A few years ago, I moved a Traditional and Roth IRA account from ETrade to Ally Invest (formerly known as “TradeKing” at the time, prior to being acquired by Ally Bank). I had long been a fan of TradeKing as a great online broker option for a number of reasons, and with the change, I wanted to share my first impressions and give a first-look Ally Invest review after my account migration. Was the acquisition and transition a good move for former TradeKing customers and new investors? Read on to find the answer…
Having held discount broker accounts with ETrade, Vanguard, Fidelity, Ally Invest, Scottrade, Fidelity, Schwab, and a few others, I have a little more experience in this area than I’d probably like to, so hopefully this review provides some useful discount broker comparisons and commentary.
What is Ally Invest?
Ally Invest is the online discount brokerage arm of Ally Bank (the 20th largest bank in the U.S., with over $160 billion in assets). Ally Invest was formerly TradeKing, prior to Ally purchasing (in 2016) and re-launching it (in 2017).
In summary, Ally Invest has a low fee trading structure, no maintenance/inactivity fees, and strong customer service with 24/7 support.
You can trade stocks, bonds, funds, options and other equities through Ally Invest. I’ll get into what types of accounts you may want to consider opening or moving to Ally Invest in a bit.
Trading Fees:
Let’s cut right to what most of us care about the most when it comes to investing online with a discount broker – the fees. Here are Ally Invest’s fees:
- Stocks: $4.95 ($3.95 per equity trade for users who make 30 or more trades in the prior calendar quarter and/or maintain an average daily balance of more than $100,000 in the prior calendar quarter).
- Bonds: $1 per bond (minimum $10)
- Mutual Funds: $9.95 Purchases/Sales
- Options: +$0.65 per contract (+$4.95 base trade). Price decreases to $0.50 per contract for users who make 30 or more trades in the prior calendar quarter and/or maintain an average daily balance of more than $100,000 in the prior calendar quarter.
You’ll notice that the base fee structure is identical to TradeKing’s old structure, however, the high volume discount is a new wrinkle (but if you’re passively investing, as I preach, that probably won’t benefit you). Aside from purchasing house brand mutual funds or ETF’s (i.e. buying Schwab ETF’s from Schwab), these fees are among the lowest in the industry.
The $9.95 to initially buy into mutual funds it is lower than many I have seen (and significantly lower than E-Trade at $19.99 and Vanguard at $35). If you prefer ETF’s over funds, that’s not really an issue – but you can more cheaply trade Schwab, and Vanguard branded ETF’s (and mutual funds) directly with those brokers, if that is your objective.
Here is a complete list of Ally Invest fees.
Other Fees:
Ally Invest excels in this area, much like Ally Bank. Whereas some discount brokers try to nickel and dime you with hidden account maintenance or inactivity fees and IRA custodial fees, Ally Invest does not. There are no monthly or annual maintenance or account fees for both taxable accounts and IRA’s (former TradeKing customers will note that in order to avoid inactivity fees, you needed to have over $2,500 in an account balance or make 1 trade over 12 months – so this is another improvement).
Minimum Balances:
Ally Invest has no minimum balance requirement for their self-directed accounts. This is a key factor for someone just getting into investing for the first time, who might not have a lot of money to put into an account right from the get go. You will need at least $2,500 to start investing in an “Ally Invest Managed Portfolio”.
What About Ally Invest Features?
Ally’s user interface, at this time, is virtually identical to TradeKing’s, with a few minor cosmetic changes (different colors and branding, primarily). If you’re not familiar with those features, the breadth and depth has always been great – far exceeding any other brokers I’ve used. They include:
- ETF, mutual fund, and stock screeners and navigators
- Portfolio back testing (very cool!)
- Social network (over 200,000 members discuss investing)
- Profit and loss calculators
- Tax manager tool
- API
- Educational resources, including multiple live webinars every month
- Technical analysis and charts
- Ally invest LIVE
- iPhone & Android apps for mobile investing
How is Ally Invest’s Customer Service?
TradeKing’s customer service was top notch. Barron’s rated it as 4/4 stars from 2007 through 2016 – the best of any online broker.
I want to confirm, but I would imagine that most, if not all, of TradeKing’s customer service staff was retained in the transition to Ally. One big upgrade is that Ally Invest offers 24/7 customer support (TradeKing was formerly 8 AM – 6 PM EST). I am not aware of any other brokers that offer 24/7 support. Most of them operate M-F and have skeleton support on the weekends (typically when people actually have time to call in for help), if at all.
You can reach Ally Invest’s customer service at 1-855-880-2559 or by email at [email protected]. They also offer chat support.
Bonus: Ally Banking Services
One nice thing about being an Ally customer is that they offer a full suite of banking services in addition to their new investment platform. This includes home loans, auto loans, debit/credit cards, checking accounts, online savings accounts, money market accounts, CD’s, and other bank related services. Kiplinger Magazine recently rated Ally Bank as the “best bank for millennials” and the “best internet bank”.
Final Thoughts:
The 4 biggest changes from the purchase and re-brand of TradeKing to Ally Invest that I have noticed thus far are:
- No more maintenance fee for a low balance or inactivity
- Expanded customer service hours to 24/7 support
- Discounted stock/options pricing for high volume or high account balances
- Added banking features from Ally Bank
All positives. As a former TradeKing and current Ally Invest customer, I’m very pleased with the transition thus far.
Ally Invest is one of the few discount brokers I continue to use at the moment, so obviously, I like them. Great service, account security, low trading fees, and no hidden “gotcha” fees to screw you over. I’d recommend using them for both a regular post-tax investment account and a retirement account for everything but broker-branded (i.e. Vanguard, Schwab) ETF’s and mutual funds. Disclosure: Ally Invest happens to have an affiliate program, so some of the links in this post are affiliate links, but this is not a paid or sponsored post, and I am an actual Ally Invest customer who recommends them based on my experience with their service.
While it seems like a good deal, what’s the incentive of giving them any money vs just investing in passive Vanguard ETFs, through vanguard.com? No fee to buy Vanguard ETFs through Vanguard, and very low expense ratios, especially if you have enough to use their Admiral Shares.
A few things:
1. At lower balance levels, Vanguard charges an annual maintenance fee. Ally Invest does not.
2. As highlighted, if there are any non-Vanguard mutual/index funds or ETF’s you want to invest in.
3. Any stock/option investing (if you’re in to that sort of thing).
4. There are some very nice research/social features that Vanguard does not have.
Fees are waived at Vanguard if you sign up for e-delivery of statements.
Great product for power traders it would appear … might have to give it a test drive soon!
Like you, I also was a Trade King customer before they merged with Ally. I actually find Ally’s website to be somewhat an improvement over Trade King’s in the following areas:
Easier to log into my account. (Don’t have to go through the security questions every time.)
Since I have more than one account, I get a summary of ALL my accounts and the current balance on the first page. I also get a summary of each account and the balance in each one. I don’t recall Trade King offering this feature.
Moving from one account to another is very simple. With Trade King I would have to re-enter my user name and password every time I moved from one account to another,
For research, I still prefer Schwab’s set-up. (maybe it’s because I haven’t taken time to learn all of Ally’s features.)
I also wish Ally would put in a feature where I can have the dividends on my stocks automatically reinvested. (This is very easy to do with Schwab).
Schwab recently lowered their stock trading fees to the same rate as Ally, (their option fees are a bit more.) I personally like the fact that Schwab has physical offices conveniently close to where I live, and for this reason, I would choose them over Ally for a person just learning how to invest.
For a more sophisticated investor who frequently writes covered calls and spreads, my preference is Ally.
It appears ally just slapped on an up-front ally login requirement to access tradeking (TK), which is to only show who is the boss between TK and ally. From the day they got together there has been no material improvement in TK’s investment functionality. Absolutely none. What happens now is an investment account holder cannot set his/her own ally online idle time, so if you are working in TK screen and wanted to get back to the ally site to see your overall value from all your investment account then you’d have to login ally again, This happens when you have been in TK site for only 10-15 minutes; greatly, I mean greatly, inconvenience an account holder’s time, and as far as I can see, it doesn’t help anything. With TK one can set the online idle time much longer which is good. So is this longer idle time with other brokers. … Instead of forcing owner of ally multiple investment accounts to go through re-login many times during a trading day, it would be a great service to account holders if either allow ally account online idle time longer or just separate the logins for the two entities, TK and Ally,
A problem but with the TK site is their charting software. If one wants to see multiple stock charts in one session, what happens is after the first one one enters another symbol to see another stock chart, hitting the enter button the charting software changes to snapshot without you wanting to go there. This random happening is wasting investor’s time and very annoying. It seems the software knows better and forces you to go to snapshot, which maybe (software knows better,) but that’s precisely not what you want to do at that moment. I notice it randomly goes from chart to snapshot but never the other way around. I had voiced this glitch in TK software, but nothing has been done. This is another very annoying feature with Ally/TK.
I Use both Ally and Schwab. Schwab’s trading prices are now $4,95 per trade (the same as Ally), unless you have $100,000 or more in investments with Ally, the n the trades are $3.95. I have over $100,000 in my IRA Accounts so I keep it with Ally but I have other accounts with Schwab outside my IRA that I seldom trade.
I personally like Schwab’s research site and I like the fact I can select whether or not to reinvest the dividends online. (With Ally you have to call customer service to set up this feature), I also like the fact that there are several Schwab offices in my area so if I have a question or I want to do a rollover, I can go in person and have a representative help me.
Schwab may be slightly higher on fees, but they really come through on service.
I should mention that I write a lot of options on my Ally accounts and I love their software support (and fees). I have not written any options on my Schwab account, I will be looking into this area in a few months.