J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing Review 2024: Pros, Cons and How It Compares

Where J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing shines

Easy-to-use platform: With a single web trading platform, plus a mobile app, this is a straightforward way to get started investing in stocks and managing your portfolio.

App connects all Chase accounts: J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investin is available within the Chase mobile app. If you’re already a Chase customer, the ability to view all of your Chase accounts, from checking to investments, in one location may be very appealing to you.

No account minimum: With no account minimum, you can start saving and investing with whatever amount works for you.

Where J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing falls short

What type of investor should choose J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing?

Chase customers: Having a mobile investing platform that is integrated with all of your other bank accounts in the same app is a big plus.

Bond investors: J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing offers free Treasury bond trading, and competitive pricing on corporate, municipal, agency and international bond trades. It offers one of the widest bond selections of any broker we review.

What the Nerds think 🤓

J.P. Morgan Self-Directed at a glance

How to sign up for a J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing account

Existing Chase customers will be happy to know that they don’t need to download another app to access J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing accounts. All of Self-Directed Investing’s offerings are available on the Chase mobile app, where users can research, trade and manage investments, in addition to accessing any other Chase accounts, such as credit cards or bank accounts.

If you’re not an existing Chase bank customer, you can still open a Self-Directed Investing account.

The signup experience is generally quite smooth, although it can take a while to fund an account. J.P. Morgan does not have an "instant deposit" feature like some other brokers, so newly-deposited funds can sometimes take the better part of a week to become available for trading.

What to know about J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing's fees

J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing offers free stock trades, and its options pricing is pretty standard; just like with stock trading, you won’t pay a per-trade commission. However, you will pay $0.65 per contract. (Options are typically grouped into contracts made up of 100 shares of the underlying stock.)

J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing has a $0 account minimum, making any amount of money you’ve saved enough to start investing. According to J.P. Morgan, you can invest as little as $1 in no-load mutual funds with no transaction fees.

You'll pay a $75 fee for full account transfers of assets, but $0 for partial transfers. Some brokers, such as Fidelity and Vanguard, don't charge this full transfer fee, but among those that do, $50 to $75 is fairly standard.

J.P. Morgan Self Directed Investing's trading platforms and apps

For Chase users, the mobile app works well to integrate various Chase financial products, such as checking and savings accounts, credit cards and investments. Through the app, users can trade stocks, bonds, mutual funds and ETFs, as well as access charting tools, screeners, J.P. Morgan research, stock watch lists and more. The app is available for iOS and Android; both versions have good reviews from users.

However, the trading experience felt slightly clunkier than those from similar bank-brokers, such as Merrill Edge (which is integrated into the Bank of America app, as Self-Directed Investing is into the Chase app). It takes several taps after logging into your Chase app to get to a screen where you can actually place a trade.

J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing does not accept payment for order flow (PFOF), a business model where customer orders are routed to trading firms for execution. Under some circumstances, PFOF brokers may have slower or less-price-efficient order execution than non-PFOF brokers. However, it's hard to say whether that's the case here, as J.P. Morgan declined to share data about its order execution quality with NerdWallet.

J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing's investment selection

While Self-Directed Investing may be an excellent choice for the beginner investor, more advanced investors may find its offerings limited. Self-Directed Investing doesn’t support investing in futures or forex. The broker does not allow access to initial public offerings (IPOs).

However, J.P. Morgan is well-equipped for mutual fund investing. With roughly 3,000 no-transaction-fee mutual funds available from J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing, you shouldn’t have a problem finding a mutual fund that fits your investing goals while still avoiding paying a transaction fee for it.

J.P. Morgan recently added support for fractional share investing — that is, users can buy less than 1 share of several hundred stocks and ETFs, for a minimum of $5. Some brokers don't offer fractional shares at all, but others have more extensive fractional share offerings that don't include minimums.

Self-Directed Investing users can buy Treasury bonds and bond ETFs for no additional fee, while corporate bonds, municipal bonds, government agency bonds and foreign bonds are available for an additional commission of $10 per trade plus $1 per bond, capped at $250.

When it comes to margin rates, the high end of J.P. Morgan's range — the Prime rate plus 4.75%, or about 12.75% at the time of writing — is fairly standard among comparable brokers. However, users with higher account balances can get rates as low as 5.68% (technically the secured overnight financing rate plus 1.85%).

Other key J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing features

Research and data

Investors have access to Morningstar analysis and CFRA reports (which are likely sufficient for most Self-Directed Investing users), and news feeds from Benzinga, Midnight Trader and Comtex, but the number of third-party research providers isn't as high as similar brokers.

Customer support

J.P. Morgan customer support is available Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern, and from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays. Users can also reach out via Facebook and Twitter Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern, and from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. If you’d rather speak to someone in person, J.P. Morgan does have in-office visits during normal branch hours.

J.P. Morgan's educational content hub, "The Know," offers thousands of articles and videos. Newsletters and webinars are also available. The Self-Directed Investing website is reasonably easy to navigate, although we could not easily find information on how to close an account.

IRA account

In addition to standard brokerage accounts, J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing also offers both Roth and traditional IRAs, which are individual retirement accounts. Experts recommend using an IRA to save for retirement because doing so comes with significant tax benefits. You can have an IRA In addition to another brokerage account, as well as in addition to an employer retirement plan like a 401(k).

J.P. Morgan also offers one of the most extensive suites of retirement planning tools of any broker we review, including calculators, checklists and hundreds of articles.

Good to know about J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing

Unknown execution quality

Typically, brokers share their execution quality with us as part of this review process. That's the percentage of trades that are executed at an equal or better price than the National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO). However, J.P. Morgan did not disclose their execution quality to us. We've factored that lack of transparency into their score.

Low interest rate on uninvested cash

J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing offers money market funds, which often have yields of 4% or more. But unlike some other brokers, such as Fidelity or Vanguard, it doesn't offer users the option to sweep their uninvested cash into a money market fund by default. Instead, uninvested cash earns the rock-bottom interest rate of 0.01% per year.

Is J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing safe?

Investing always means assuming some risk of loss. But J.P. Morgan is insured to protect your funds in the event that a banking crisis rendered it insolvent.

J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing accounts come with Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) coverage, which protects up to $500,000 per account (up to $250,000 of which can be cash). J.P. Morgan is also regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Agency, which ensure its compliance with securities laws and financial industry standards.

Is J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing right for you?