Firstrade Review 2025: Fees, Services and More

Firstrade is an online brokerage offering commission-free trading on stocks, ETFs, options and mutual funds. Unlike many competitors, it provides access to a wide range of securities, including fractional shares and fixed-income products like bonds, making it a more versatile choice for long-term investors. The platform supports multiple account types, including retirement and education savings accounts, and offers research tools powered by Morningstar and other providers. However, Firstrade’s platform design remains a weak point, with a dated interface that can be challenging to navigate. Still, its low-cost structure and broad investment options make it a contender for cost-conscious investors.

Keep in mind that a financial advisor can help you create a strategic investing plan based on your financial preferences and goals. Match with an advisor today.

Services and Features: What Does Firstrade Offer?

Firstrade is known as one of the first low-budget trading platforms on the internet, as well as for offering trading services to residents in a wide variety of countries and languages.

Perhaps the best part of Firstrade is the range of assets this service offers. While not a full-service brokerage like the major players in this space, Firstrade does offer a significantly more well-rounded series of choices than many of its more stripped-down competitors. Investors on Firstrade can invest in stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), options, mutual funds and bonds.

It’s important to call out these last two. Mutual funds and bonds are an important part of most investors’ portfolios. For a retail investor, products like these should typically make up a significant portion of your long-term holdings. This is particularly true of index funds, given that a very low percentage of professionally managed funds historically beat the S&P 500. This gives Firstrade a notable and important edge over comparable services like Robinhood and Webull. Unlike those platforms, you can use Firstrade for your entire portfolio rather than having to choose different trading tools for your speculative assets vs. your long-term investments.

Firstrade is primarily built around its website interface, but it also offers a mobile trading app that syncs seamlessly with your web-based trading. (This is not a particularly noteworthy feature, as both interfaces simply draw their data from the same portfolio.) You can also place trades over the phone and receive assistance via phone, email or chat.

This service offers a wide variety of account types, including IRA, educational, dedicated business portfolios and others. It also offers a decent variety of research options for users to dive into.

The research options available through Firstrade are, again, beyond what is offered by other budget trading platforms. You can get all of the basic technical indicators that an investor has come to expect, ranging from the price history and trade volume of an asset to more sophisticated data such as bid-ask spreads and basic volatility metrics. In addition to this, Firstrade offers fundamental analysis with access to Morningstar streaming news sources.

Pricing: How Much Does Firstrade Cost?

As an investor you should generally look for four types of fees attached to an online trading platform:

Trading fees. Any charge attached to each trade that you make. This can come in the form of a flat fee, or more often will be based on the “spread.” This is the difference, if any, between the buying and the selling price of an asset.
Trading commissions. This is when a broker will charge you a percentage based on the volume or value of each trade, based on the value of assets in a specific investment, or based on the total value of assets in the portfolio.
Inactivity fees. Any fees that the broker charges you for not trading, such as if it charges you for keeping money in a brokerage account.
Non-trading/Other fees. Any form of fee for trading on this platform not covered above. For example, a brokerage might charge you for making deposits into your brokerage account or taking money out.

Firstrade was one of the first brokers on the internet to offer completely free trading, and even today is usually cheaper than any of its competitors. This platform offers free trading in stocks, ETFs, mutual funds and options. This last is rare, if not unique, among online trading platforms.

Investors pay a net yield basis to trade bonds, and margin trading is available starting at interest rates of 11% (8.75% for $1 million and over). Broker assisted trading typically comes with an additional $19.95 charge. Firstrade does not charge inactivity fees, but does charge some fees for basic activities such as transferring your money out. The exact amounts vary depending on how you move your money and what you choose to do.

Effectiveness: How Well Does Firstrade Work?

Perhaps the greatest weakness in the Firstrade platform is in its design. The truth is that online investing is an enormously complicated business. Inexperienced investors need an interface and layout that lets them learn the ropes while still competently managing their money. Sophisticated investors need a website that lets them navigate among a stupendously vast financial universe with ease. Neither category of investor wants to slow down and think about how to use their interface and the products in front of them.

Unfortunately that’s exactly what happens here.

As a website, Firstrade is generally poorly laid out. It is difficult to find assets, difficult to find information within those assets and difficult to create custom data sets for exploring your own trading options. However, the design for each individual asset’s screen is fairly well laid out, with critical technical data along the top and news and analysis along the side.

Pricing wars have also caught up with and surpassed Firstrade in the market. By now virtually all major trading platforms offer free exchange-based trading, and many offer free options contracts as well. While totally free mutual fund trades are rare, if not unique to this platform, most major brokerages offer extensive no-fee fund lists that can meet the needs of almost any retail trader.

Bottom Line

Firstrade is a low-cost brokerage that offers commission-free trading across a wide range of securities, making it a solid option for cost-conscious, long-term investors. It remains one of the few platforms to offer free options trading with no contract fees and commission-free mutual funds, giving it an advantage over many competitors.

However, its outdated interface, lack of advanced research tools, and market-wide shift to commission-free trading have diminished its appeal. For investors looking for a streamlined experience with better tools and support, platforms like Fidelity or Charles Schwab may be better choices.

Tips on Investing

Not every trading platform is the right choice for you, given your unique goals, timeline and risk profile. A financial advisor can help you get clarity on those three factors so that you will know which trading platform to choose. SmartAsset’s matching tool matches you with vetted financial advisors who serve your area, and you can have a free introductory call with your advisor matches to decide which one you feel is right for you. If you’re ready to find an advisor who can help you achieve your financial goals, get started now.
For investors who are just getting started, picking the right trading platform can be a key step in the process. Our guide on investing for beginners can help you learn the other key steps in this process, from learning the numbers to picking your assets.