Online Stock Trading: Fees Drop to Zero
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Here's your Money Briefing. I'm J.R. Whalen at The Wall Street Journal in New York. The price wars in the online stock trading business have taken a sharp turn. We'll have details in a moment. First, some money and market news you should know. It won't be long before the weather outside is frightful, but retailers are upbeat about the upcoming holiday shopping season. The National Retail Federation expects holiday sales to rise about 4% this year to about $730 billion.
What recent news kicked off this Money Briefing about online trading fees?
That would be a rebound over last year when the government shutdown led to sales below economists' expectations. But recent economic data indicates that sales numbers could still disappoint. Retail consulting firms point out that fears of an oncoming recession are growing louder, and the ongoing trade dispute is impacting consumer confidence, though higher tariffs have yet to translate to higher prices for consumers. Americans owe roughly $1.5 trillion in student debt, but a record number of people are saving for college. Through the middle of this year, Americans added $352 billion in assets into their tax-advantaged college savings plans, also known as 529 education savings accounts. That's a 7% increase over a year ago.
And the College Savings Plans Network says the number of 529 college savings plans topped 14 million in June. The National Center for Education Statistics says as of 2017, one year at a public college cost more than $19,000. while private nonprofit and for-profit schools cost an average of over $41,000.
The online brokerage price wars have taken a dramatic turn. Charles Schwab and its rivals E-Trade and TD Ameritrade are eliminating commissions on online stock and options trades. And Wall Street Journal reporter Alexander Osipovich is here with details. So, Alex, this seems like an answer to investors who felt that fees charged by Schwab and its competitors were too high. That's right, JR.
Fees in general for trades at online brokerages have been on the downtrend recently. Every few years there seems to be a price war and they come down a few bucks. But the new thing is that recently there are some online brokerages of a new breed, especially Robinhood, that have introduced zero commission trading. They're very lean operations. They have other ways of making money. And that's put some pressure on the older guys, Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, E-Trade in particular, to lower fees even further. Yeah. Robinhood and TradeZero just disrupted this business. Robinhood is the big one. They now have around six million users and spawned a whole slew of competitors that are also offering zero commission trades and a few other players like, you know, JP Morgan has a zero commission trading platform now, too.
TD Ameritrade dropped its fees earlier this week, and Schwab and E-Trade's zero-commission models go into effect on Monday the 7th. That's Columbus Day, and yes, the markets were open that day. But the elimination of fees might not be as damaging to Schwab because Schwab is less reliant on fees than its rivals? That's correct.
Schwab is a pretty diversified business, and it essentially runs a bank as well as an online brokerage. And it makes money by, among other things, charging people interest for, collecting interest for the money that it holds for its clients. It has less of a reliance on trading commissions than some of its peers, such as E-Trade and Ameritrade.
And you mentioned J.P. Morgan a little while ago. Other brokerage houses like J.P. Morgan Chase, they've offered free stock trades for some of their customers. They sort of created packages for free trading in the past.
Yes. And a lot of it is actually about reaching out to new, younger, and first-time investors. I think that's one of the lessons of Robinhood, that younger, millennial-type investors really like a simple fee structure that they can understand without feeling like they're getting screwed in the fine print. And so they flock to Robinhood, and that's unleashed a lot of these competitors. Even Bank of America on its Merrill Edge product offers some zero-commission trades.
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