TD Ameritrade vs. Robinhood

Editor’s Note: Schwab acquired TD Ameritrade in 2019 and has since migrated TD Ameritrade accounts onto its own platform. Former TD Ameritrade clients now have access to the thinkorswim trading platform and other educational resources through Schwab.

Comparing TD Ameritrade and Robinhood is a little bit of an exercise in apples-to-oranges. TD Ameritrade is a full-service brokerage firm offering storefront advising, online and app-based trading platforms and robo-advisors. Robinhood is a highly streamlined, primarily app-based trading platform in which investors make their own decisions. Here’s how to evaluate these two services.

For hands-on investment help, a financial advisor can guide you in putting a financial and investment plan together.

TD Ameritrade vs. Robinhood: Fees

From a user end, there are largely four types of fees to look out for in a trading platform:

Trading fees: Any form of fee attached to each trade that you make. This can come in the form of a flat fee, or more often the broker will charge you what’s known as 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.
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.

Robinhood charges no trading fees or commissions, no inactivity fees, no fees for moving money in or out of your account and very few non-trading fees. Instead, Robinhood makes money by pocketing the small difference between the buying and selling price of an asset. This generates very little money, typically only pennies or less per share traded, but over millions of transactions those pennies add up. The service does charge $5 per month for an upgrade to Robinhood Gold, which allows you to borrow money at 3% for margin trading.

TD Ameritrade has $0 online trading fees. This free trading covers equities (stocks), exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and options traded over the firm’s website and app. At time of writing, this full-service firm offered many features that Robinhood didn’t, leading to a more complicated price structure. For example, broker-assisted trading will typically cost $25 per trade, while placing an order over the telephone involves a $5 trading fee. Some mutual funds will incur a $50 trading fee. Options can cost $0.65 per contract in some cases, while futures cost $2.25 per contract over this service. The firm charges a $75 transfer fee to move your portfolio to another service.

TD Ameritrade vs. Robinhood: Services and Features

The main difference between Robinhood and TD Ameritrade is breadth of services.

Robinhood is a streamlined trading platform focused on its app, although it has also introduced a web interface. In keeping with its goal of appealing to new investors, Robinhood is feature-limited. You can trade stocks, ETFs, options and ADRs through its main service. Most notably this means an investor cannot purchase bonds or mutual funds. A recently introduced feature called Robinhood Crypto allows users to trade cryptocurrencies.

Robinhood offers little in the way of investor data or tool sets. For each asset you can pull up an individual page that gives the asset’s basic trading information (such as its current buy/sell price), five years of pricing history and basic statistics such as trading volume. The app offers no additional data, context or tools for technical analysis. This is by design as Robinhood is intended for users who have little, if any, experience in the markets. The goal is to avoid intimidating new traders with a wall of unfamiliar tools and data. But that also means traders have no access to such data either.

TD Ameritrade is a full-service brokerage that also has a web- and app-based trading platform. Investors can purchase virtually any mainstream security through this service, including equities, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, currencies, options and futures. The most notable gap is that, unlike Robinhood, TD Ameritrade does not support directly investing in cryptocurrency at this time.

In addition to direct investment, TD Ameritrade offers a wide variety of tools, data sets and advising options for investors. This includes not only standard technical analysis, such as candlestick charts and extended pricing history, but also market analysis reports, tools for comparing the performance of various assets and asset classes, tools for projecting the performance of certain investments and more. TD Ameritrade also offers brokerage services, meaning that investors can get advice on their portfolio. This comes in the form of either robo-advising (finding automatically managed accounts build for certain performance metrics) or speaking with an actual investment advisor.

Unlike with Robinhood, though, many of these services can cost additional money to use.

TD Ameritrade vs. Robinhood: Online and Mobile

There are two major differences in the user experience of Robinhood vs. TD Ameritrade. First, and most importantly, is customer support. Like many platforms, Robinhood thinks of itself as a technology company involved with finance. This defines its approach to customer service, which is limited to an FAQ and email address. While this works for a company selling Bluetooth speakers, many customers may want the option to talk to a human being when it comes to managing their money.

TD Ameritrade, on the other hand, has multiple channels for customer service, ranging from telephone and email all the way to physical branches you can visit if need be.

The other critical difference is scope and accessibility. Robinhood’s platform has been built around the core concept of accessibility. The company, in a very real sense, wants to make investing as easy as playing a game or swiping on Tinder. It has succeeded, for better or worse.

The Robinhood app (its primary interface) is intuitive and easy to use. Assets are listed in menus that you can quickly navigate and are grouped together with category tags that let you easily find other, similarly situated investments. Any given investment’s information screen is clean and understandable, and the app does a good job of making sure users can find tools that are there.

However, this ease of use comes at a cost. The interface is clean primarily because there’s relatively little in it, with investors able to access only limited information about any given product. It is, in fact, far easier to buy and sell a product than to actually learn more about how you’re spending that money. And a series of prompts at the bottom of each asset’s page will suggest additional assets that you can buy in a manner similar to how streaming services will prompt you to keep binge watching with similarly categorized TV shows and movies.

TD Ameritrade, on the other hand, certainly does not suffer from a surplus of simplicity. As an investment platform, this service offers two options: its basic app simply called the TD Ameritrade Mobile App and its app for sophisticated investors called thinkorswim. It allows you to create customized technical analysis, building data sets from just about any different group of indicators and assets according to your investment strategy. This is very useful for a specific kind of investor.

The TD Ameritrade app, on the other hand, is the company’s base line product. It’s intended for most investors, ranging from the fairly sophisticated to the brand new. It largely succeeds at this. The TD Ameritrade app is well designed and offers a generally intuitive layout. Even inexperienced investors will be able to find basic information such as price history, current trading prices as well as buy and sell commands. More sophisticated investors have access to analytical tools by choosing different tabs on an asset’s page.

As with all full-service platforms, however, TD Ameritrade’s ease of use has its limits. Particularly for the new investors targeted by Robinhood, the volume of information available on TD Ameritrade may prove overwhelming at first. It will likely take these investors some time to get comfortable with this platform, and they’ll be well advised to make sure they understand exactly what buttons they’ve pushed before committing any money.

TD Ameritrade vs. Robinhood: Who Should Use It?

TD Ameritrade is a fine platform for virtually any investor. Robinhood is designed to provide a streamlined experience for new investors. It does this by providing a stripped-down, feature-light trading platform that is easy to pick up and use regardless of your experience level with finance. Trading on this platform mimics the mechanics of app-based gameplay. It is, above all else, easy.

Yet inexperienced investors are exactly the demographic who should move a little more slowly. Robinhood can steer investors into higher-risk choices than they otherwise might have made. Traders primarily buy and sell stocks on this app, a natural result of the low-information system which Robinhood provides, and prompts at the bottom of each asset screen suggest similar stocks that traders could buy in a similar way that Netflix queues up new shows to encourage binging. The firm emphasizes options, a high-complexity and high-risk asset class that aren’t usually appropriate for neophyte investors.

For new investors, the more thorough, slower pace of TD Ameritrade will serve them well, even if it feels more daunting at first. Meanwhile, experienced investors will find Robinhood’s feature-light platform almost immediately limiting. TD Ameritrade’s full spectrum of customizable technical analysis tools and broad asset classes will serve even sophisticated investors well.

Bottom Line

Both TD Ameritrade and Robinhood offer basic free stock trading, though each platform offers extras for a fee. That’s especially the case with TD Ameritrade, which lets users trade bonds and mutual funds, something Robinhood does not provide. TD Ameritrade also has a robust array of customer-service options, while Robinhood only offers email assistance. Also, TD Ameritrade’s thinkorswim platform is one of the industry’s most sophisticated resources.

Tips for Investing

The best way to start trading is by taking a step back and making a plan. That’s something that a financial advisor can provide critical insight into. Finding a financial advisor doesn’t have to be hard. SmartAsset’s matching tool matches you with up to three vetted financial advisors who serve your area, and you can interview your advisor matches at no cost to decide which one is right for you. If you’re ready to find an advisor who can help you achieve your financial goals, get started now.
One of the most helpful tools for investing – whether you use an online trading platform or not – is a free, easy-to-use asset allocation calculator. It will keep the “guardrails” up on your decision making so you’re more likely to stay on the road to reaching your financial destination.