Fidelity ABOUT:
Fidelity Investments is marked as the best for investors. It is a full-service broker with over 19 million retail brokerage accounts and over $2 trillion in client assets.
Fidelity charges $4.95 per stock trade, $4.95 plus $.65 per contract for options trades, and is highly regarded for its quality customer service, extensive retirement services, and all-around investment offering.
Fidelity offers 12,505 mutual funds, of which just over 4,000 are No Transaction Fee (NTF) funds. Regular mutual fund trades cost $49.95 to buy, $0 to sell. Unlike most brokers, Fidelity and Charles Schwab charge only for the original purchase. There is no additional charge for redemption.
The company’s tradition of putting clients’ interests “before our own is a big part of what makes Fidelity special,” the fund firm says in its mission statement. The mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments founded seven decades ago. And run ever since by the Johnson family, has won the trust of tens of millions of investors.
Over the past several years the mutual funds have been among the nation’s biggest investors in pre-IPO companies, U.S. regulatory filings show.
Official website: https://www.fidelity.com/
PLATFORM:
Fidelity provides an intuitive client website and sleek mobile platform suitable for novice and casual investors. Also for moderately active traders, who want to research, place and manage their own trades.
The client website supports conditional orders. And both the website and mobile app offer an extremely well-designed, comprehensive symbol profile page. That includes customizable charts, news, Equity Summary scores, social sentiment, company profiles, financials and more.
Advanced and active traders can use Fidelity’s customizable desktop platform – Active Trader Pro – available for both PC and Mac.
The platform features streaming market data, advanced trading capabilities. This includes conditional orders and the ability to place up to 20 orders at once with the multi-trade ticket.
Also, portfolio management tools and integrated access to positions, charts, news, alerts. And orders to help identify entry and exit strategies.
The online platform is well-organized, which makes it easy to order trades and conduct research.
The Fidelity online trading platform is laid out like a standard website. So, it is intuitive and it is easy to navigate by those new to the trading platform or even new to investment trading.
The trade ticket is straightforward, and you can preview your order before finalizing the trade.
When ordering options, you can choose from different strategies, including multi-leg, butterfly and condor.
When researching within the platform, you have access to dozens of interactive analytic charts. You can draw trend lines, add technical indicators and mark certain events.
Fidelity, like its competitors, provides active trader services and tools. This includes Active Trader Pro, which is both desktop and web-based, as well as Wealth-Lab Pro, which is desktop based. But does not make its active trader platforms automatically available to all customers.
FREE DEMO ACCOUNT:
Fidelity doesn’t support futures or forex trading.
It offers the demo mode for its software which means that does not directly offer a “paper trading” possibility.
WITHDRAWAL:
It generally takes between three to five days to receive your check. Depending upon mail delivery in your area and the type of account from which you are withdrawing money.
You can withdraw money via check from most non-retirement accounts. On Portfolio Summary, select Withdraw Money from the Select Action drop-down box.
There are some restrictions which may prevent withdrawals for online requests. These restrictions are in place to protect customers.
The maximum you can request to withdraw from your account online or by telephone is $100,000 per account.
To request a withdrawal greater than $100,000, you must complete a paper form. The minimum amount for a brokerage account transfer is $10.
CUSTOMER SUPPORT:
Customers can contact support via email, live chat, phone. But there is also Virtual Assistant. Fidelity’s search engine which helps you find information on the Fidelity.com site.
As with any search engine, they ask that you not input personal or account information.
Responses provided by the virtual assistant are to help you navigate Fidelity.com.
They said about Fidelity
* None of the competitors provide the full package that Fidelity does: comprehensive offerings, excellent customer service, superb online experience, and a great mobile app.
* Both in person and online availability, ease of online transactions, and Fidelity offerings to keep you up to date on your accounts and retirement goals.
* I have subscribed to your Fidelity Investor newsletter since 1999 and invest using several of your model portfolios. I really appreciate your investment guidance and the returns that have resulted. Thank you for all of your help!