Executive Summary
The story everyone tells about zero-commission trading is that it was bad news for advisors. Free trades, free robo-advisors, index funds that cost almost nothing to hold, the assumption runs that all of it squeezes the case for paying a person to manage your money and eventually the fee-based advisor gets priced out the same way the stockbroker did.
That’s not what the data shows. Cerulli found 68% of affluent investors in 2025 said they were willing to pay for financial advice, up from 38% in 2010, and the number climbs to 75% among investors with $5 million or more. Free trading didn’t shrink the market for advice, it moved what the advice is for. That’s also the reason we built six free practice-management tools and put them on our own website with no card number and no phone call required. We’re not handing them out to be generous. We’re handing them out because we think the RIA model is what’s left standing once the commodity work gets automated, and we’d rather more advisors running real numbers than fewer.
Denise runs a solo RIA outside Fort Worth, around seventy households, most of them referred in over twelve years. When Schwab went to zero commissions in 2019 she assumed her value was about to get squeezed from both directions, cheap trading on one side and free robo-portfolios on the other. What actually happened was different. Her clients kept asking about the same things they always had, when to take Social Security, whether to convert part of an IRA before a big income year, what happens to the business when her biggest client’s father passes it down. None of that got cheaper when trades did.
The Day Trading Went To Zero, The Job Didn’t
Schwab announced on October 1, 2019 that it would cut stock, ETF and options commissions from $4.95 to zero, effective October 7. TD Ameritrade matched within the day, effective October 3, and E*Trade cut to zero the same week. Fidelity followed on October 10, calling itself “the fifth major industry player since last month to roll out some form of zero-commission online stock and ETF trading,” and naming Interactive Brokers’ move in late September as the trigger that started the whole chain.
That week ended a hundred year old business model in about seventy-two hours. Every prediction at the time said something like it would gut the advisor channel, since anyone could now trade for free and the whole pitch for paying a person seemed to be sitting right there for the taking. It didn’t happen. The RIA channel kept growing through it. Cerulli reported RIA headcount expanded nearly 8.6% in 2022 alone, twice the channel’s annualized rate over the prior ten years, with firms managing under a billion dollars still making up 93% of the channel by firm count. Cheap execution didn’t thin out the independent advisor. It thinned out the part of the job that was never really the point.
What Clients Are Actually Paying For Now
If trading isn’t what clients are buying anymore, the question worth asking is what is. The answer keeps showing up in the same place, work that has nothing to do with picking a stock and everything to do with a decision that only happens once or twice in a client’s life. Estate planning offered in house at HNW-focused practices went from 56% of firms in 2017 to 73% in 2024, and tax planning, preparation and compliance work went from 29% to 38% over the same stretch, according to Cerulli. The work advisors do is getting bigger while trade execution quietly turns into infrastructure nobody thinks about, the same way nobody thinks about the phone network anymore.
Denise’s practice is the small version of that same shift. She spends almost no time on trade tickets now and a lot more time on the conversations that used to feel like a favor she did for good clients between the actual work. Now they are the actual work. The households who need that kind of attention are also, disproportionately, the ones with more than a brokerage account to think about, which is part of why the advisors serving them well are busier than ever even while online trading got free years ago.
A robo-advisor or a self-directed account is a fine answer for someone with a 401k and a couple of index funds, and nobody serious about the RIA model should pretend otherwise. That’s exactly the client a $4.95 trade used to cost real money to serve and a free one doesn’t anymore. The household with a business to sell, a concentrated stock position from twenty years at one employer, or three kids who all need different things from an inheritance was never going to get that handled by an app, and that household is where an independent advisor’s time is worth more than it used to be, not less. Free trading didn’t create that client. It just cleared the small accounts off an advisor’s desk so there was room to actually serve them.
Six Free Tools We Built For A Reason
We put six free practice-management tools on our site and none of them cost anything or ask for a card number. A Benchmark Snapshot that shows where a firm sits against others that registered the same year, on assets, team size and assets per advisor, using percentiles pulled off public Form ADV filings. A Capacity Check that turns a week’s worth of meetings into an honest number of hours per household. A Practice Valuation Calculator that runs the same math a buyer would run, with every adjustment shown. A Buyer Readiness Check scored across six questions. Growth Math, which takes the firm an advisor wants in a few years and works out what that means for new households a week between now and then. And Market Fit, which counts how many households in a given state file above a chosen income against how many advisory firms are already competing for them.
None of it requires talking to us first. Type in your own numbers and the tool gives you the answer, and most of them share a profile once you fill in the first one, so the second calculator you open is already half done. That’s on purpose. The value isn’t in making an advisor pick up the phone to find out where they stand. It’s in the number itself.
Each one exists because of a specific conversation we kept having. The Buyer Readiness Check came out of advisors who assumed they were close to a sale and weren’t, scored across six questions so the gap shows up as a number instead of a feeling. The Practice Valuation Calculator exists because most advisors have heard a number from a friend at a conference and never seen the math behind it, so ours shows every adjustment on its own line, the ones helping the number and the ones working against it. None of these were built to be marketing. They were built because the questions kept coming up and there was nowhere free to answer them.
Nothing here runs on your custodian’s numbers or ours. The Benchmark Snapshot and Market Fit both pull off public Form ADV filings, the same filings anyone can pull themselves, which is part of why we can hand the answer over without a conversation first. Arithmetic doesn’t need a salesperson standing next to it.
The Four Numbers Every Growing RIA Should Know Cold
Of the six, four answer questions that come up constantly and that most owners have never actually run. We call it the four number gut check, and it’s the order we’d suggest running them in.
- Where you actually stand. The Benchmark Snapshot answers this against real filings instead of a guess based on how busy the office feels.
- How full your week actually is. The Capacity Check turns a felt sense of being slammed into an hours-per-household figure, and it’s usually a worse number than the owner expected.
- What growth costs in real terms. Growth Math takes a target and divides it back into new households a year and first conversations a week, which is the part most growth plans skip.
- How much room is actually left. Market Fit shows the households above a chosen income threshold against the firms already serving that state, so an advisor knows whether the market they’re chasing has room in it before they spend a year chasing it.
Run all four in about ten minutes and an owner knows more about their own firm than most owners ever bother finding out, because there was never a set of free practice-management tools built to answer them before.
Why We Don’t Charge For Them
Here’s the actual reasoning, plainly. We believe the RIA model, an independent advisor working for a client rather than a wirehouse, is the right structure for the work that’s left once trading got automated and cheap. We want more of that model to survive and grow, not less, and the easiest way to help a firm we’ve never talked to is to hand them the same numbers we’d use if they became a client. A tool that only exists to get someone on the phone isn’t actually free, it’s a lead form wearing a calculator’s clothes. Ours don’t route anywhere except back to your own numbers. For most people who use them, that’s where it ends, and that’s fine with us.
Some advisors run the numbers and call us anyway, usually because a Benchmark Snapshot or a Growth Math result raised a question the calculator can’t answer, like how to actually execute on what it just showed them. That’s a fair use of a call. It’s a different transaction than a lead form pretending to be a tool, and advisors can tell the difference the same way clients can.
What To Do With The Time Zero Commissions Bought You
Denise didn’t get less busy when trading got free, she got busy with different work, and the work she ended up with is the kind that’s hard to automate and impossible to get from a robo advisor. It’s the case across the whole channel. That’s why we think handing out real numbers, free, to anyone running an independent practice is worth doing regardless of whether they ever become a client.
For more on where the tech side of practice management is heading, see what AI tools are actually saving advisors’ time and where the software your team already pays for is going unused. For more on the practice-management and technology questions independent advisors are asking right now, visit our advisor resources hub.
Our goal is to get as many advisors as possible actually running these numbers instead of guessing at them. Start here, no card number, no phone call required:
https://ritzstevens.com/tools/
Sources: Charles Schwab press release, October 2019, via Schwab pressroom. TD Ameritrade and E*Trade commission cuts, via CT Public. Fidelity’s October 10, 2019 move, via Boston Globe. Cerulli Associates, RIA channel headcount growth, via Cerulli press release. Cerulli Associates, affluent investor willingness to pay for advice, via Cerulli press release. Cerulli Associates, in-house estate and tax planning services at HNW practices, via Wealth Solutions Report.
Leave a Reply