J.P. Morgan Chase Rating:  

Review of J.P. Morgan Chase: fees and commissions, pros and cons, minimum requirements and promotion offer for opening a new JP Morgan discount stock brokerage account or IRA.

J.P. Morgan Chase Overview

JP Morgan Chase Bank has a lot of customers, and the financial conglomerate knows they invest in taxable accounts and IRA’s. The company wants a part of their business, so it has launched J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing, a new discount broker. Whether it will succeed in attracting business away from some of the bigger players in the online brokerage industry is yet to be seen. Let’s take a look at what the new securities firm offers at this point.

J.P. Morgan Chase Commissions

J.P. Morgan Chase Pros

- Competitive prices. Definitely a low-cost brokerage house.

- Integration into Chase ecosystem.

- A decent amount of learning materials.

J.P. Morgan Chase Cons

- Small range of products.

- Software is very rudimentary. Some trading tools are missing altogether.

- Portfolio management is not currently available. This is a self-directed broker only right now.

- Retirement resources don’t measure up to J.P. Morgan Chase’s competitors. Chase doesn’t offer many non-taxable account types.

Customer Support

JP Morgan Chase has a good history of customer relations on its banking side, but what about its new brokerage arm? J.P. Morgan Chase fails to provide 24/7 support, which some of its rivals do offer. A J.P. Morgan Chase agent can be contacted during the week from 8 am until 9 pm. These hours are EST. There are no hours on Sunday, although there is a Saturday session that lasts from 9 till 5. During our investigation, we phoned in for a test, and it took us six minutes to talk to a rep. We thought this wait time was a little long.

The J.P. Morgan Chase site does not offer any type of chat service, and this we consider to be another failure. Chase offers many banking locations but zero J.P. Morgan Chase locations. Maybe in the future, the company will add some brokerage offices if J.P. Morgan Chase attracts a minimum number of customers.

What the J.P. Morgan Chase site does offer is an internal e-mail service. We were able to send and receive messages within this system.

Range of Investments

J.P. Morgan Chase clients have access to US-listed bonds, stocks, mutual funds, options, and ETF’s. You cannot trade futures, foreign exchanges, or currencies here.

Strangely, J.P. Morgan Chase also does not provide margin accounts. This seems even more bizarre given that one of the largest banks in the world owns this broker. Surely it has enough cash on hand to provide margin loans.

Mutual and Exchange-Traded Funds

To find mutual funds on the J.P. Morgan Chase site, you need to click on “Investments” in the top menu and then select “Mutual funds” (not surprisingly). Doing this gave us 2,538 securities that could be purchased by new investors.

The screener has an option to search for socially-responsible investments (59 funds) and products with expense ratios under 1% (a very impressive 1,354). Although J.P. Morgan Chase’s total mutual fund list is rather short, we do like the fact that none of them carry loads or transaction fees.


Profile pages for funds display a lot of helpful info. For example, we found total holdings, the inception date, the manager’s name and tenure, turnover ratio, and the current yield.

Pricing

Do you want to know what J.P. Morgan Chase charges for its broking services? Yea, we thought you would want to know that; so we did some digging, and here’s what we found:

Chase charges $0 for stock, mutual fund, and ETF trades.

As already mentioned, J.P. Morgan Chase’s mutual funds don’t have a transaction fee; although placing a trade for one of them over the phone carries a $20 fee. Doing the same with an ETF or stock costs $25.

One fee we thought was rather excessive was a $75 transfer-out charge, which is also assessed against partial transfers.

J.P. Morgan Chase clients don’t pay any account fees. Chase also does not require any deposit to get started.

Retirement Accounts

If you’re trying to stash some money away for life after work, Chase has some retirement resources to help you along that arduous journey. We found Traditional and Roth IRA’s available, and J.P. Morgan Chase allows old employer plans to be rolled over into one of these two options.

Unfortunately, the brokerage firm does not offer SIMPLE or SEP accounts. Individual 401(k)’s are not available, either. Also missing on the J.P. Morgan Chase site are retirement videos and calculators; although there are several articles.

Trading Software

There are no portfolio management services at J.P. Morgan Chase; so if you decide to open an account, you’ll need to be familiar with the trading software the brokerage house offers.

The first thing we need to say is that the trading tools here are very minimal, without many advanced features. So if you need direct-access routing or complex order types, forget it. You’ll have to go somewhere else.

If you stay with J.P. Morgan Chase (probably for its low commissions), you’ll get no trade bar, no desktop software, and no browser platform. The broker offers its website, and that’s it.

A simple chart can be found in the overview section on a stock’s profile page. Clicking on “Chart” will produce a full-size graph, although full-size does not mean the width of the monitor. A chart cannot be detached, either.

Chase’s charting program comes with technical indicators (about twenty), company events, and comparisons. The maximum timeframe is ten years, and there are four graph styles.


As for the website’s trading form, it’s much simpler than the charting program. Just 2 order types are available besides the standard market and limit choices. We found 5 time-in-force choices: day, GTC, on the open, on the close, and immediate or cancel.

Bonds have a different trading form. It’s actually integrated with the fixed-income search tool. First, you need to enter the bond criteria you’re looking for, such as yield to maturity, sector, and maturity date. Then the scanner returns a list of securities with a trade button on each line. To find the bond scanner, you need to click on “Investments” in the top menu, and then choose “Fixed Income.”


The J.P. Morgan Chase site also provides a watchlist, although it’s difficult to find. The choices under the top menu change depending on whether you’re on a stock’s profile page or not. You need to be on a profile page to find the watchlist.


Overall, we think the J.P. Morgan Chase site needs to be redesigned so that it’s easier to navigate.

Mobile App

J.P. Morgan Chase customers get to use the same app as Chase Bank customers use. It does appear to have fewer features on the brokerage side, however. We weren’t able to find a mobile check deposit tool with our investment account login, for example. There is also no streaming business news.

The order ticket on the app is very elementary, with just a few order types and time-in-force choices. The graphing program isn’t very functional. A chart does not fit in the app very well vertically, and it can’t be rotated horizontally; so charting is pretty much a no go here.

An equity’s profile page has an “add to watchlist” button. But after adding a stock to the watchlist, we were not able to find the actual watchlist.

On the positive side, the app does offer the ability to trade mutual funds; and that’s about the only positive thing we can say about this platform.

Cash Management Features

Because J.P. Morgan Chase is owned by JPMorgan Chase, you might think that the brokerage firm would offer some pretty good banking features. Well, you need to think again. J.P. Morgan Chase does not provide checks or a debit card. One workaround of this lapse is to open a Chase deposit account and link it to a J.P. Morgan Chase securities account. Some of Chase’s checking accounts come with some really nice perks, such as ATM fee reimbursements and 0% foreign currency fees.

Portfolio Management

Currently, J.P. Morgan Chase is only offering self-directed accounts. The brokerage firm does say it is planning to launch an investment advisory service in the first half of 2021. Although we don’t know the specifics of this upcoming service, we suspect it’s probably a digital advisor.

Portfolio Builder

One service J.P. Morgan Chase has that is similar to a robo-advisory service is Portfolio Builder. Clients answer a few online questions (time horizon, risk tolerance, and so forth), and then the program suggests ETF’s and stocks based on the answers. There is a $5,000 minimum balance requirement to use the online tool.

Investment Education & Research

Although J.P. Morgan Chase’s platforms are rather simple, they do offer a decent amount of financial education. For example, there’s a section on the website entitled “Investing 101.” It provides a large assortment of articles on investing essentials. We found information on inflation, differences between mutual and exchange-traded funds, and fundamental analysis.

There are also videos on the J.P. Morgan Chase site. They are only a few minutes long each; but they cover key investment topics, such as risk tolerance and diversification.

Another useful educational service on the J.P. Morgan Chase site is market news articles from Chase financial professionals. We found documents on the impact that midterm elections have on securities markets and the future of energy.

Moving from education to research, there are security screeners on the J.P. Morgan Chase site that are able to look for potential investments. We evaluated the screeners, which are available for stocks, bonds, ETF’s, and mutual funds. Without an exception, they all provided many criteria to search by.

Comparison

While we liked J.P. Morgan Chase’s mutual fund screener, the information on fund profile pages is rather brief. We found more information at Fidelity and Charles Schwab. And JP Morgan's J.P. Morgan Chase’s fund list is rather small by industry standards. Larger lists can be found at TD Ameritrade and Vanguard.

Trading tools are also very weak here, with better technology at TradeStation, Interactive Brokers, and TD Ameritrade.

Recommendation

It’s hard to suggest J.P. Morgan Chase over other firms for most activities. J.P. Morgan Chase’s greatest strength, low commissions, is rivaled and even surpassed by several other brokers, especially Webull. Nevertheless, small accounts can do well here with J.P. Morgan Chase’s low commissions and $0 opening requirement.

We definitely don’t recommend J.P. Morgan Chase for beginners (better resources are at TD Ameritrade) or for IRA’s.

We also can’t suggest J.P. Morgan Chase for mutual fund investors, as other brokers have larger lists.

JP Morgan J.P. Morgan Chase Review Recap

JP Morgan J.P. Morgan Chase has made an attempt to enter a rather competitive arena. So far, it looks like it has a lot of work to do if it wants to outperform its rivals.