe you're a complete newbie. I'm gonna make sure to cover the best option for you no matter what situation that you're in. Now that being said, number five on the list is going to be the best option for beginners which is going to be Ally Invest. Now Ally Invest is very low cost at about $5 a trade. It's very easy to use and beginner friendly and they even offer an option where they just automatically invest for you so you can literally just set it and forget it if you don't want to learn anything about investing. It's also a $0 account minimum so even if you only have a 20 in your wallet you can still invest. It's also extremely convenient if you're already using Ally Online Banking and Ally Online Banking is great because instead of just setting your money there and it doesn't earn you anything, it actually earns you about 2.2% interest every single year and you can still take the money out and put it back in whenever you want. Now the downsides to using Ally Invest is you are somewhat limited in terms of what you can do because they designed it to be extremely user friendly. The stock trading app is actually the same app as the online banking app and because of that they had to make it super super simple to use especially if you use the application itself on your phone. But overall it still has most of the important core capabilities that you need in order to buy and sell stocks and it's also very convenient if you're already using Ally Online Banking because then you can just have all of your money in one place you don't have to worry about checking 10 different apps. Now the downside to this is you're very limited in terms of what you can do when it comes to doing research on different stocks but overall if you're a beginner this is a very very solid option. Now number four on the list is going to be a perfect option for someone who's a new investor who wants to become either an intermediate or an advanced level investor and this is going to be TD Ameritrade and the reason I decided to put them on this list is because they have so many physical locations that you either can go in yourself or you can call 24-7 and these locations have experienced investing professionals who can help you with either the research, the basics, the investing part or just using the platform in general. You can call these guys anytime you have something that pops up or anytime you have a question and it's almost like having your own personal investing mentor. There's also no minimum deposit so it's perfect for a new investor doesn't matter how much money you have to invest you can start an account. Now another great thing about TD Ameritrade is they have a basic platform that's very beginner kind of newbie friendly and then once you get that down once you learn that maybe you're at an intermediate level you can actually move up to their gold standard platform which is going to have all the advanced research tools and some of the more advanced and complicated stuff. So TD Ameritrade is great to learn no matter what level you're at. Now the $7 trading fee is a little bit higher than the other ones on this list but that might be worth it for you depending on what you value. If you value having someone you can contact 24-7 or go in to speak with them and they really know what they're doing and they can help you out then it's totally worth it to spend an extra few dollars on the trades that you do and a lot of people I know use TD Ameritrade for that exact reason. Now number three on the list is going to be the best if you want to start day trading or doing options and that's going to be interactive broker and if you're an active trader or you're interested in getting into active trading that this is hands down going to be the best option for you. For one the individual trading fees are extremely low and if you're new and you don't really know how to do day trading they actually offer classes where they teach you how to execute day trades and then after you do the classes you can create a demo account where you actually pretend to invest in the market just to see how it works and see all the functionality so that way you can learn how to do all the important things without actually losing money in the process. Now interactive broker does have very very good research options but you can also integrate third party software if you want to analyze the data even further. It's also very good for global trading because you have access to stocks from just about every major country. Now interactive broker is not going to be for newbies because of the fact that you're day trading. It's very complicated and there's a lot of metrics that you have to keep track of and this is simply not ideal for someone who's not familiar with trading already. Now additionally they used to have a $10,000 account minimum they recently changed this to $2,000 minimum but not everybody has $2,000 just lying around and on top of this you actually get penalized for inactivity so if you decide to take a break from day trading to you know go on vacation or have a life or something you can actually get penalized and charged a small amount for doing that and on top of that you have to pay $10 every month whether you make money or lose money and overall I don't really recommend options trading or day trading. I think that most people end up losing money with this method I'd say probably 99% of people end up losing money this way. The only people who make money are the ones who get either lucky or are very very very good at it and it takes years and years to get that good and for 99% of people they would be better off just diversifying their money throughout the entire market. Now number two on the list is one of my absolute personal favorites which is Fidelity. In my opinion I believe that Fidelity is the best option for doing market research and it's also the best option if you're wanting to do long-term investing. There's no account minimum so you can pretty much start an account right now with no money or a very small amount of money and the trading fees are very low at about $4.95 each. The customer service in my opinion is top notch the only one that might be better is TD Ameritrade and it's also extremely easy to use unlike some of the other online brokerages like Vanguard and honestly Fidelity pretty much has all of the positives that I mentioned before when I was talking about the others on my list except it also has zero dollar index fee management. This means that they will manage your money and diversify it across the entire market for zero dollars. They don't charge you anything to manage your money and this will become important here in a moment when I explain what I believe to be your best option for investing. Overall I think that Fidelity is the most well-rounded online broker. I mean the only negative I can think of is they still do have that $4.95 cent fee for doing trades which number one on the list doesn't have. Yes that's right number one on the list is going to be best for you if you're really cheap like me and you don't want to pay anything for the trades that you do and that is Robinhood. The only trades that you have to pay anything for on Robinhood are what are known as broker assisted trades where you actually call somebody up and they do the trade for you and I don't really see any scenario where you would need to do this. I mean I guess if you're on an African safari and you realize all of a sudden that you know this company is about to take over the world and you don't have time to go back to civilization you can call somebody up and do that but I honestly don't see any reason why you'd ever need to do that. Robinhood has no minimum deposit there's no maintenance fees there's no late fees there's no inactivity fees there's basically no fees for anything and you can even buy cryptocurrency on Robinhood. Now there are a few minor downsides to using Robinhood and the first downside is the customer service is not 24-7. In fact it's only open Monday through Friday during normal business hours and I have used the customer service they're pretty good honestly I know some people have complained about it and in my opinion they're actually pretty decent I haven't had any big complaints they're not going to be as good as Fidelity or TD Ameritrade and you're not going to be able to get a hold of them anytime you want. They also don't have the amazing research options that you would get with something like Fidelity and that's because they just wanted to make it as simple as possible so that anybody can invest using Robinhood and realistically I think the best option if you want to buy individual stocks is to do all of the research on Fidelity or TD Ameritrade and then do the investing on Robinhood and if you are going to buy individual stocks I recommend that you do two things first of all you want to diversify your portfolio and invest across the entire market so you want to have at least 50 different investments that way if one sector of the market or one company goes down you don't lose all of your money and the second thing that I recommend is buying high yield dividend stocks that actually pay you in real money every single year. Now if you're going to go with long-term investing which is what I personally recommend that you do you're going to want to use Fidelity and there's two things you're going to want to do first of all open up a Roth IRA which is a tax advantage savings account and then second of all you're going to want to open up an account that invests in index funds and index funds are great because it diversifies across the entire market and it's been shown since the 1920s that the market goes up about 10 percent every single year 7 percent if you adjust for inflation but it doesn't really matter you know sometimes it's going to go down 10 percent sometimes it's going to go up 30 percent doesn't matter overall it's going to go up 10 percent every single year you can just set it there and forget it you won't ever have to worry about what a company's doing or anything like that you won't have to worry about if the CEO is about to get fired or anything you set it and forget it it goes up 10 percent you make a bunch of money every single year and studies have shown that investing in an index fund is going to be 95 to 99 percent of investors and most of these investors are professionals so it's very low risk and high reward now if you want more advice on how you can retire early so that you can gain financial freedom and live the life of your dreams go ahead and check out some of my other videos and if you watched this far and found it helpful don't forget to smash that like button go ahead and smash the subscribe button too and comment down below your thoughts on the video i work really hard on these videos and i appreciate any support or any feedback that you have even if it's negative just let me know thank you again for watching and bye for now