I manage mine. I&#x27;m doing alright but I&#x27;m treating it as a hobby as opposed to anything else since actively managing it involves not insignificant risk. I [should|will] keep a bunch in a more stable Vanguard fund to mitigate the risk.<p>Right now I&#x27;m using Merrill, which is fine. Trades are something like 6-8 bucks which isn&#x27;t terrible. I&#x27;m actually trying to switch to InteractiveBrokers when I manage to not have an ADD attack during their insanely long signup process.<p>Two reasons for the switch. Dollar trades are nice (with $10 minimum, monthly fee is `max(10 - num_trades, 0)`), and I think they have a small per contract fee for options. The big reason for the switch though is the tooling and the API. I want to be able to build up a nice CLI tool (maybe also a daemon for alerts&#x2F;custom triggers) that I can use to reduce the per-interaction overhead of actively managing my portfolio since most of the time I spend doing it is waiting for page refreshes and mentally doing the math on options chains instead of writing a quick function to run a specific comparison and being able to just call it anytime in the future.