Moomoo is the rare retail broker that hands a $200 account the same Level 2 depth, premarket access, and charting that traders used to pay real money for. If you’re starting small and trade from your phone or a single desktop screen, it’s one of the strongest value plays in the retail tier; if your edge depends on routing your own orders or shorting hard-to-borrow names, it isn’t built for you.
Our rating: 4.0 / 5
Best for: beginner-to-intermediate day traders on small accounts who want professional-grade market data at retail prices.
NOT for: traders who need direct-access routing, published locate pricing, or an IRA next to their trading account.
Price: $0 commissions on US stocks, ETFs, and equity options; index options $0.50 per contract; flat 6.8% margin rate.
Pros:
- $0 commissions and $0 contract fees on equity options
- Free Level 2 depth with a $100 average balance
Cons:
- FINRA fined the firm $750,000 in 2024 over influencer marketing
- Very high daily order counts can trigger per-share commissions
What moomoo is and who runs it
Moomoo is the international retail brand of Futu, a Hong Kong-based fintech group. Two entities matter for a US trader: Moomoo Technologies Inc. runs the app and platform, while Moomoo Financial Inc. is the actual broker-dealer, a FINRA member with SIPC coverage up to $500,000 per account, including $250,000 for cash. The split is normal for app-first brokers, and the disclosures spell it out plainly.
The product started as a mobile app and grew outward: there’s now a full desktop platform, a TradingView integration, and an open API. US clients trade US stocks, ETFs, OTC names, and options, plus Hong Kong stocks and select China A-shares at a 0.03% commission. Crypto runs through a separate entity, Moomoo Crypto Inc., and isn’t available in every state. There are no IRAs; moomoo’s own materials state it doesn’t offer retirement accounts, so this is a taxable trading account, full stop.
Features that matter for day trading
Level 2 depth, free at $100
This is moomoo’s headline feature for active traders. You get real-time Level 2 market depth with up to 60 bid and ask price levels, free, as long as your 30-day average account value stays at $100 or more (cash and positions both count, and new accounts get 30 days complimentary). Dip below the threshold and access pauses until your average recovers; nothing is lost permanently.
That’s a meaningfully lower bar than paying $10–25 a month for a depth subscription elsewhere. Reading the Level 2 book tells you where size is stacked and whether a thin stock is about to get heavy; for a scalper on a $500 account, getting that data free changes the math of staying in the game. The exact conditions live on moomoo’s Level 2 access page.
Charting, screener, and the desktop platform
The platform ships with 100+ technical indicators and 38+ drawing tools, multi-chart layouts, sector heat maps, an earnings calendar, and a customizable stock screener that filters on more than 100 criteria. The desktop app is a genuine workstation, not a stretched phone screen, and layouts sync between desktop and mobile. If you’d rather chart elsewhere, the TradingView integration lets you trade your moomoo account from TradingView’s interface, and the open API supports custom and algorithmic workflows.
The screener is a candidate-finder, not an alerting engine. It filters the universe on your criteria; it doesn’t sit in a window firing premarket gapper and relative-volume alerts at you in real time. Traders whose whole morning runs on live scan windows typically pair a retail broker like this with a dedicated scanner, and our Trade Ideas review covers the standard version of that pairing.
Order types, sessions, and overnight trading
Session coverage is genuinely wide. Premarket runs 4:00 AM to 9:30 AM ET, after hours runs to 8:00 PM, and an overnight session covers 8:00 PM to 4:00 AM, which strings together into 24-hour trading from Sunday 8 PM to Friday 8 PM ET on eligible stocks (look for the “24” icon on the quote page). One catch worth knowing before you rely on it: overnight sessions accept limit orders only. That’s the right constraint for thin overnight books, where a market order on low liquidity is how you donate money, but it means no overnight stop orders.
Order types cover the practical range: limit, market, stop, stop limit, trailing stop, trailing stop limit, market-if-touched, limit-if-touched, and attached bracket orders, plus algorithmic order support on US stocks. What you won’t find documented is client-side route selection. Orders go where the platform sends them; the help center documents no way to pick your ECN or route directly. For most retail-size trades that’s invisible. For traders who care about fills on fast tape, it’s the structural line between this tier and a direct-access broker, and it’s the main reason moomoo doesn’t compete with direct access platforms on execution control.
Day trading without the PDT rule
The pattern day trader rule is gone. Effective June 4, 2026, FINRA’s new intraday margin rules (Rule 4210(d)(2)) replaced the old framework, and moomoo’s own documentation confirms what that means in practice: no $25,000 minimum, no day-trade counting, and all existing PDT flags removed automatically. The details are on moomoo’s intraday margin rules page.
What replaced it is real-time margin monitoring. Margin accounts now track an Intraday Margin Level through the day: your equity liquidation value minus the maintenance requirement on your positions (25% on long marginable stock, 30% on short, 100% on non-marginable names). Trade too large relative to your equity and you create an intraday margin deficit, which can trigger a margin call or forced liquidation the same day, not at the close. Cash accounts are untouched by all of this and still follow settled-funds rules. The new regime is more flexible than the PDT era and less forgiving of oversizing; we break down how the rules work across all brokers in our intraday margin requirements explainer.
Short selling
Shorting is available in margin accounts. Whether a specific stock is shortable shows directly on its quote page, and short borrow rates vary by stock; you check them in the app and on your daily statement rather than on a published rate sheet. There’s no published locate fee schedule and no documented pay-per-locate workflow for hard-to-borrow names, which puts moomoo in the same bucket as every retail app broker: fine for shorting liquid large caps, not a tool for low-float HTB shorts. Traders building a short-biased strategy on tight inventory belong at a broker built for short selling instead.
Paper trading
Paper trading is free and doesn’t require a funded brokerage account. Stock simulation works on web, desktop, and mobile; options and futures paper trading require the app. For a beginner, that’s the correct first stop before risking a dollar, and it’s one of the better-implemented simulators in the retail tier; see how it stacks up in our paper trading apps comparison.
Pricing, fees, and the fine print
All numbers below were verified against moomoo’s published fee schedule, which the broker last updated on May 20, 2026.
| Item | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| US stocks, ETFs, OTC, fractional shares | $0 commission | Retail orders, US residents |
| Equity and ETF options | $0 commission, $0 contract fee | Regulatory pass-throughs still apply |
| Index options | $0.50 per contract | Plus exchange proprietary fees (CBOE products) |
| Margin rate | 6.8% flat, all balances | Short borrow rates vary by stock |
| Hong Kong stocks | 0.03%, min HK$3 | Plus HK$15 platform fee per order |
| ACH deposits and withdrawals | $0 | Domestic wire out $20, international $25 |
| Outgoing stock transfer | $75 per transfer | Cash withdrawals stay free |
| Broker-assisted phone trade | $10 |
Regulatory pass-throughs exist at every broker and are small: on stock sells, the SEC fee is $0.0000206 of the transaction amount and FINRA’s trading activity fee is $0.000195 per share (capped at $9.79 a trade); on options, the OCC charges $0.025 and the ORF $0.013 per contract. Worked example: a 1,000-share round trip on a $5 stock costs you zero commission and roughly $0.30 in sell-side regulatory fees. That’s effectively free by any historical standard.
Two clauses in the schedule deserve a closer read than most reviews give them.
First, the $0 platform fee is technically promotional. It has been running since November 2018, and moomoo commits to 30 days’ notice before ending it. Nobody in the commission-free tier charges platform fees on US stocks today, so this is a category fact, not a moomoo flaw; the protection play is simply knowing the clause exists so a future notice email doesn’t surprise you.
Second, and more relevant to this site’s readers: the non-retail order clause. If your activity “typically involves a large number of orders per day,” upstream partners can reclassify your orders as non-retail, after which stock trades cost $0.0049 per share (minimum $0.99 per order) and options cost $0.65 per contract (minimum $1.99). Moomoo notifies you before the new schedule applies. Run the math on what that does to a high-frequency scalping style: the same 1,000-share round trip that cost $0.30 now costs $9.80. A scalper doing 30 such round trips a day would go from about $9 to roughly $294 in daily costs. If you’re placing a handful of trades a day, this clause will never touch you. If you’re machine-gunning orders, it’s the single most important paragraph in the fee schedule.
On margin, the structure is the story. Most brokers tier rates by debit balance, so small accounts pay the worst rates; moomoo charges 6.8% to everyone. Checked against peers in June 2026: Webull charges 8.74% on balances under $25,000, while Robinhood publishes 5% on balances up to $50,000. On a $10,000 debit carried for a month, that’s about $57 at moomoo, $73 at Webull, and $42 at Robinhood. Moomoo isn’t the cheapest, but the flat rate means a $5,000 account pays the same rate as a $5 million one, which is unusual and favors exactly the small accounts this broker attracts. Opening a margin account requires at least $2,000 in equity, the standard FINRA floor.
There are no inactivity, maintenance, or account fees in the published schedule. Closing out is cheap if you do it right: withdraw cash by ACH for free, and only pay the $75 transfer fee if you’re moving positions to another broker rather than flattening them first. One funding quirk to plan around: ACH deposits can’t be withdrawn within four business days of settling, an anti-money-laundering hold, though instant buying power (up to $1,000 initially, expandable to $10,000 based on assets) lets you trade before settlement.
Learning curve and support
The interface is information-dense by design. A trading screen that shows depth, time and sales, indicators, and options chains is a gift to someone who knows what they’re looking at and a wall of numbers to someone who doesn’t. There’s no one-tap trade execution; orders take a few deliberate steps. For a day trader that friction is mostly a feature, but expect the first week to involve more menu-hunting than on a stripped-down app.
The education side is unusually deep for a broker: 200+ structured courses, a large help center, and an active in-app community. Support runs 24/7 by in-app chat and email, with phone support on trading days from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM ET. That phone window covers the full session plus the close, though not the 4 AM premarket where gap traders actually live.
One trust item belongs in any honest review. In November 2024, FINRA fined Moomoo Financial $750,000 over social media posts by paid influencers that made misleading claims about trading profits, plus failures to deliver required privacy notices; the firm settled without admitting or denying the findings, and the action is on the record at FINRA’s disciplinary actions database. The violation was about marketing conduct, not customer funds or execution, but a fine for overselling trading profits is worth knowing about when the product is a trading app aimed at newer traders. It’s priced into our trust score below.
Who should open an account, and who shouldn’t
Open one if you’re a newer or intermediate day trader with a small account who wants real market data without subscription costs. The combination of free Level 2 at a $100 balance, 4 AM premarket access, $0 commissions, and a flat margin rate is close to the best deal in the retail tier for that profile, and the paper trading mode gives you a free runway before risking capital. If that’s you, the next decision is account structure, and our small-account broker comparison covers cash-vs-margin choices under the new rules.
Skip it if you need direct-access routing, locate transparency for shorting tight names, or retirement accounts. Skip it too if your style generates hundreds of orders a day; the non-retail clause makes the economics unpredictable at that volume. And if you’re a complete beginner choosing a first platform, weigh it against the field in our beginner apps roundup rather than defaulting here because the data is free.
The standing caveat applies to every broker on this site: the platform doesn’t make the trader, and most day traders lose money. Free Level 2 lowers your costs; it doesn’t supply an edge.
Alternatives
Webull is the most direct competitor: a similar app-first, data-rich, commission-free broker. Moomoo wins on margin rates for small balances (6.8% flat vs 8.74% under $25,000) and on equity options contract fees; the platforms are close enough that interface preference legitimately decides it.
Interactive Brokers is the step up for traders who outgrow the retail tier: more markets, more order routing control, and institutional-grade tools, at the cost of a steeper learning curve. It’s where moomoo graduates tend to go when execution control starts mattering more than free data.
Verdict
Moomoo earns a 4.0: a genuinely strong value broker with structural limits you should walk in knowing.
- Core capability (execution, routing and locates): 3.5. Wide session coverage, a full order-type set, and in-app short availability, but no documented route selection, no published locate pricing, and order-cost uncertainty at very high volume via the non-retail clause.
- Value: 4.5. For its intended user, a small-account active trader, the package of $0 commissions, $0 equity options contract fees, free Level 2 at $100, and a flat 6.8% margin rate is near the top of the retail tier. Moomoo’s own materials cite $0.65–$1.00 as the industry-norm options contract fee; charging zero against that norm is a real, recurring saving.
- Ease of use: 4.0. Clean, modern, and synced across devices, but information-dense; the first week has a learning curve that simpler apps don’t.
- Trust and transparency: 3.5. The fee schedule is dated, detailed, and unusually candid (the promotional platform-fee clause and non-retail clause are both disclosed plainly). The 2024 FINRA fine for misleading influencer marketing costs it here.
- Support and education: 4.0. 24/7 chat, 200+ courses, and a deep help center; phone support is limited to standard business hours.
Weighted overall: 4.0. How the weights work, and why core capability counts double, is laid out in our rating methodology. If moomoo fits your profile, sort out the account structure first: the best brokers for small accounts covers cash accounts, margin, and funding under the post-PDT rules.
FAQ
Is moomoo worth it for day trading?
For small-account traders who want real depth data without paying for it, yes. You get Level 2, 4 AM premarket access, and $0 commissions on a polished platform. Traders who need direct-access routing or locate transparency should look at a direct access broker instead.
Does the PDT rule apply on moomoo?
No. FINRA eliminated the pattern day trader framework on June 4, 2026 and replaced it with intraday margin rules. Moomoo removed all PDT flags automatically, and there is no $25,000 minimum or day-trade counting. Margin requirements still apply in real time, and oversized intraday positions can trigger a same-day margin call.
Is there a minimum deposit?
Moomoo’s published fee schedule lists no account minimum. A margin account requires at least $2,000 in equity before you can borrow, and free Level 2 data requires a 30-day average account value of $100 or more.
Can you short sell on moomoo?
Yes, in a margin account. Whether a specific stock is shortable shows on its quote page, and short borrow rates vary by stock; you check them in the app and on your daily statement rather than on a published rate sheet.
Does moomoo have a free trial?
The closest thing is paper trading, which is free and doesn’t require a funded brokerage account. Stock paper trading works on web, desktop, and mobile; options and futures paper trading require the app.
How do you close a moomoo account?
Withdraw your cash by ACH for free, or transfer positions to another broker for $75 per outgoing transfer. The published fee schedule includes no inactivity or maintenance fees, so an open, empty account costs nothing while you decide.