Day trading platform a level of excitement that you won’t find with buy-and-hold investing. There’s a rush from putting in the research, seeing an opportunity and landing a trade that gives you a profit. However, day trading can be risky, and it requires a lot of time to learn the trade and to develop your skills. That’s why it’s important to practice on a demo account or with play money first before putting your real dollars at risk.

Our list of best brokers for day trading considers fees, trading platform features, research and tools, education and customer support. It also takes into account the number of assets available to trade, the speed of order execution and extended-hours trading.

The Art of Precision: Choosing the Right Day Trading Platform for Your Style

For day traders, a good brokerage should offer an easy-to-use, reliable trading platform and a wide range of tradable assets. They also want fast execution times and high-quality, reliable data that streams quickly. In addition, many day traders use sophisticated automated strategies that require clean data to function. For this reason, they test their platforms using a simulation feature like the stock market stimulator from TD Ameritrade or the paper-trading feature offered by tastyworks.

Traders will look at the prices of securities—stocks, futures, currencies and cryptocurrencies—on their platform to decide whether to buy or sell. These prices come from the exchange where a security is traded and can include the price of a buy or sell order, as well as the bid and ask prices. The best brokers for day trading offer accurate price data, fast order execution and low fees. They may also allow you to choose which market maker your orders go to—a practice called routing choice.