Top 25 Best
Investment Apps

Glen's Take

Wealthfront's direct indexing feature is genuinely valuable for high-balance taxable accounts. Instead of buying VTI, Wealthfront buys the underlying 500+ individual stocks and harvests losses on each one separately. This generates significantly more tax alpha than fund-level harvesting. The 5% APY cash account is also best-in-class. If I were choosing between Betterment and Wealthfront for a large taxable account, Wealthfront wins on direct indexing alone. For smaller accounts or IRAs, it is a coin flip.

Glen's Take

M1 Finance is the most underrated investing app on this list. The pie concept is brilliant -- you set your target allocation once, and every dollar you deposit is automatically invested to maintain those targets. No manual rebalancing, no spreadsheet tracking, no forgetting to buy the lagging fund. It is like building your own robo-advisor for free. The only catch: M1 uses a single daily trading window, so you cannot trade intraday. For buy-and-hold investors, that is a feature, not a bug.

Glen's Take

Acorns is great for building the habit of investing and terrible as a long-term platform. The $3/month fee on a $500 balance is an effective 7.2% annual expense ratio -- worse than the most predatory mutual fund. On $5,000, it is still 0.72%. On $50,000, it is 0.072%, which is reasonable. My advice: start with Acorns to build the muscle, then graduate to Fidelity or M1 Finance once you have a few thousand dollars saved. Acorns served its purpose when it got you investing. Do not let loyalty keep you paying high fees.

Glen's Take

Stash is the training wheels version of investing. The themed collections are a smart way to help beginners understand sector exposure without drowning them in ticker symbols. The Stock-Back card is a clever hook. But like Acorns, the flat monthly fee is expensive for small accounts. $3/month on $1,000 is a 3.6% effective fee. The educational content is genuinely good though. If you are choosing between Stash and Acorns for your first investing app, Stash teaches you more. Then graduate to a real brokerage.

Glen's Take

Public deserves credit for killing PFOF when it was the easy revenue stream. That takes conviction. The bond access is also genuinely useful -- buying individual Treasury bonds through TreasuryDirect is painful, and most apps do not offer individual bonds at all. The AI analysis tools are interesting but not yet at the level of a human analyst. Public is a solid pick for investors who want a modern interface with Fidelity-level execution quality. The social features are take-it-or-leave-it.

Glen's Take

Moomoo's free Level 2 data is the hook, and it is genuinely valuable. Being able to see full order book depth on Nasdaq stocks without paying for a data subscription is a real edge for active traders. The screeners and financial data presentation are better than what most paid platforms offer. The concern is the parent company -- Futu Holdings is a Chinese-listed company, which makes some U.S. investors uncomfortable about data security. Your assets are held by a U.S.-regulated clearing firm, but the app itself is developed overseas.

Glen's Take

If you trade options seriously, Tastytrade's capped commission structure saves real money on large positions. The platform thinks in probabilities and expected outcomes, which is exactly how options should be traded. Tom Sosnoff built thinkorswim and then built Tastytrade to fix what he thought thinkorswim got wrong. The educational content through Tastylive is genuinely world-class for options education. Not for beginners, not for buy-and-hold investors, but for options traders it is purpose-built.

Glen's Take

TradeStation is for the engineer-trader who wants to code their edge. EasyLanguage is surprisingly approachable -- if you can write basic pseudocode, you can build a strategy. The backtesting is rigorous and the automated execution means your strategy runs whether you are watching or not. I explored TradeStation when I was testing systematic approaches for my hedge fund. The learning curve is steep, but for quantitative traders, it offers capabilities that Schwab and Fidelity simply do not have.

Glen's Take

Merrill Edge makes sense almost exclusively for Bank of America customers who can qualify for Preferred Rewards tiers. The Gold tier ($20K+ combined balance) gets you 25% bonus on BofA credit card rewards. The Platinum Honor tier ($100K+) gets you 75% bonus. If you are already in the BofA ecosystem, Merrill Edge is free money. If you are not a BofA customer, there is no compelling reason to choose Merrill over Fidelity or Schwab.

Glen's Take

Ally Invest follows the same logic as Merrill Edge for BofA customers: if you already bank with Ally, adding investing is seamless. Moving money between savings and brokerage is instant. The managed portfolios are reasonably priced at 0.30%, though Betterment and Wealthfront offer more sophisticated tax-loss harvesting at 0.25%. Ally is a perfectly adequate brokerage that benefits mainly from banking integration. Not exciting, but functional.

Glen's Take

Firstrade is the dark horse for cost-conscious options traders. Zero per-contract fees on options is unique. If you trade 100 options contracts per month, that saves $50-65 versus Schwab or Fidelity. The platform is not pretty and the tools are basic, but if your primary concern is minimizing trading costs, Firstrade wins on pure economics. The international account support also makes it popular with non-U.S. investors who want access to American markets.

Glen's Take

J.P. Morgan Self-Directed is the investing platform for people who live in the Chase app. It is adequate, not exceptional. The research is decent, the interface is clean, and the integration with Chase checking and savings is seamless. But compared to Fidelity, Schwab, or IBKR, the trading tools are limited. No mutual funds, limited options support, and basic charting. Use this if Chase is your primary bank and you want simplicity. Use something else if you want depth.

Glen's Take

I use TradingView every single morning before the market opens. It is the best charting platform that exists for retail investors, and it is not even close. I track GSE preferred stock spreads, run custom Pine Script indicators, and set price alerts that notify me on my phone. The free tier is usable. The Premium tier ($14.95/month) removes ads and adds more alerts. The community is massive -- when I am researching a new position, I check TradingView to see what other analysts are charting.

Glen's Take

I published over 300 articles on Seeking Alpha covering GSE preferred stocks, value investing ideas, and macro analysis. The platform made me a better investor because writing forces you to think clearly about your thesis. The Quant Ratings are surprisingly predictive -- top-rated stocks have historically outperformed bottom-rated stocks by a wide margin. At $239/year, Premium is not cheap, but the earnings transcripts and analyst estimates alone are worth it if you do fundamental research.

Glen's Take

Morningstar's Star Ratings are what most financial advisors use to evaluate funds, and for good reason -- the methodology is rigorous and the data is comprehensive. The fair value estimates on individual stocks are useful as a sanity check, though I prefer doing my own DCF models. Where Morningstar truly shines is fund and ETF analysis. If you want to understand what is inside your target-date fund or compare two similar ETFs, Morningstar's tools are unmatched. The $249/year is worth it for serious fund investors.