What to Look for in a Broker

Your broker is the only door between you and the exchange. When choosing one, most people look at a single number: commission per trade. But what a broker costs you is the sum of five or six items, and the most visible one is often the smallest. This article names no firms and quotes no fees; fee schedules change often, and the current one lives on the broker's own pricing page and in the contract annex. US fee schedules broker by broker, every cell with its source, are on a separate page: Broker Comparison

The Cost Items

Product and Session Access

A cheap broker that doesn't offer what you need isn't cheap. Topics to ask about:

• Fractional shares. Can you place dollar-based orders, and on which stocks? More: Fractional Shares
• Extended hours. Is there access to the pre-market and after-hours sessions? Some brokers now offer overnight trading too. Earnings reactions mostly happen in these hours. More: How to Read an Earnings Day
• Order types. Do stop and trailing stop orders wait on the server or in the app?
• ETF access. Some brokers don't offer US-domiciled ETFs to retail clients because of rules in the country they're regulated in. Ask before opening an account.

What Investor Protection Protects

In the US, if a SIPC-member broker fails and client assets are missing, SIPC protects up to $500,000 per customer (of which at most $250,000 in cash). Protection is tied to the legal entity where the account is opened: global brokers operate through separate companies in many countries, and an account opened at a non-US entity may not be covered by SIPC.

For brokers licensed in Türkiye, the Investor Compensation Center (Yatırımcı Tazmin Merkezi) plays a similar role, compensating up to a ceiling updated every year if a firm can't meet its obligations. How assets in foreign markets are treated under that scheme is something to ask the broker directly.

Domestic Broker vs. Foreign Broker

There's no right or wrong between them; there's a choice that shifts with the items you weigh most. If you'll work with a foreign firm, verify its license on its own regulator's website (in the US, FINRA's BrokerCheck, for example). The SPK can block access to platforms offering unauthorized investment services in Türkiye; whether a platform that reaches you through ads is authorized to serve Türkiye can be checked against the SPK's lists.

Where You'll See It on This Site

This site isn't a broker, you can't place orders here, and it doesn't recommend any firm. The Broker Comparison page sets side by side the commission, minimum fee, custody, data and licence details of the brokers that let Turkish residents buy US stocks, taken from their official fee schedules with the source and the date each was read, and prices a single $1,000 and $10,000 purchase under each schedule. If you're moving your account from a bank to a broker: Moving From a Bank to a Broker

When comparing the price in your broker's app with a stock page here, check the page's timestamp: the gap usually comes from delay.