Every Brokerage Calls Itself Free. We Scored 10 to See Who Pays.

The $0 Trade That Isn't

Open any brokerage's homepage tonight and you will find the same number: $0. Zero commissions, zero account minimums, zero reasons - apparently - to pick one over another.

And yet last year Robinhood collected $2.628 billion in transaction-based revenue from those free trades. Schwab pays 0.05% on default cash while the Fed holds rates at 3.50 - 3.75%. And one of the two brokers at the top of our scorecard charges its average customer $2.61 a trade - on purpose, and we'll argue that's a feature.

Everyone tells you to open a brokerage account. Almost nobody shows you the bill. So we scored the ten brokerage apps a retail investor is most likely to open in 2026 across six categories: fees, design, what you can trade, how safe your money is, what each trade actually costs you after execution, and what they do with your data. We used Barebone to pull the receipts behind the marketing - earnings releases, SEC Rule 606 order-routing disclosures, fee schedules, and five years of enforcement actions - side by side.

The result is a tier list. The pattern behind it is more interesting than the rankings.

The Scorecard

Broker	Tier	In one line
Fidelity	S	The only mass-market default settings that don't charge you for inattention
Interactive Brokers	S	Visible costs, institutional execution, every major asset class
Public	A	No order-flow payments on stocks; the cleanest pricing story among the apps
Wealthsimple (Canada)	A	The best option in Canada - once you neutralize the 1.5% currency fee
Robinhood	B	The best-designed app in the business, with a business model worth understanding
Schwab	B	The biggest platform in the group; the 0.05% default sweep is the catch
moomoo	B	The deepest free charting toolkit; newer to the US and still proving out
Chase (J.P. Morgan)	C	Convenient if your checking account already lives there; little else stands out
E*TRADE (Morgan Stanley)	C	Fine if you're already on it, no reason to switch to it
Webull	C	Slick interface, but the most order-flow-dependent economics in our study

One correction worth making before we go further, because comparison lists keep getting it wrong: E*TRADE is not part of Schwab. Morgan Stanley closed its all-stock acquisition of E*TRADE on October 2, 2020. Schwab bought TD Ameritrade. Different deals, different owners - and it matters, because who owns your broker determines whose balance sheet your idle cash is feeding.

Who Actually Pays for Free

Zero-commission trading runs on payment for order flow, or PFOF: instead of sending your order to an exchange, your broker routes it to a wholesale market maker, which fills the order and pays the broker a small rebate for the privilege. You pay nothing visible. The market maker earns the bid-ask spread. The broker takes a cut.

The scale of that cut is the first thing our scoring surfaced.

Robinhood's full-year 2025 results, released February 10, 2026, show $4.5 billion in total net revenue - a record. Of that, $2.628 billion (58.4%) was transaction-based revenue: rebates from market makers on options, crypto, and equities. Another $1.514 billion was net interest revenue, much of it earned on customer cash and margin lending. Add it up and roughly 92 cents of every revenue dollar came from the two lines that monetize how you trade and what you leave idle.

The fourth-quarter mix tells you what the product really is: $314 million of transaction revenue from options (up 41% year over year), $221 million from crypto (down 38%), and just $94 million from equities. Free stock trading is the storefront. Options order flow is the engine.

Webull leans even harder on the model relative to its size. Its own interim filings show equity and options order-flow rebates of $132.8 million in the first half of 2025 - 53.4% of total revenue, up from 48.8% a year earlier. A majority of Webull's business, in other words, is selling its customers' orders. That, plus a disclosure history that only began with its April 2025 SPAC listing, is why it scored lowest on transparency in our study.

Schwab is a different animal: FY2025 trading revenue - which bundles commissions, order-flow payments, and principal transactions - was $3.921 billion, up 20%, but only about 16.4% of its record $23.9 billion in net revenue. Schwab doesn't need your order flow. It has something better, which we'll get to.

Then there's the counter-model. Fidelity takes no payment for order flow on stock trades - it routes equity orders for execution quality and, by its own disclosures, delivered more than $1.3 billion in price improvement to customers in 2022 alone. Public dropped PFOF on stocks back in early 2021 and replaced it with optional tipping; on options, where it does collect order-flow payments, it rebates $0.06 to $0.18 per contract back to enrolled customers. And Interactive Brokers simply charges you: an average of $2.61 per cleared commissionable order, all-in, per its February 2026 metrics.

That $2.61 is the honest number in this industry. Every other broker's price is somewhere in the spread, the rebate, or the sweep - you just can't see it.

The Cash Nobody Watches

The second invisible fee has nothing to do with trading. It's what happens to your money between trades.

When the Fed held rates at 3.50 - 3.75% on March 18 (an 11 - 1 vote, one dissent for a cut), short-term cash kept paying real money. Whether you receive it depends entirely on your broker's default:

• Fidelity automatically sweeps uninvested cash into SPAXX, a government money market fund yielding about 3.3%.
• Robinhood pays 3.35% APY through its High-Yield Cash program - but only if you pay $5 a month for Gold. On $10,000, that's $335 a year, minus the $60 subscription.
• Schwab's default bank sweep pays 0.05%. On the same $10,000: $5 a year.

This is not an oversight on Schwab's part; it's the business. Across 38.5 million active brokerage accounts, Schwab's fourth-quarter net interest margin was 2.90% - the spread between what client cash earns the firm and what the firm pays out is a primary profit engine, and it helped drive that record $23.9 billion revenue year, up 22%. To be fair to Schwab: a money market fund yielding about 3.3% is one manual trade away inside the same account. The 0.05% is a tax on inattention, not a cage. But defaults are where most balances actually sit, and Schwab knows it.

Wealthsimple runs the Canadian version of the invisible fee. The app itself is excellent - genuinely the best option in Canada, which is why it holds an A - but trading US stocks from a Canadian-dollar account costs a 1.5% currency conversion each way, every trade. The fix exists: a USD account at $10 a month converts your cash once and ends the per-trade toll. If you trade US names from Canada and haven't done this, that subscription pays for itself almost immediately.

See the pattern? The fee is never gone. It just moves to wherever you're not looking.

The Trust Ledger

Our sixth category - what they do with your data, and whether you can trust the disclosures - is where the tier list stopped matching the marketing.

Robinhood is the instructive case, because the same company appears on both sides of the ledger. The SEC's December 2020 settlement - $65 million - found that between 2018 and 2019, Robinhood's inferior execution prices cost customers $34.1 million in aggregate even after accounting for the commissions they saved. Free trades, net loss. FINRA followed in June 2021 with a $70 million sanction for what it called systemic supervisory failures. In January 2025 the SEC collected another $45 million across Robinhood's two broker-dealers, and in March 2025 FINRA added $29.75 million more, including $3.75 million in customer restitution.

That's just under $210 million in settlements since 2020, and it's why Robinhood sits at B despite having, in our scoring, the best-designed app in the industry.

The steelman matters, though: most of that conduct dates to 2018 - 2022, and the 2026 product is meaningfully better than the one regulators wrote up. Robinhood ended 2025 with 27.0 million funded customers (up 1.8 million year over year), 4.2 million Gold subscribers (up 58%), $324 billion in platform assets, and $68 billion of net deposits on the year. Customers are voting with their transfers, and the cash program - 3.35% for subscribers - is now genuinely competitive. The fines are history. Whether the incentives that produced them are history too is the thing to watch, because the revenue mix above says the company still earns most of its money when you trade more.

Where the S-Tiers Earn It

Fidelity's S comes down to alignment-by-default: zero commissions, no PFOF on stocks, execution routed for price improvement, and idle cash automatically earning about 3.3% with no subscription attached. It is the only mass-market broker in our study whose default settings don't quietly monetize your inattention.

Interactive Brokers earns its S the opposite way - by charging visibly and competing on everything else. Its February 2026 metrics: 4.646 million client accounts, up 31% year over year, holding $820 billion in client equity. Divide one by the other and the average IBKR account holds roughly $176,000, against about $12,000 at Robinhood ($324 billion across 27.0 million customers). Those accounts traded 204 times a year on average. Stocks, options, futures, bonds, funds, and FX across global markets, at an average all-in commission of $2.61 - this is what the professionals' choice looks like in the data, and it's been compounding for decades.

Where Our Scorecard Breaks

An honest tier list has to disclose where it bends.

Fidelity isn't a saint - check the options line. The no-PFOF policy covers stocks; on options, Fidelity's own Rule 606 disclosures show order-flow payments, like nearly everyone else. S-tier means best-aligned, not conflict-free.

IBKR's S assumes you can use it. The interface is built for people who already know what a contingent order is, and its free tier, IBKR Lite, reintroduces the same PFOF economics we dinged others for. The S is really for IBKR Pro.

Public's halo has an asterisk. No PFOF on stocks is real, but the options rebate program means Public participates in order-flow economics where the money is largest - it just shares some back.

Design is worth more than purists admit. Robinhood made millions of people investors who otherwise wouldn't be. An imperfectly-aligned broker you actually use beats a perfectly-aligned one you don't.

And the weights are editorial. We scored six categories evenly. If you never hold cash, the sweep gap is irrelevant. If you trade twice a year, PFOF costs you pennies. Your weights are the right weights.

What This Means

The question "which brokerage is best?" dissolves under data into "which fee would you rather pay?" - because every model charges somewhere.

If you are...	The fee that matters	Where the scoring points
A buy-and-hold investor who keeps cash	The default sweep	Fidelity
An active or multi-asset trader	Execution + commissions	Interactive Brokers
A Canadian trading US stocks	The 1.5% FX conversion	Wealthsimple, with the USD account
Phone-first, design-driven	Order flow + the Gold math	Robinhood, eyes open
Already at Schwab, E*TRADE, or Chase	Idle cash at 0.05%	Stay, but move the cash deliberately
A charting power user	Order-flow economics	moomoo or Webull, knowing who pays whom

One closing thought from the study. A brokerage is custody and execution - it holds your money and routes your orders. It doesn't think for you, and in a market where the Fed is holding and every basis point of yield is contested, the thinking is the part that compounds. Every broker on this list will tell you it's free. The data says the real question is whether the price you're paying is the one you can see - or the one you can't.

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Data: Barebone | Sources: Robinhood Q4 and FY2025 results (Feb 10, 2026), Charles Schwab Q4 2025 earnings release and FY2025 Form 10-K, Interactive Brokers February 2026 brokerage metrics, Webull Form 6-K interim filings, SEC and FINRA enforcement releases (2020 - 2025), FOMC statement (Mar 18, 2026), Fidelity execution-quality disclosures, Wealthsimple fee schedule | Data as of April 1, 2026