Top Rated For:
- 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:Best Broker for Options Trading
- 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:Best Options Trading Platform
- 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:Best Day Tradingꦯ Platform for Options
Our Take
Tastytrade is a technology-focused, options-first platform that is an excellent choice for experienced and active options traders. Tastytrade has built a stellar reputation helping active traders magnify their efforts through the platform’s high-powered functionality. Despite its power, ಞthe thoughtful design means even nಞovice traders can learn their way around. The broker also has among the most competitive fee structures on the market, making it an attractive choice for frequent traders.
Buy-and-hold investors may think that using a tastytrade brokerage account is like using a sledgehammer on a pushpin. However, even these users would admit to being surprised by the number of valuable analytical tools on the platform. That’s a big part of what makes tastytrade a legitimate choice as a brokerage for any user, but especially for active traders.
Introduction
Launched in 2017 as tastyworks and rebranded to its current name in 2023, tastytrade may come off as a novice, but don’t let the first impression fool you. Designed by the founders of the award-winning thinkorswim platform (now owned and operated by Charles Schwab), tastytrade is a powerhouse of all things trading. Despite its do-it-yourself vibe, it provides the technology, education, and support a retail trader needs to succeed and brings industrial-level tools and executions to a retail crowd. While tastytrade is an all-around strong platform, it may not be ideal for everyone.☂ This review will take a look at how tastytrade ranks against its more established rivals to help𒊎 you decide whether it is the right fit for your needs.
Pros & Cons
Well-designed user interface
Low fee structure that favors active traders
In-depth analysis and research tools
Abundant, free education
Feature overload
Fee structure favors active traders
Requires a bit of a learning curve
Pros Explained
- Well-designed user interface: Tastytrade’s user interface is undeniably complex, but among advanced professional-grade platforms, it may well be the most robust and intuitive to learn.
- Low fee structure that favors active traders: Stock and ETF trades have zero commissions, while option trades are $1 per contract. However, the commission is capped at $10 per trade, making larger trades most economical.
- In-depth analysis and research tools: Options trading is based on complex mathematics and formulae, and tastytrade enables traders to quickly compare positions and probabilities with tools that analyze and calculate the risks in each trading strategy.
- Abundant free education: The tastytrade staff and user community are very active and create an abundance of educational material on YouTube and on tastylive, its own financial network.
Cons Explained
- Feature overload: The culture of rapid improvement and delivering the highest-quality tools has its downsides - the sheer number of features available on tastytrade may be overwhelming even for experienced traders.
- Fee structure favors active traders: Like most retail brokers, tastytrade doesn’t charge commissions on stock trades and ETF trades. The company’s $1/contract opening fee for options, capped at $10, is great for high-volume traders, but for low-volume traders, it is more or less in line with what competitors charge.
- Requires a bit of a learning curve: The downside of a high-powered software platform is its cost of adoption–the time it takes to learn and become proficient at using it. Tastytrade staff and development teams work hard to minimize this cost, but for now, there remains a learning curve.
Usability
When it comes to usability, the tastytrade platform stands out. The brokerage frequently wins awards and acclaim, much of it related to the well-designed user experience. Tastytrade sums up the guiding principle behind the design in six words: see it, click it, trade it.
The team behind the user experience relies heavily on user feedback to tweak the features so that the platform helps traders do exactly what they like. For example, users can create watch lists and sort them by their 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:implied volatility (IV) score–something you care a lo꧅t about if you are an active options t𒅌rader.
This kind of hyper-focused design makes the platf♏orm invaluable for its target audience of options traders but rather oblique to casual inve🎐stors simply looking to run stock screeners or invest in mutual funds.
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Trade Experience
It’s worth remembering that company founders Tom Sosnoff and Scott Sheridan were 20-year veterans of the options pits at the 澳洲幸运5🅷官方开奖🧸结果体彩网:Cboe (Chicago Board Options Exchange). They built the tastytrade platform to be the tool they wished they had back in their floor-trader days while also providing access to modern markets such as cryptocurrencies and small-exchange futures contracts.𝓰 🦹
Admittedly, there is a lot to look at on the platform, but when it comes to execution, tastytrade is designed to help you complete an order with a minimum amount of clicks and scrolling. But it goes beyond that–the team at tastytrade listens closely to user feedback as they continuously improve the user interface. The result of this approach is a versatile and powerful trading station that allows you to search options on ETFs with high 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:trading volume and open interest and execute a 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:market-order trade in as li𝓰ttle as two🎀 well-placed clicks.
Traders can choose between three viewing modes in the interface—table mode (a typical options chain view), analysis mode (focused on comparing prices and relative values), or curve mode (tꦯo help visualize the profit and loss potential of your trading stra꧃tegy).
Using either view, you can access predefined trading strategies such as 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:butterfly, straddle, 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:iron condor, and more. As part of using these modes, traders can see the options they have selected and all of the associated statistics, including the probability of profit, 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:delta, theta, standard deviation, P/L, implied volatility, the expected move, max profit/loss, expiration dates, prices, and more. This makes for a sophisticated analysis of the option positions with the intent to improve the pro💎bability of trading profitabiꦗlity.
Mobile Trade Experience
Tastytrade provides four separate trading mediums: a website portal, a desktop program, a mobile app for iOS and Android, and an app specifically for use on the iPad/iOS. The first two are similar but the mobile apps differ quite significantly based on screen sizes. There is very little that can be done on the desktop or web-based versions of the tastytrade platform that can’t be done through the mobile platform. All 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:order types and analysis tools are available with only the exception of som♔e charting functions.
The mobile platform is smartly designed, but not meant to be a simple single-thumb trading app. The interface on mobile devices is designed to optimize available screen space. For examp🅰le, the advanced order entry screen offers all of the same order types, but has them rearranged to accommodate the more compact screen.
Range of Offerings
Tastytrade offers users the ability to trade in stocks and ETFs, futures (both indices and commodities), and, of course, options contracts on each of the aforementioned assets. You can trade options on stocks, as well as options on futures and indexes. You can even trade options on option-oriented indexes such as the 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:Cboe Volatility Index (VIX).
In 2024 tastytrade also made Treasury bond trading and investing possible, though you have to call the trading desk to implement orders. There is a $25 fee to open a Treasury bond position (regardless of size) and a $25 fee to close it. There is no fee for holding it to maturity. Once a Treasury bond position is open, it will display among the trader’s open positions on the platform.
Survey Insight
According to 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:Investopedia's latest Reღader Survey, our readers revealed that they still own their favorite stocks, despite tari꧙ff and recessi🐻on-related worries being among their top concerns.
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Order Types
Traders looking for a wide selection of order types to help manage their options and other positions will not be disappointed in tastytrade's offering.
Some of th🍒e more popular order𝔍 types available on the tastytrade platform are as follows:
Order Type | Description |
---|---|
Market | Takes the next available price |
Limit | Specifies the least desirable price at which you want to enter the trade–any better price is acceptable. |
Stop | It specifies the most desirable price at which you want to enter the trade, where any price that is worse is also acceptable. |
Stop Limit | Specifies the most desirable price at which you want to enter the trade–where any price worse is not acceptable. |
TIF orders (time in force) | DAY (today only) GTC or Good ‘til Canceled (indefinitely) GTD or Good ‘til Date (will expire on the end of the date specified |
OCO | One Cancels Other orders are bracket orders that can be used for entering or exiting a trade. Typically the trader has two goals (i.e. go long vs. go short, or take profit vs. stop a loss). This order allows the trader to specify both options, execute the one that hits first, then cancel the remaining order. |
OTOCO | One Triggers One Cancels Other are a combination of an entry order and a bracket order. The typical scenario is to enter a position, and once the position is entered, to execute a bracket order to either take profit or stop a loss, depending on which order is executed first. |
Closing | Closing orders can be specified as automatic profit-taking orders if a certain percentage of potential profit is reached, or as rolling trades to automatically change the strikes or expiration dates or both. |
Quick Action Closing | Balanced, Default, and Full closing orders are types of closing orders meant for groups of several option contracts. Balanced and Default specify what partial portion of those contracts a trader wants to close, and Full allows the trader to close all related option contracts. |
These orders are, like so much else in the platform, optimized for active options traders who want to carry out their option trading s꧅trategies most effectively.
Trading Technology
Tastytrade is a technology-driven broker, which brings many advantages to traders on its platform. Like many brokers today, tastytrade uses a proprietary order routing system. The platform’s algorithms focus on order fill quality and price improvement. The electronic system will route orders to the market maker, which will yield favorable execution for the customer. Customers have even mentioned the fill performance on Trustpilot reviews. It needs to be noted that while tastytrade is known for strong executions, it does collect 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:Payment for Order Flow (PFOF)--a practice some see as going against clients’ best interests.
Another advantage is that tastytrade offers 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:fractional share trading, which makes higher priced stocks accessible even for smaller account sizes. If your favorite stock is trading for $1,000 per share, but your account only has $500 of buying power available, you could enter an order for .5 shares (or less) and get a fill. Note that there is a clearing fee of ten cents per trade.
No matter the size of a trader’s account, they are likely to find the strongest feature of this platform, by far, is its sophisticated analytics. The wide variety of way🐓s to research and analyze an options trade or trading strategy leaves all competitors behind.
It’s hard to imagine a way for any retail trader to get an edge in the overly competitive world of options trading, which is so heavily dominated by sophisticated math-driven pricing models. Yet, tastytrade finds a way to make such advantages freely available to its customers each day through the design of its interface. It not only identifies pricing and strategy data (see illustration be🎶low) but helps a trader focus on where a pricing advantage might exist.
Costs
The base commission for options trading is $1 per contract, and it is capped at $10 per trade (or per leg in combination trades). This innovative pricing 🍎means that a one-contract option trader is paying roughly the same as they might elsewhere, but a 100-contract trader is paying about ten cents per contract. That’s nearly impossible to beat. As a bonus, there is no cost to close option positions, making this platform by far th🅷e most cost-efficient options broker on the market.
In addition to these prices, the following fees apply:
- Futures contracts: $1.25 per contract to open, $1.25 per contract to close.
- Micro futures: $0.85 per contract to open, $0.85 per contract to close.
- Cryptocurrency purchases: $0 +0.35% markup/markdown.
- Cryptocurrency sales: $0 +0.35% markup/markdown.
- Margin interest base rate: 10%. ($50,000 to $99,999 balance, higher rates for lower balances and lower rates for higher).
- Domestic wire withdrawals: $25
- International wire withdrawals: $45
- Sending a check domestically costs $5, while sending a check internationally costs $10.
- Account transfer fee: $75.
- Exercise and assignment fee: $5.
- Inactivity or account closure: no fee.
There is no fee to access the platform, and there are no fees for ACH deposits and withdrawals.
How This Broker Makes Money From 𝐆You and for You
The methods by which brokers make money from you have become less transparent over the years. Here are some ways t༺astytrade makes money from your business:
- Interest on cash balances: tastytrade doesn't share information on what it does with cash balances or if it pays any interest to the consumer. This is likely a source of revenue for the company, as is common in the industry.
- Payment for order flow: tastytrade accepts payment for order flow on equity and options orders, a common practice among brokers nowadays. Tastytrade states that it is committed to achieving the best execution for customers and gives a breakdown of their payment for order flow activities.
- Margin: Like other brokers, tastytrade charges interest on margin borrowing, which is a source of income for the company. Its rates are between 8% and 11%, depending on your balance as of April 11, 2025.
Conversely, here are a couple 🀅of ways tastytrade makes money for you:
- Price improvement: tastytrade's smart order router attempts to achieve the best execution results for customers and strives to save them money with price improvement (getting better fills than you are quoted).
- Commission caps: This is mentioned elsewhere, but the cost comparison and savings are very significant for active traders just by putting commission caps on trades.
Account and Research Amenities
The tastytrade platform is an options-first broker, bui💫lt in-house using proprietary technology, and brings to 💟bear all the decades of options experience collectively captured among its senior staff members. As such, it offers limited portfolio analysis tools and no third-party research resources. Most of its research amenities are designed to help you act like an options market maker.
Stock and ETF Screener
The tastyt𓆉rade platform doesn’t have a dedicated stock screening tool. However, it does have sopཧhisticated watchlist tools that accomplish a similar task. The platform has nine major categories of these characteristics.
Category | Description |
---|---|
tasty | Preset watchlists that tastytrade staff finds helpful to research, such as: 52-week highs/lows, top equities in the past hour, fast moving stocks, implied volatility (high/low), and more including Tom Sossnoff and Tony Batista’s favorites which are often reviewed on the tastylive streaming programs. A new addition to this list for 2024 includes a preset list for AI stocks. |
Crypto | Preset watchlist of high-volume cryptocurrencies and a preset watchlist of cryptocurrency ETFs. |
Dividend | Two preset watchlists of dividend stocks that have increased their dividends over the past 25 years. “Aristocrats” are the mega caps among these, and “Champions” are all the others. |
Earnings | Two preset watchlists of option-tradable stocks that have earnings coming up in the next week, one of which is named tasty Earnings and focuses on those with the highest IV score. |
Futures | Present watchlists of all Futures, CME-traded futures, Micros, Small-exchange futures, and futures that feature options. |
Indicators | An oblique category of nearly 200 exchange-calculated indicators, some of which are familiar to floor traders and almost none of which are familiar to the average new options trader. Not to be confused with traditional technical studies. |
Liquidity | Three presets include high options volume, liquid ETFs, and liquid stocks. |
Market Indices | 16 Preset watchlists, including the components of the S&P 500, S&P 100, Nasdaq 100, and several other industry-specific groupings. |
Sectors | Eleven preset watchlists of stocks in each of the major sectors. |
Other | Custom watchlists you can build from scratch or by cloning and modifying other watchlists. |
It is also worth mentioning that tastytrade now has a direct integration with TradingView, allowing users to make full use of its charting and screening capabilities while seamlessly executing trades via tastytrade.
Options Screener
tastytrade does not have a dedicated platform screener as found in thinkorswim (the other Sossnoff-inspired option-trading platform). However, the prebuilt or custom-built watchlists and analysis tools can help you find trade ideas the way a screener does.
Tools and Calculators
Actively trading multiple options positions can generate more portfolio heat, or combined trade risk, than a trader anticipates. To help with this, the tastytrade platform has a feature called the Portfolio Risk Analysis Tool. It can help you identify whether too many of your options are highly correlated to one another, detailing the exposure levels of your entire portfolio.
Charting
tastytrade has robust, interactive charting tools with several available technical studies that can be used to analyze price and volume action. Fundamental research and news are also available. Chart🌱 windows can be detached from the main screen and spread across a multi-monitor setup for unlimited customization.
Trading Idea Generators
Withinﷺ the platform, tastytrade provides a link where you can follow any one of 20 ongoing feeds from tastylive experts such as Tom Sossnoff, Tony and Nick Battista, Liz D🧸ierking, Jenny Andrews and many others. These expert option traders not only give you trade ideas, they explain them too.
Options backtesting
One of the more recent additions to tastytrade’s list of features is its options backtesting tool. With 10+ years of historical data, it allows clients to see how their trades or strategies would’ve performed over time. Traders can test long and short options strategies and spreads over a time period of their choosing.
News
News feeds are delivered along with the other information for a specified ticker symbol. These feeds pull financial news and broader topics from Reuters, Eikon, IFR, and others. The news feeds are active around the clock and provide accurate, authoritative content to confirm or refine your trading ideas.
Cash Management
With uninvested cash earning 0.01% and no banking features like ATM access, tastytrade's cash management offering is among the weakest in the industry. While there is no minimum to open a margin account, you must have at least $2,000 in your account to gain margin privileges and begin trading on margin.
Fractional Dividend Reinvestment Plan (DRIP)
Tastytrade customers ✱can specify dividend reinvestment f🃏or dividend-paying stocks, and since the platform supports fractional share purchases, the dividends will be reinvested into fractional shares rather than paying cash into the account.
Portfolio Analysis
Real-time portfolio statistics, such as the probability of profit, delta, theta, liquidity, and buying power, are displayed on the desktop applicatioﷺn. Guidance on reading the performance reports and analysis is available on . Through the ongoing training on tastylive, traders can become familiar with the concepts behind the option Greeks and learn to recognize a portfolio’𒈔s sensitivity to market movements.
Survey Insight
According to 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:Investopedia’s latest Rea൩der Survey, readers still choose individual stocks as their top choice for where they would invest if they had an ex༺tra $10,000 on hand, even though their appetite for risk has faded since February. This is followed by ETFs, money market funds, and CDs.
Education
Tastytrade has its own financial network–tastylive–a free learning center that helps traders learn about the platform and trading in general, as well as an excellent tool to generate trade ideas. That’s doubly important when you consider tastytrade hasn’t yet developed paper trading functionality, leaving🥀 users with no practice options but to risk real money.
The platform includes additional educational resources like blogs, videos, and an investing glossary. It also includes Cherry Picks, a weekly research report, and Cherry Bomb, a daily email with insights from Tom Sosnoff and Tom Preston.
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Customer Service
The tastytrade phone support line is open Monday through Friday from 7 a.m.–5 p.m. You can talk to a live broker during this pe♎riod. There is also a chatbot that can lead y♉ou to solutions.
Security and Reliability
- Two-factor authentication is available via SMS and apps.
- The mobile apps have fingerprint and face recognition.
- Excess Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) coverage is provided up to an aggregate of $150 million, subject to maximum limits of $37.5 million for any one customer's securities and $900,000 for any one customer's cash.
- No major security breaches were reported.
- tastytrade has not experienced any outages in the last year.
Transparency
tastytrade pricing structure and fees are very well documented and referred to repeatedly on the tastylive programming. The commissions and fees webpage is easy to find and understand.
Available Account Types
tastytrade has all the commonly used a💦ccount types, in♚cluding:
- Individual and joint taxable
- Traditional individual retirement account (IRA)
- Roth IRA
- Simplified employee pension (SEP) IRA
- Inherited IRA (Roth and traditional)
- Corporate
- Trust
- International (non-U.S.)
The Bottom Line
Active traders seeking great trading technology, competitive pricing, and functionality optimized for trading derivatives like options, futures, and futures options, as well as top-tier educational content, will be hard-pressed to find a better platform than tastytrade. While tastytrade handles advanced trading in these areas, the tastylive network makes the platform an excellent place for beginners looking to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to become successful.
Compare tastytrade to Similar Online Brokers
Broker | Star Rating | Minimum Deposit | Stock Trades | Per Contract Options | Max Option Legs | Number of No-Load Mutual Funds | Fractional Share Trading of Stocks | New Spot Bitcoin ETFs |
4.7 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.65 | 4 | 14,900 | Yes | Yes | |
4.1 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $1.00/Open Only | 4 | 0 | Yes | Yes | |
3.8 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.65 | 4 | 6,000 | Yes | Yes |
How We Picked the Best Online Brokers and Trading Plat🅰forms
Providing readers with unbiased, comprehensive reviews of online brokers and trading platforms is a top priority for Investopedia. We combined our industry research and subject matter expertise to guide the research and weightings for our 2025 online broker rankings. To collect the data, our researchers collected data points through online research of provider websites. To fill in any gaps, our research team reached out to the individual brokerages. In some instances, our researchers did much deeper online 🐓research to get the information they needed to complete the data collection. The data collection process spanned from Dec. 20, 2024 to Feb 19, 2025.
We then developed a proprietary model that scored each company to rate its performance across 11 major categories and 120 criteria to find the best online brokers and trading platforms. The score for each company’s overall star rating is a weighted average of the criteria in the following categories:
Online Broker Evaluation Categories
Category | Weight |
---|---|
Research Amenities | 12.78% |
Trading Technology | 11.86% |
Range of Offerings | 11.59% |
Trade Experience | 10.12% |
Costs | 10.00% |
Educational Material | 8.95% |
Mobile App Usability | 8.93% |
Portfolio Analysis and Reports | 7.67% |
Customer Service | 6.98% |
Account Amenities | 6.16% |
Through this all-encompassing data collection and review process, Investopedia has provided you with 🙈an u🐈nbiased and thorough review of the top online brokers and trading platforms.