# Best Apps to Buy Stocks: The Tier List, With Receipts

> We ranked 10 trading apps S tier to D tier, then pulled the receipts: order-flow filings, enforcement records, and the margin call that froze the buy button.

- Author: Barebone Research, Barebone AI
- Published: 2026-04-23
- Canonical: https://barebone.ai/resources/best-apps-to-buy-stocks-broker-tier-list
- Publisher: Barebone AI (https://barebone.ai)

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## The 7 A.M. Margin Call

At about 7:00 a.m. Eastern on January 28, 2021, a routine letter landed at Robinhood from a clearinghouse most of its customers had never heard of. The number inside was not routine: a **$3.7 billion** collateral requirement, against roughly **$696 million** Robinhood actually had on deposit.

By the time the market opened, the most downloaded brokerage app in America had turned off the buy button on GameStop and a dozen other stocks. Within two days, the restricted list ran to roughly fifty names.

Most people choose a brokerage on app-store stars and sign-up bonuses. The things that actually separate brokers — how they make money, how they execute your orders, what they do under stress — stay invisible until a morning like that one.

So this lesson is a tier list, built the way an analyst would build one: we ranked the ten apps a new investor is most likely to download, then used Barebone to pull the receipts behind each — earnings releases, SEC order-routing and enforcement records, clearinghouse post-mortems, and the brokers' own monthly metrics.

Three receipts up front: a "free" broker that paid **$65 million** over execution that cost customers **$34.1 million** more than commissions would have; a broker whose filings show **53.3%** of revenue is payment for its customers' order flow; and one that simply charges **$2.61** a trade — we'll argue the most honest number in the industry.

## The Tier List

| App | Tier | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Interactive Brokers | **S** | The closest thing retail can get to an institutional terminal; visibly priced |
| Fidelity | **S** | 80 years old, privately held, and doesn't take order-flow money on your stock trades |
| Schwab | **A** | Enormous, cheap, reliable — just know that your idle cash is the business model |
| Public | **A** | Dropped order-flow payments on stocks in 2021 and said so out loud |
| Webull | **B** | Genuinely deep free charting; the most order-flow-dependent economics in the group |
| moomoo | **B** | Futu's international app — similar toolkit to Webull, aggressive sign-up promos |
| Trading 212 | **B** | A solid commission-free app for the UK and Europe; doesn't accept US customers at all |
| Robinhood | **C** | The best onboarding in the industry, with incentives you need to understand first |
| eToro | **C** | Copy-trading and a social feed; the crowd is the product |
| Chase | **D** | Fine if your checking account already lives there; no other reason to pick it |

Tiers are a judgment, not a measurement — we'll show you where ours bend. The rest of the lesson is the *why*, because the reasoning transfers to any broker, including ones not on this list.

## How a Free Broker Actually Gets Paid

Commissions died in 2019, when the major US brokers cut stock trades to $0 within weeks of each other. The fee didn't die. It moved somewhere you can't see it.

The main mechanism is **payment for order flow**, or PFOF: instead of sending your order to a public exchange, your broker routes it to a wholesale market-making firm, which fills the order and pays the broker a rebate for the privilege. The market maker earns the bid-ask spread; the broker takes a cut; you pay nothing visible.

One correction to the version that circulates online: brokers are not "selling your data to hedge funds who trade against you." The buyers are market makers — firms like Citadel Securities, a separate business from the hedge fund it shares a founder with — and they earn spreads at enormous scale, not bets against your account. The real, documented problem is subtler: the rebate creates a conflict over *execution quality*. In December 2020, the SEC fined Robinhood **$65 million** for, among other things, routing orders between 2015 and 2018 at prices inferior enough to cost customers **$34.1 million in aggregate — even after accounting for the commissions they saved**. Free trades, net loss.

The scale shows up in the income statements. Robinhood's full-year 2025 results, released February 10, 2026: a record **$4.5 billion** in revenue, of which **$2.628 billion** was transaction-based — rebates on options, crypto, and equities — and another **$1.514 billion** was net interest, much of it earned on customer cash and margin loans. Here is the fourth quarter, line by line:

<Chart name="LessonNineRevenueMixChart" />

Look at the smallest bar. At the most famous stock-trading app in the world, **stock trading generated $94 million of $1.28 billion in quarterly revenue — about 7%**. Options and crypto order flow are the engine. The stock trades are the storefront.

Webull leans on the model even harder. Its own filings, released March 4, 2026, show full-year 2025 order-flow rebates of **$304.1 million — 53.3% of total revenue**, up from 50.5% the year before. A majority of the business is selling its customers' orders.

None of this makes an app unusable. It makes the incentive legible: a broker paid per order wants more orders, in the products that rebate best.

## The Morning the Buy Button Vanished

Back to January 28, 2021, because it's the best stress test we have — and because the version you've probably heard ("Robinhood banned the buy button to protect hedge funds") doesn't survive contact with the documents.

The mechanics: in 2021, a stock trade took two days to legally settle, and in between a clearinghouse called the NSCC guarantees both sides — demanding collateral from every broker, scaled to the risk of its unsettled trades. GameStop going from **$17.25** at the start of January to an intraday **$483** on the 28th, with volume concentrated inside a handful of apps, blew those formulas up. Industry-wide, the clearinghouse's collateral pool jumped from **$26 billion to $33.5 billion** in a day.

Robinhood's share of that morning, per the SEC and House investigations:

<Chart name="LessonNineMarginCallChart" />

The demand was **$3.7 billion**, including a **$2.2 billion** "excess capital premium" — a surcharge that kicks in when a broker's own capital is thin relative to its risk. Robinhood had about **$696 million** on deposit. It restricted buying in the hottest names, which mechanically shrank its risk exposure; the clearinghouse then waived the surcharge for all members shortly after 9:00 a.m., bringing the requirement to roughly **$1.4 billion**, which Robinhood posted. The next day it announced **$1 billion** in emergency capital.

The House Committee's June 2022 report put the counterfactual in writing:

> "Without the NSCC waiver, over which Robinhood had no control, the company would have defaulted on its regulatory collateral obligations."

The SEC's own post-mortem, published in October 2021, pointed at the same plumbing — clearinghouse margin, not a favor to short sellers. Neither investigation found the conspiracy. What they found was arguably worse for the customer-trust question: a broker growing faster than its capital, surprised by a collateral rule that was published in advance.

The real lesson of the buy button generalizes: **a brokerage is a balance sheet with an app on top**. In calm markets all balance sheets look the same. Under stress, yours decides what you're allowed to do with your own account.

## What S Tier Looks Like

Now the top of the table — the two S tiers earn it in opposite ways.

**Interactive Brokers charges you, visibly.** Its February 2026 metrics: an average commission of **$2.61** per cleared order, including exchange, clearing, and regulatory fees. In exchange: institutional-grade execution and access to stocks, options, futures, bonds, and FX across global markets. The interface is famously dated, and it assumes you know what you're doing. Hedge funds technically run on prime brokers, not retail apps — but IBKR is the closest thing to a professional terminal a retail investor can open in an afternoon: **4.646 million client accounts** (up 31% in a year) holding **$820 billion**.

Divide assets by accounts, per broker, and you get the most honest chart in this lesson:

<Chart name="LessonNineAccountSizeChart" />

The average IBKR account holds roughly **$176,000**. The average Robinhood account: about **$12,000** ($324 billion across 27.0 million funded customers). Webull: about **$4,900**. Serious money sits where costs are visible and execution is the product — a better app review than any number of stars.

**Fidelity, the other S, charges you nothing — and still doesn't take the rebate.** Founded in 1946 and privately held for the 80 years since, it takes no payment for order flow on retail stock and ETF orders, routing them for execution quality instead. Its own disclosures claim more than **$3.2 billion** in price improvement delivered to customers on trades in 2025 — an average of **$26.04** saved on a 1,000-share order, versus an industry average of $5.11. The fan version of this praise ("they've never once screwed over their users") is unfalsifiable marketing; the falsifiable version — published execution numbers, an incentive structure that doesn't need you trading more — is better.

Schwab, at A, is what scale looks like with one catch. Record full-year 2025 revenue of **$23.9 billion**, **38.5 million** brokerage accounts, **$11.9 trillion** in client assets — and **$11.75 billion** of that revenue, essentially half, is net interest, the spread earned largely on customer cash sitting idle at near-zero default rates. Not hidden; just the answer to "how is this free?" Public, the other A, dropped order-flow payments on stock trades in February 2021 — one week after the GameStop episode — and replaced the revenue with optional tipping, which remains the cleanest pricing story among the new apps.

## Where the Tier List Bends

An honest ranking discloses its own weak points. Five of ours:

**Fidelity's halo has an options-shaped asterisk.** The no-PFOF policy covers stocks and ETFs; on options orders, Fidelity's routing disclosures show order-flow payments like nearly everyone else's. S tier means best-aligned, not conflict-free.

**IBKR's S is really for IBKR Pro.** The free tier, IBKR Lite, reintroduces the same order-flow economics we just examined. And the learning curve is real — a platform you can't operate is worth less than a simpler one you can.

**Robinhood at C is about incentives, not quality.** The steelman is strong: 27.0 million funded customers, **$68.1 billion** of net deposits in 2025 alone, and an onboarding flow that has pulled millions of people into investing. The enforcement record — the $65 million SEC settlement, FINRA's record **$70 million** sanction in 2021 — describes 2015–2021 conduct, and the 2026 product is meaningfully better than the one regulators wrote up. But the revenue mix above is current, and it still pays the company most when you trade most.

**Trading 212's B comes with a hard border.** It's a legitimate commission-free option in the UK and Europe — but it doesn't accept US customers at all. If you're in the US it isn't a B; it isn't an option.

**And for small accounts, the PFOF debate can outweigh its own stakes.** If you place a few hundred-dollar trades a year, order-flow economics cost you pennies — while parking idle cash in a near-zero default sweep for years costs real money. The biggest fee in the industry is inattention, and it's available at every tier.

## Three Questions That Rank Any Broker

Tier lists age; the method doesn't. Three questions, each answerable from public documents, rank any brokerage you'll ever consider:

**1. How does this broker make money?** Read the revenue mix in its earnings release and its SEC Rule 606 order-routing report. If most of the revenue is transaction rebates, expect the app to be engineered toward more trading, faster, in options and crypto. That's not a scandal; it's a design brief.

**2. What happens to my idle cash?** The default sweep rate is the quietest number in the account agreement, and at the scale of a Schwab it's half the income statement. Find where uninvested cash sits and what it earns; the gap between defaults can be the largest fee you ever pay.

**3. What happens under stress?** January 2021 was a public capital-adequacy exam, and every broker's behavior that week is on the record. A broker is custody plus execution — holding your assets, routing your orders — and the whole question is whether it can keep doing both on the worst morning of the cycle.

Notice what's not on the list: sign-up bonuses, app-store ratings, free-stock promos. Those are marketing budgets. The three questions are balance sheets — and the tier table at the top is what happens when you re-rank brokers on the things they'd rather not compete on.

The buy button is free everywhere now. The ranking was never about the button.

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*Data: Barebone | Sources: SEC press release and order re: Robinhood Financial (Dec. 17, 2020), SEC Staff Report on Equity and Options Market Structure Conditions in Early 2021 (Oct. 2021), House Financial Services Committee "Game Stopped" report (June 2022), FINRA news release (June 30, 2021), Robinhood Q4 and FY2025 results (Feb. 10, 2026), Charles Schwab 4Q and full-year 2025 results (Jan. 21, 2026), Interactive Brokers February 2026 brokerage metrics (Mar. 2, 2026), Webull FY2025 results, Form 6-K (Mar. 4, 2026), Fidelity execution-quality disclosures, Trading 212 help centre | Data as of April 23, 2026*