If you're trading in small amounts, the comissions add up pretty quickly, a $10 comission on a $1000 purchase of stock ends up being 2% of the price, considering you have to pay to buy and to sell. That's way better than a $30 comission from the before times, but it's still big.

That said, we can all thank RobinHood for driving comissions down to zero, and then do business at brokerages that work. I personally wouldn't trade at IB, because I only do a tiny amount of trading, and don't want to go into the rabbit hole of individually routing my orders; it's great that it's available, but I don't need that, nor do I want an API or stuff.

I was speaking less about options trading and more about general adoption. I've never done options trading, just small-ish buys and sells. My experience with e-trade was a flat 10 dollar txn fee, which was totally unreasonable for the amount of money I was investing.

For someone like me who's only tossing $2,000 into stocks to play around with, having zero fees is the #1 selling point, otherwise, the fees add up to a significant fraction.

I suppose it might be worth reexamining. Last time I used etrade it was a flat 10 dollar txn fee, which was absolutely ridiculous for people like me who just play around with funmoney. Robinhood was perfect for my needs.

Not for options, I think it's only Robinhood, tastyworks, and webull.