As an investor, I'm a creature of habit. I opened my first brokerage account with TD Ameritrade in 2002 when I was in college, and I still have that account today. I've since expanded my relationship to include retirement accounts and custodial accounts, but I've been a loyal TD Ameritrade customer for more than two decades.
However, TD Ameritrade was acquired by Charles Schwab a couple years ago and over the past year, my various accounts have moved over to Schwab's platform. While I wouldn't call it a bad investment platform, I'm just not as much of a fan as I was of TD Ameritrade's interface.
So, I decided to make a change. Well, sort of. I'm leaving my existing accounts at Schwab, but any new money I deposit into my investments is going into new accounts (a taxable brokerage account and a retirement account) that I opened with SoFi. It's been about a year since I switched my contributions to SoFi. Here's how it's going so far.
What I love about SoFi's investment platform so far
This is definitely a pros and cons discussion, but I should start by saying that overall, I'm a big fan of SoFi's investment platform and have absolutely no plans to stop using it. The pros outweigh the cons for me. Here are just a few of the reasons I'm happy with my experience so far.
User-friendly trading
First and foremost, SoFi makes investing easy. I log on to the web portal or mobile app, choose "invest" to navigate to my brokerage account, and the process for entering stock orders is simple. From the time I log in to the time I've deposited money and bought a stock, maybe a minute has passed.
Bank accounts and investments in one place
It isn't that big of a deal for me to have to check my investments and my bank accounts at two different firms. I've been doing that for most of my adult life.
However, SoFi is also where I keep my primary checking and savings accounts, and the convenience of having all of my finances in one place is very nice. I can move money seamlessly and manage all of my accounts in the same app. Plus, I absolutely love my experience with the SoFi Checking and Savings account (member FDIC) -- it would be very difficult to write an article listing any pain points about it.
Fractional trading
Schwab offers fractional share investing. Sort of. Schwab's Stock Slices allows you to invest in stocks in $5 increments regardless of the share price, but only in companies that are in the S&P 500 index.
On the other hand, SoFi offers easy-to-use fractional share investing for most stocks (it's available for all 40-ish stocks in my portfolio). All I do is enter the dollar amount I want to invest and SoFi does the rest.
What I wish SoFi did differently
No investment platform is perfect, and there are some good reasons I'm maintaining my accounts at Schwab even though I'm making all of my new deposits into SoFi. Here are a few of my biggest pain points with SoFi, which I hope to see improvement on over time.
- Better options access: SoFi has done a solid job of adding new investment choices over the past couple of years. It recently started to offer mutual funds and alternative investment funds, for example. But I like using options as part of my investment strategy, and SoFi only offers very basic forms of options trading.
- Stock research: Access to third-party research reports from firms like Morningstar are a highlight of several other investment platforms, but SoFi is designed as a low-frills way to buy and sell investments.
- More account types: One reason I can't completely move to SoFi is because the custodial accounts I have for my kids would have nowhere to go. There are several major account types that SoFi doesn't offer, and custodial accounts are among them.
- Desktop trading software: I'm not a short-term trader by any definition, but I love having a desktop trading platform that allows me to monitor all of my stock positions on one screen, in real-time, and provides other valuable features. It's the primary reason I'm keeping my Schwab account, as the thinkorswim software it acquired along with TD Ameritrade is absolutely fantastic.
The bottom line
As I mentioned earlier, no brokerage platform is perfect. Every single brokerage we've reviewed at The Ascent has something listed under both the pros and cons column. For me, SoFi checks a lot of boxes and provides a generally pleasant and frustration-free investing experience, but there are a few ways it could improve before I'd be willing to move my existing investment accounts to the platform.
