Your assets never sit in our accounts — they're held in your name at an independent custodian. Choosing which one is among the most consequential decisions we make on clients' behalf. Here's our reasoning, with the numbers.
Most independent advisors default to Charles Schwab or Fidelity — both respected institutions that serve millions of investors well, and we say so without reservation. Our obligation, though, isn't to choose the familiar custodian; it's to choose the one whose economics, balance sheet, and machinery do the most for our clients. After weighing the options across five dimensions, we custody managed accounts at Interactive Brokers ("IBKR") — a firm built for institutions and professionals that, in our judgment, offers advantages the household names don't match.
Think of a custodian the way you think of a bank vault. Its purpose is not to make your money grow — that’s what markets and planning are for. Its purpose is to make sure that what’s yours stays yours: held in your name, segregated from the firm’s own money and from everyone else’s, accounted for to the penny, and there — tomorrow, next decade, and in the worst week the market ever has. Returns come and go with markets. Safety comes from custody. Which is why, before we ever compared costs or platforms, we asked one question first: where will client assets be safest? Everything else on this page is a tiebreaker after that one.
Read that middle number again. The industry standard stops at SIPC’s $500,000. IBKR’s excess policy extends per-account protection sixty-fold beyond the baseline — coverage written at Lloyd’s of London, layered on top of the daily segregation discipline above. (As at every securities firm, this protects against failure of the broker-dealer, not against market losses; futures are not covered.)
Custodian economics reach client returns through two channels most investors never examine: what your idle cash earns and what borrowing costs. Here are the published numbers, side by side.
IBKR Pro rate applies to USD balances above $10,000 in accounts over $100,000 NAV. Brokerage/bank rates as compiled from the firms’ published rate pages (bankofamerica.com, citi.com, us.etrade.com, jpmorgan.com, schwab.com, wellsfargoadvisors.com) as of July 6, 2026. All rates change with market conditions; verify at each firm’s site.
This gap isn't generosity — it's structure. At most large brokerages, the default "sweep" deposits your cash at an affiliated bank, which lends it out and keeps nearly the entire spread; the 0.01% you're paid isn't an oversight, it's the profit engine. Interactive Brokers doesn't fund a lending bank with client cash — it simply passes through its benchmark rate minus half a percent. When your custodian doesn't profit from underpaying you, your interests are aligned by design. StockBrokers.com, reviewing the industry in 2026, wrote that IBKR "continues to set the benchmark for cost efficiency."
For a client who ever borrows against a portfolio — a bridge purchase, a tax-timing decision — a $100,000 loan costs roughly $4,100–$5,100 a year at IBKR versus $10,000+ at the household names' base rates (large balances negotiate lower everywhere, but the starting lines aren't close). Add $0 stock and ETF commissions, currency conversion measured in fractions of a basis point, and no custody fees on our client accounts.
Rates verified July 2026. We re-verify the figures on this page periodically; if you're reading this and the date above is more than a few months old, ask us for current numbers.
A custodian's first job is to still be standing in every market. Interactive Brokers publishes its strength plainly:
Two of those numbers deserve emphasis. Zero long-term debt means no leverage working against clients in a crisis. And 74% insider ownership means the people running the firm carry the downside personally — which shows up as a famously conservative risk culture: every client position is marked to market and credit-vetted in real time, continuously, rather than at day's end. A brokerage-pure model, without a large banking balance sheet, also means client assets aren't sitting adjacent to interest-rate risk on long-dated securities portfolios — a structural difference from bank-affiliated custodians that 2023's regional-banking stress made vivid across the industry.
Charles Schwab is a well-capitalized, A−-rated firm — and also a fundamentally different animal: a bank holding company. Its model takes client sweep cash, deposits it at Schwab's affiliated banks, and invests it in long-dated bonds, earning the spread between what those bonds yield and the near-zero sweep rate. The publicly documented facts show what that model carries:
Both firms carry similar credit ratings. The difference isn't the letter grade — it's the model behind it. One custodian's balance sheet takes interest-rate risk with a bank; the other's is a capital cushion with no debt and nothing parked at amortized cost. For the place your life savings sit, we prefer the second.
IBKR is the platform of hedge funds, professional traders, and advisory firms — and that machinery serves our clients directly: execution via SmartRouting, which searches across exchanges for the best available price (and on the professional tier, stock orders aren't sold to market makers as payment for order flow); access to 150+ markets worldwide for genuinely global diversification; fractional shares, sophisticated fixed-income tools, and portfolio-level risk analytics; and the reporting and API infrastructure that lets our planning and monitoring systems see accounts with precision. Household-name platforms are built for the retail account holder; IBKR is built for the professional managing money on a client's behalf — which is exactly the relationship you're hiring.
Schwab and Fidelity offer branch networks you can walk into, integrated banking conveniences, and brands your neighbors recognize. Fidelity's money-market default for cash is genuinely competitive. For a do-it-yourself investor who values a nearby office, they're strong choices — and if you hold legacy accounts at either, we can work with them (you'll find a Schwab login on our client access page).
Branch lobbies and brand familiarity don't compound. Balance-sheet strength, near-zero cost friction, automatic interest, disciplined execution, and institutional tooling do — year after year, in every account, whether anyone is watching or not. When the advisor relationship replaces the branch visit, the custodian's job narrows to exactly the things IBKR does best.