Best Trading Platforms for Day Trading in October 2025

You’ll need to determine the best trading strategy for you. You may wish to specialize in a specific strategy or mix and match from among some of the following typical strategies.

How you execute these strategies is up to you. Some traders might angle for a penny per share, like spread traders, while others need to see a larger profit before closing a position, like swing traders. Some traders might be willing to hold overnight, while others won’t and prefer to maintain a neutral position in case bad news hits before they can react.

To know when to trade, day traders closely watch a stock’s order flow, the list of potential orders lining up to buy and sell a stock. Before buying, they’ll look for a stock to fall to “support,” a stock price at which other buyers step in to buy, and the stock is more likely to rise. To sell, they’ll look for when the stock hits “resistance,” a price where more traders start selling and the price is more likely to fall. To make judgments like this, you’ll want a broker that lets you see order flow.

Whichever strategy you pick, it’s important to find one (or more) that work and that you have the confidence to use. It can take a while to find a strategy that works for you, and even then the market may change, forcing you to change your approach.

Risk management is all about limiting your potential downside, or the amount of money you could lose on any one trade or position. When considering your risk, think about the following issues:

• Position sizing. If the trade goes wrong, how much will you lose?

• Percentage of your portfolio. Closely related to position sizing, how much will your overall portfolio suffer if a position goes bad?

• Losses. What level of losses are you willing to endure before you sell?

• Selling. After making a profitable trade, at what point do you sell?

Even with a good strategy and the right securities, trades will not always go your way. It’s important to have a plan for when to close a position, whether it’s purely mechanical — for example, sell after it goes up or down X% — or based on how the stock or market is trading that day.

Proper risk management prevents small losses from turning into large ones and preserves capital for future trades. But that means traders have to be willing to realize a loss, which is hard for many traders to accept, even though it’s essential to long-term survival.

Here are some of the most popular questions about day trading.

Stocks are among the most popular securities for day traders — the market is big and active, and commissions are relatively low or nonexistent. You can also day trade bonds, options, futures, commodities and currencies.

Typically, the best day trading stocks have the following characteristics:

• Good volume. Day traders like stocks because they’re liquid, meaning they trade often and in high volume. Liquidity allows a trader to buy and sell without affecting the price much. Currency markets are also highly liquid.

• Some volatility — but not too much. Volatility means the security’s price changes frequently. This kind of movement is necessary for a day trader to make any profit. Someone has to be willing to pay a different price after you take a position.

• Familiarity. You’ll want to understand how the security trades and what triggers moves. Will an earnings report hurt the company or help it? Is a stock stuck in a trading range, bouncing consistently between two prices? Knowing a stock can help you trade it. (Here’s how to research a stock.)

• Newsworthiness. Media coverage gets people interested in buying or selling a security. That helps create volatility and liquidity. Many day traders follow the news to find ideas on which they can act.

Day traders who focus on stocks often rely on “technical analysis,” or analyzing the movements of stocks on a chart, rather than “fundamental analysis,” which involves examining company factors such as its products, industry and management. While some day traders might exchange dozens of different securities in a day, others stick to just a few — and get to know those well. This knowledge helps you gauge when to buy and sell, how a stock has traded in the past and how it might trade in the future.

Day traders need liquidity and volatility, and the stock market offers those most frequently in the hours after it opens, from 9:30 a.m. to about noon ET, and then in the last hour of trading before the close at 4 p.m. ET.

As to the best time to trade for profitability, theories abound, but what can’t be disputed is the concentration of trades that bookend the regular market session. According to data compiled by trading algorithm developer BestEx Research and published by Bloomberg in April 2024, about a third of all S&P 500 stock trades happen in the final 10 minutes of the trading day.

A day trader might make a few hundred trades in a day, depending on the strategy and how frequently attractive opportunities appear.

If you are using a margin account and you execute four or more day trades — that is, trades in which you buy and sell a security the same day — within a five-business-day period, and those trades represent more than 6% of your total trades in that period, you’ll be designated as a pattern day trader.

That means you’ll have to maintain a minimum equity level of $25,000 in your margin account any time you day trade. That $25,000 can consist of cash, securities or both. You also may have your buying power restricted.

One way to avoid the pattern day trader rule is by avoiding margin entirely by using a cash account. But many online brokers, such as Robinhood, give you a margin account by default, meaning you’d have to dig into your account settings and manually switch over to a cash account. Cash accounts may also have longer settlement times when you sell a security (that is, sale proceeds aren’t immediately available and may take several days to hit your account).

Generally speaking, the more you trade, the more you want to consider execution quality. Time is literally money with day trading, so you want a broker and online trading system that is reliable and offers the fastest order execution. Many platforms will publish information about their execution speeds and how they route orders; we’ve included these details in our analysis and ratings as well.

Pattern day trader is a designation under FINRA rules that is defined as someone who day trades four or more times within 5 business days. Those day trades must also account for more than 6% of the trader’s total trades within the same period. Your brokerage can help you determine if you’re a pattern day trader. If you are, you’re subject to additional regulations, including the requirement to have at least $25,000 in equity in your margin account.

Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about the day trading platforms that we review.

This is a loaded question. The trading platforms on our list don’t have minimum account requirements, but as noted above, you’re required to maintain a minimum of $25,000 in equity to engage in pattern day trading. That equity can be in cash and eligible securities. That’s the minimum amount you need to maintain in your account; on top of that, you also need the money you’ll use to day trade.

But just as important is setting a limit for how much money you dedicate to day trading. Those dipping into this kind of active trading may want to risk only a small portion of their account balance — 5% to 10% of your investable assets, at most.

Using a trading platform isn’t risky — many investors invest through trading platforms. But day trading can be risky. In short: You could lose money, potentially lots of it. Day trading is exactly what it sounds like: Buying and selling — trading — a stock, or many stocks, inside of a day. It’s all about making predictions and timing the market, with the goal of making a small profit on each trade. In an ideal world, those small profits add up to a big return.

But research has shown that only 1% of day traders consistently earn money; many, many lose it. It’s essentially a full-time job, because you need to constantly be watching — and timing — the market, waiting for your next move. It isn’t for beginner, or casual, investors.

To limit the risks, you can keep the majority of your investment portfolio in long-term, diversified investments like low-cost index funds, and day trade with a small portion.

As noted above, Webull and Fidelity offer the best platforms for beginner or intermediate investors.

We also have a separate list of best brokers for beginners, which includes our analysis of not just the brokerage firm’s trading platform, but also how well they score on other factors that appeal to beginners, such as educational resources about how to use those platform. Finally, we suggest looking for a platform that offers paper trading, so you can practice with simulated trades before the real thing.

Interactive Brokers scored the highest among the brokers in this roundup, and its platform is designed for experienced, active traders, especially the Pro offering. We’d also suggest looking at tastytrade, which really impressed our testers.

We score brokers’ mobile apps based on their iOS and Android reviews — specifically, based on the simple average of their average scores on both app marketplaces. We also personally test each app by creating and funding an account, exploring the app’s features and interface, and placing a few test trades. We share our testing results across the team to discuss what we’ve found and eliminate bias.

The brokers in this roundup impressed all of our reviewers, as well as a majority of reviewers on the iOS and Android marketplaces.

Most brokers we review have eliminated trading commissions for stocks. A notable exception is the IBKR Pro plan from Interactive Brokers, which is nonetheless our top pick for day trading platforms. Interactive Brokers also offers a plan with no commissions for stock trading, IBKR Lite — and Pro users pay very low stock trading commissions (fractions of a penny per share) in exchange for lower margin rates and bulk discounts on options trades.

On that topic, free options trading is not as common as free stock trading. Many if not most brokers charge a per-contract trading fee, typically less than $1 per contract. However, a few of the brokers on this list have completely done away with options trading fees, including Webull, SoFi Active Investing, Moomoo, Firstrade, Robinhood and Public. The last of these, Public, has “negative” options trading fees — it pays users a per-contract rebate for options trades.

All of the brokers on this list offer stocks, ETFs and options. All of them except for Robinhood, Moomoo and SoFi Active Investing also offer individual bonds. Some also offer more exotic assets that may appeal to day traders.

Interactive Brokers, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, Public, Robinhood and TastyTrade all offer cryptocurrency trading. Webull does too, but it’s in a separate app called Webull Pay.

Webull, Interactive Brokers, TastyTrade, Charles Schwab and E*TRADE also offer futures trading. Robinhood also plans to launch futures trading in the coming months.

Margin is essentially a loan from your broker. When you open a brokerage account, you’ll be asked if you want a cash account or a margin account.

A margin account allows you to place trades on borrowed money. Like most forms of borrowing, margin trading involves paying interest, and low margin interest rates were one of the criteria for this roundup.

Often called leverage, trading on margin can magnify your gains — and, in the worst-case scenario, your losses. To read more about margin, how to use it and the risks involved, read our guide to margin trading.

The star ratings below represent the broker’s overall score. Our reviewers — who are writers and editors on NerdWallet’s editorial team — send detailed questionnaires to every broker, digging into details about their platforms and capabilities. Then we hands-on test every trading platform to understand the user experience and features as a real day trader. We evaluate the experience of funding accounts, placing trades and using the platform’s analysis and research tools.

Day trading is just one way to approach the stock market — and it’s hardly worthwhile for most investors.

Conversely, investors who buy and hold low-cost index funds that track a broad market index like the S&P 500 could see higher returns over a long period. Historically, the S&P 500 has an annualized total return of about 10%, not accounting for inflation.

If you’re going to day trade, it’s paramount to set aside a certain amount of money you can afford to lose. Don’t trade more than that amount or use the mortgage or rent money.

Here are some resources that will help you weigh less-intense and simpler approaches to growing your money: