The LSE Directory / Retail brokers
TD Ameritrade was a US online discount brokerage that let retail investors trade stocks, ETFs, options, mutual funds and futures, and provided the thinkorswim desktop, web and mobile platform for active and options traders. It traced its roots to First Omaha Securities, founded in Omaha, Nebraska in 1975 by Joe Ricketts, and took its final name in 2006 after acquiring the US operations of TD Waterhouse from TD Bank Group, which in turn took a stake of roughly 39 percent in the combined firm. The firm ran two linked brands: TD Ameritrade for mainstream retail investors, with zero commission trading on US listed stocks, ETFs and options (options carried a per contract fee) plus paperMoney, a virtual trading simulator funded with 100,000 dollars of practice money; and thinkorswim, bought in January 2009 for about 606 million dollars from its 1999 founders Tom Sosnoff and Scott Sheridan, which served more advanced options and futures traders with custom scripting, deep options chains and simulated strategy testing. It competed against Charles Schwab, E*Trade, Fidelity and Interactive Brokers on platform depth and education as much as on price. TD Ameritrade went public in March 1997. It grew through further acquisition, buying Scottrade Financial Services for about 2.7 billion dollars in 2017 (TD Bank separately paid 1.3 billion dollars for Scottrade Bank in the same transaction), which added more than 3 million client accounts and roughly 170 billion dollars in assets. By the time Charles Schwab agreed in November 2019 to buy the company in an all-stock deal valued around 26 billion dollars, TD Ameritrade held about 1.3 trillion dollars in client assets across roughly 12 million accounts. Schwab closed the acquisition on October 6, 2020, then spent the following years migrating client accounts onto its own systems; the TD Ameritrade brand, website and API were retired in May 2024 once the last accounts had moved. thinkorswim was the one part of TD Ameritrade to survive intact, folded into Schwab's trading platform lineup and still marketed and actively updated under the thinkorswim name as of 2026.
