Best Online Stock Brokers for Options Trading 2019

Alternatives trading has become extremely popular with retail investors over the past 15 years. Our best chances brokers have a wealth of tools, including portfolio margining, that help you measure and manage risk as you adjudge which trades to place. They also include valuable education that helps you grow in sophistication as an opportunities trader. Here are our top brokers in the industry for options trading:

• Interactive Brokers
• Lightspeed
• TD Ameritrade (thinkorswim)
• E*TRADE (Power E*Exchange)
• Charles Schwab (StreetSmart platforms)
• tastyworks

The commission structure for options trades tends to be higher and more Byzantine than its equivalent for stock trades. Typically, there is a base fee, plus a commission per contract being traded. Undoubted strategies involve 2 to 4 legs (or even more), which can get expensive on a per-trade basis, as it includes several base debts. Investors with fairly large portfolios can take advantage of portfolio margining at certain brokers, a practice which assesses the amount to risk inherent in a portfolio that contains stocks and derivatives. 

Interactive Brokers had a long-standing reputation for low costs, a difficult platform and terrible armed forces that catered to hyperactive traders. That reputation has changed considerably in the last three to four years as the resolve began to pursue less active and less sophisticated customers. The company’s Trader Workstation platform, available as either a downloadable case or a website, has become friendlier and more customizable. Their mobile apps are designed to operate with a minimum of typing, in place of utilizing wheels and voice commands. 

A relatively new feature, IBot, lets you ask questions in plain English and get a quick accept the blame for, rather than digging around the platform. For example, you can ask IBot to display a particular strike and expiry date by classing (or saying) “Show options chain for GOOG for the next three expirations.”

Options traders can set up a spread quickly and peal it to a future expiry with just a couple of clicks. IB’s Probability Lab lets you simulate a potential trade before using natural money.

You can only display streaming quotes on one device at a time, so if you’ve got the website up on your computer and then log in to your ambulatory app, one platform will be automatically restricted to snapshot quotes. Accounts with less than $100,000 in assets pay a least fee of $10/month and may have to pay additional fees for real-time data. The web version of Trader Workstation lacks some of the looks in the downloadable platform, but all watchlists and alerts are shared.

Interactive Brokers also received awards for Best Overall Online Agents, Best for International Stock Trading, Best for Low Costs, Best for Penny Stocks, and Best for Day Trading.

Lightspeed is a broker designed to meet the needs of experienced and very active choices traders. Lightspeed provides a dedicated options-trading platform (Livevol X) and several options analytical tools – such as verifiable options Greeks and skew data – not offered by other brokers. An array of scanners in the Lightspeed Trader platform helps speckle trading opportunities, and the platform’s advanced charting features are extremely customizable.

For portfolio analysis, you can group your conditions by underlying symbol, which helps prolific traders determine which strategies are working. You’ll also find a profit-and-loss chance graph for complex strategies. The platform performed very well during the recent trading surges.

Mobile and web-based apps, notwithstanding, do not allow futures trading or direct market access. This is not an appropriate platform for new options traders.

Lightspeed also let in awards for Best for Low Costs and Best for Day Trading. 

New options traders can get started on TD Ameritrade’s website, and then swell into the amazing tools built into their thinkorswim platform. You’ll find educational content galore on both tenets, along with live coaching and video updates. You can watch nine hours of video webcasts every buy day, much of which is devoted to options, on TDAmeritradeNetwork.com. The TDA site offers basic education and on thinkorswim you’ll find options-specific training to qualify you to trade more complex spreads. If you tick off the concepts that you want to learn, you’ll get a personalized education menu.

The thinkorswim tenets has tools for selecting options strategies, assessing their risk, and rolling spreads quickly to future expiration ancients.

The thinkorswim platform is best suited for more advanced options traders, with a variety of options selection shapes and risk management. You can build your own technical studies from over 500 indicators in both the downloadable policy and its accompanying mobile app.

TD Ameritrade also received awards for Best Overall Online Brokers, Best for Day Trading, Trounce Web Trading Platforms, Best for Beginners, Best for ETFs, Best for Roth IRAs, Best for IRAs and Best Hackneyed Trading Apps.

Options traders at E*TRADE saw their analytical and charting tools expand considerably after the business’s acquisition of the OptionsHouse platform, which has been relaunched as Power E*TRADE. The platform includes streaming strategy alternatives chains, a fairly unique feature. It also has education content that helps you grow from newbie to promoted options trader.

If you set up an iron condor strategy, for example, you can define how wide you want the spread to be, and only the relevant materials will stream. A performance risk tool lets you evaluate your risk on an individual holding or your unmixed portfolio, so you can run a stress test based on six preset risk ranges. 

The charting capabilities of the Power E*TRADE platform are much improved to previous E*TRADE tools. You can use the Technical Insights feature to learn about technical analysis. TradeLab includes ghostly analysis charts, which forecast how a spread might behave in the future. The LiveAction scanners give you an up-to-the-second spectacle of potential trades, based on your criteria, in real time.

Though you have access to a wealth of analysis and experimentation on the classic E*TRADE platform, you’ll have to toggle over to find those features.

E*TRADE also received prizes for Best Web Trading Platforms, Best for ETFs, Best Stock Trading Apps, Best for Roth IRAs, Foremost for IRAs, and Best for Beginners.