Its brokerage fees are among the lowest on the market, but the desktop platform may be tricky for new investors to pick up.
Interactive Brokers offers a range of web, desktop and mobile trading platforms designed to suit beginner investors all the way through to advanced traders.
Regardless of which platform you choose, you'll find competitive fees, excellent trading tools and strong educational resources.
Interactive Brokers is best known for its popular day trader platform Trader Workstation (TW) which offers low fees and an extensive list of tools and assets.
In fact, IB has been named Finder's Best Active Trader platform for the last 4 years in a row, as well as the Best platform for Global Stocks.
| Type of broker | Online only |
| ASX products | Shares, Exchange traded options |
| Available markets | ASX, NASDAQ, NYSE, 50+ markets |
| Standard brokerage fee | US$1 |
| Support | Phone, Email, Live chat |
| More Info |
Based on Interactive Brokers Australia share trading platform scores in Finder's 2024 Customer Satisfaction Awards.
Interactive Brokers received the following awards in the 2024 Product Awards:
Interactive Brokers offers 7 trading platforms designed to target different types of investor and investment approach:
A mobile app for trading more than 90 global stock markets and options.
Suitable for: beginner and intermediate investors
Client Portal is an easy-to-use web-based trading platform.
Suitable for: beginner and intermediate investors
A desktop trading platform that lets you trade stocks, options and futures on more than 150 global markets.
Suitable for: beginner, intermediate and advanced investors
An advanced mobile platform offering access to stocks, options and futures in more than 150 global markets.
Suitable for: intermediate and advanced investors
IB's flagship desktop trading platform that lets you trade stocks, options, futures, FX and bonds on more than 150 global markets.
Suitable for: intermediate and advanced investors
An API trading platform aimed at more experienced traders.
Suitable for: advanced investors
IMPACT
A dedicated mobile app for ESG investing.
Suitable for: beginner and intermediate investors
Interactive Brokers Group was launched in the United States over 40 years ago and opened offices in Australia in 1997.
Today, it’s one of the oldest share trading platforms on the market, offering access to more than 150 global markets and with clients in more than 200 countries.
Its suite of products includes stocks, options, futures, forex, funds and fixed income.
It’s fully licensed and regulated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and is a participant of ASX, ASX 24 and CBOE Australia.
Interactive Brokers' Traders Workstation (TWS) is a desktop day trading platform.
New investors may find IB's platform overwhelming, but the positive here is that almost everything on Interactive Brokers is customisable to suit your personal trading style, whether you're trading shares, options, futures, forex or a mix of the above.
Unfortunately, to optimise your account through TWS, you’ll need to really understand what you want to get out of it – no easy task for beginners. For example, when you place a trade, you'll see an extensive list of conditional orders to choose from (check out the pic).
Source: Interactive Brokers Trader Workstation demo | July 2022
If you don’t understand how the trading terms shown above can be applied, you're probably not ready to use TWS. As Interactive Brokers states on its website, this platform is targeted toward advanced investors. Make sure to check out the trial version of TWS to test whether you’re ready to launch the real deal.
While Trader Workstation is mostly suited to algorithmic or day traders, Client Portal is user friendly enough that even relatively new investors should be able to pick it up with a little practice and self learning.
Unlike TW, which requires you to download the platform, you can easily sign into Client Portal from any desktop.
Here's what the stock order window looks like from Client Portal:
Interactive Brokers' Client Portal Image: Supplied
As you can see, you get fewer conditional order types to choose from when buying or selling stocks but the whole process is much easier to navigate.
If you're thinking of opening an Interactive Brokers account from Australia, here are some of the features you can expect:
| Fees |
★★★★★ 3.9/5 |
|
| Trading tools |
★★★★★ 5/5 |
|
| Research and education |
★★★★★ 5/5 |
|
| Available securities |
★★★★★ 4/5 |
|
| Customer support |
★★★★★ 5/5 |
|
| Available countries |
★★★★★ 5/5 |
Unlike other trading platforms where you need multiple accounts to trade different products, IB allows you to access Australian stocks, international stocks, futures, options, fixed income, CFDs and ETFs all from a single account.
You can buy and sell stocks and other securities from 34 different countries 24 hours a day, 6 days a week using a single account. Unfortunately, IB does not list its conversion rates on the website.
To find out what rate IB is offering for each currency, you’ll need to manually enter the details into the trading platform.
Interactive Brokers offers fractional investing on eligible US, European and Canadian stocks and ETFs, with no minimum trade requirement.
Say a certain stock is trading for $500. Instead of having to invest $500 to buy a single share, you could invest say $100 and buy part of one share.
Interactive Brokers will pay up to 4.83% interest on cash sitting in your account, but there are some caveats.
First, that rate only applies to US dollars and you must have at least US$100,000 sitting in your account to receive the full rate. For Australian dollars, you can earn up to 3.84% interest on accounts with AUD$15,000-$150,000.
Interactive Brokers has two mobile apps - the flagship IBKR Mobile and IBKR GlobalTrader - which both offer similar functionality to IB's web and desktop platforms.
Signing up to its mobile apps is relatively straightforward and you can start trading in only a few minutes. It also still allows investors to trade in over 90 stock exchanges across the US, Canada, Europe and Asia.
IBot is Interactive Broker's AI tool that can help you manage your account, access market data, make trades and answer customer support queries, amongst other functions. It is available on Trader Workstation, Client Portal and IBKR Mobile.
Designed for investors who are not sure what to buy, the IBKR GlobalAnalyst scanner will help find undervalued opportunities.
You will simply need to choose a region, country, industry, market capitalisation and currency. The scanner will try to find undervalued stocks that can be bought.
Interactive Brokers lets you set up an investment strategy that is then carried out by automatic recurring investments.
You can trade global markets outside of regular market hours, including 10,000 US stocks and ETFs, options, and bonds, as well as European bonds and UK gilts.
Interactive Brokers offers brokerage fees starting from 0.015% of your trade value for Australian stocks. While that’s incredibly low, that fee only kicks in once you start trading amounts of $300,000,000 or more, which is really only applicable to institutional investors.
That being said, the fees are still pretty low for casual investors, from $6 on trades of less than $300,000 per month (for the fixed fee structure - see below).
On basic retail trading platforms, investors are usually presented with 1 or 2 order types: limit orders or market orders. Interactive Brokers offers a much wider selection to suit professional traders. Along with limit and market orders, you can choose from the following:
Confused? Interactive Brokers has a great video explaining what these order types mean and how to use them on the platform.
PortfolioAnalyst is an additional tool that lets you view all your trading accounts from a single dashboard. It lets you track the performance of each account and offers tools to help you analyse your portfolio and build an investment strategy.
You can use the Allocation Goals tool to see if your portfolio is on track to meet your investing goals and the Retirement Planner tool to map out your investment strategy for retirement.
Interactive Broker's Risk Navigator helps you measure your risk exposure across multiple asset classes and global markets.
Interactive Brokers also offers an ESG trading app called IMPACT which is available on mobile. The app lets you filter stocks and ETFs to match your specific ethical requirements and build up a value-based portfolio. You can also trade stocks and options directly from the app.
Interactive Brokers markets itself as having among the lowest fees on the market. That may be true, but the fee structure can be a little tricky to get your head around.
IB offers two different pricing structures: Fixed-fee and volume-tiered. Whichever pricing model is more suitable for you depends on your trading frequency, so be sure to keep that in mind.
Trades for global stocks, options, futures, forex, fixed income and more also come with their own fee structures.
For example, when trading US stocks you'll need to pay both a commission and FX fee when converting your AUD to US dollars.
However, Interactive Brokers does not charge additional FX spreads or platform fees and has a low FX conversion fee, making it one of the most cost-effective places to trade US stocks.
Subscriptions to real-time streaming market data is free in some instances, but you may need to pay when exchanges charge Interactive Brokers for the data.
IBKR Pro’s fixed rates (either per share or as a percent of trade value) include exchange and regulatory fees. This straightforward, flat-fee structure works best for regular, occasional traders.
| Monthly trade value (Fixed fee structure) | Online broker fee |
|---|---|
| Australian stocks | 0.08% or $6 (whichever is higher) |
| US stocks | US$0.005 per share, min $1/max 1% per trade |
If you choose the tiered fee structure, your brokerage fee becomes lower the more you trade per month. As you can see in the table below, this will only affect investors that plan to trade more than $3,000,000 per month.
Additional clearing and exchange fees depend on which exchange the security is listed on. To trade stocks listed on the ASX, the clearing fee is 0.011695% of the trade value plus an exchange fee of 0.00165% of the trade value. Telephone orders are $40 per order.
| Monthly trade value (Tiered fee structure) | Online broker fee |
|---|---|
| First $3,000,000 | $6 |
| $3,000,000 – $30,000,000 | $4 or 0.05% of trade value |
| $30,000,000 – $100,000,000 | $3 or 0.03% of trade value |
| $100,000,000 – $300,000,000 | $2 or 0.025% of trade value |
| > $300,000,000 | $1 or 0.015% of trade value |
Stocks listed in the US, Canada and Mexico charge brokerage fees per stock rather than value. Stocks listed in Europe use trade value to set the fees. Here are some of the fees on international stocks:
| Location | Broker fee |
|---|---|
| US (<= 300,000 shares per month) | Tiered: $0.0035 per share capped at 1.0% of trade value |
| Fixed: $0.005 capped at 1.0% of trade value | |
| UK (up to GBP£50,000 trade value) | Tiered: GBP£1.00 per order or 0.05% of trade value |
| Fixed: GBP£6.00 | |
| UK (over GBP£50,000 trade value) | Tiered: GBP£1.00 per order or 0.05% of trade value up to GBP£40,000,000 |
| Fixed: 6.00 + 0.05% (of incremental trade value > GBP£50,000) |
You can transfer money into your Interactive Brokers account via a bank transfer or using BPAY.
It’s relatively simple to open an Interactive Brokers account.
Signing up to Client Portal, IBKR Mobile or IMPACT does not require you to prove assets or experience level.
Depending on which platform you sign up to, you’ll need to provide the following information:
There are 5 main account profiles that you could qualify for with Trader Workstation, depending on whether you’re a professional or an amateur trader.
Kylie Finder
Investments analyst
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Kylie Purcell Finder
September 26, 2023
Hi Rishi, this guide has more details on ASX options contract fees for various brokers including Interactive Brokers: https://www.finder.com.au/best-options-trading-platforms
rishi
September 18, 2023
hi .,., i wanted to know ASX options trading fees per contract.