Build Your Own ETF at Fidelity, Schwab, Robinhood and M1

Fidelity is the only major US broker with a real basket product: Fidelity Basket Portfolios lets you hold 2 to 50 stocks or ETFs as one named unit and rebalance the whole thing in a single action for $4.99 a month. M1 gets you automatic rebalancing of new contributions into target percentages, with a $3 monthly platform fee that disappears above $10,000 in assets. Schwab and Robinhood both offer commission-free fractional shares from $1, which is enough to build any basket by hand, but neither gives you a basket-level rebalance button.

That is the short version. The longer version matters because the four platforms are solving genuinely different problems, and picking the wrong one means either paying for automation you will not use or hand-managing something you thought would run itself. Everything below was checked against each provider's own pages in July 2026, and this is educational content rather than investment advice.

What each broker actually gives you

How to build your own ETF at Fidelity

Fidelity Basket Portfolios is the closest thing on the US retail market to a personal ETF. You create a basket, add between 2 and 50 stocks or ETFs, assign each one a target weight, and then buy, sell or rebalance the entire basket as a single action rather than placing individual orders. Fractional shares are supported out to three decimal places as long as each order is worth at least $1.00, so a $500 investment can actually land on your target percentages instead of rounding into a mess.

The pricing is a flat $4.99 a month with a 30-day free trial, cancel anytime, and there are no account minimums on the underlying retail brokerage account. You can create as many baskets as you want under that one subscription, which is the detail that makes it good value if you run more than one strategy. A $4.99 monthly fee is $59.88 a year, so on a $10,000 basket it works out to about 0.60% annually and on a $100,000 basket about 0.06%. That arithmetic decides whether it is expensive or cheap for you, and it is worth doing before subscribing.

The limitation worth knowing is the 50-position cap. That is plenty for a thematic basket or a concentrated version of an index, and it is not enough to replicate a broad index yourself. If you were hoping to hold all 500 S&P constituents directly, this is not the tool, and managed direct indexing is the product built for that job.

How to build your own ETF portfolio on M1

M1 comes at the problem from the opposite direction. Instead of a basket you trade, you define a pie: a set of target percentages that add to 100. Every dollar you deposit gets routed toward the slices that are furthest below their targets, which means the portfolio drifts back toward your weights automatically as you contribute, without a single manual rebalancing decision.

Trading is commission-free. The cost is a $3 monthly platform fee, and M1's own disclosure states it is waived if your aggregate M1 balance reaches $10,000 for at least one day during the 30-day billing cycle, or if you hold an active M1 Personal Loan. You never pay more than $3 in a month regardless of how many accounts you have open. Orders execute in a daily trade window rather than immediately, which is a real trade-off: if intraday pricing matters to you, this is the wrong platform, and if you are building a long-term basket it is close to irrelevant.

M1 is the best fit when you are contributing regularly. The automatic routing of new money is genuinely valuable and it is the one thing Fidelity's baskets do not do for you. It is a worse fit if you want to place a single lump-sum basket order at a price you can see.

Can you make your own ETF on Schwab?

Not as a basket, no. Schwab retired the Stock Slices branding, and its own page now says plainly that the offering "is now referred to simply as fractional shares." The upgrade that came with the rename is real and often missed: fractional investing at Schwab now covers most US-listed stocks and ETFs from $1, rather than the S&P 500 only. Trades placed online are commission-free.

What that gives you is the raw material. You can absolutely construct a 20-name weighted basket at Schwab by placing 20 fractional orders, and you can rebalance it later by placing 20 more. What you do not get is a tool that holds the concept of a basket, tells you when the weights have drifted, or resets them in one click. For a small basket you check quarterly, that is fine and it costs nothing. For twenty-plus positions rebalanced regularly, the manual work is what the Fidelity subscription is buying.

Schwab does also sell managed direct indexing, under the name Schwab Personalized Indexing, starting from 0.40% a year with a $100,000 minimum. That is a different product for a different budget, and it is compared against the alternatives on our direct indexing page.

Can you make your own ETF on Robinhood?

Same answer as Schwab, with slightly tighter eligibility rules. Robinhood supports fractional orders that must be worth at least $1, and eligibility covers most stocks trading above $1 per share with a market capitalization over $25,000,000, limited to National Market System securities listed on national exchanges such as Nasdaq and the NYSE. Over-the-counter stocks are excluded.

Those thresholds rule out exactly the kind of names a speculative micro-cap basket would want, and they are irrelevant for a basket of established companies. Robinhood has no basket or pie feature, so as at Schwab, the construction and the rebalancing arithmetic are yours to do. Recurring investments exist and can be pointed at individual securities, which gets you partway to M1's behavior without the allocation logic that decides where the money should go.

Which one should you use?

Match the platform to how you will actually behave, not to the feature list:

• You will rebalance a real basket on a schedule: Fidelity. The $4.99 is cheap for the single-action rebalance once you are past ten or so positions.
• You contribute every month and want it handled: M1. Automatic routing of contributions is the feature, and above $10,000 the platform fee is waived.
• You want a small basket and zero recurring fees: Schwab or Robinhood. Ten positions checked twice a year is not much manual work, and commission-free fractional trading covers it.
• You want the whole S&P 500 held directly with losses harvested: none of the above. That is managed direct indexing at 0.09% to 0.40% a year with a $5,000 to $100,000 minimum, and the tradeoffs are covered in what direct indexing actually costs.

The decision none of these platforms make for you

Every one of these tools starts after the hard part is finished. They will hold whatever list you give them, at whatever weights you type, and none of them will tell you whether the list is any good or whether the weighting scheme suits it. That gap is where most self-built baskets go wrong, and it is not a broker problem.

Two decisions do most of the damage. The first is the membership rule. A basket assembled from names you happen to like is a watchlist, and it will drift as your attention does; a basket built from a written rule, such as US-listed companies deriving most of their revenue from a specific activity, can be checked against reality later. Getting from a thesis to a defensible shortlist is genuinely hard work, and it is worth doing properly, whether that means reading filings yourself or using something that can turn a thesis into a fundamentals-backed shortlist of tickers before you commit weights to it.

The second is the weighting method, and it moves outcomes more than most people expect. Take twenty-five companies and weight them by market capitalization: the four largest will often account for well over half the basket, and your result becomes a story about those four. Weight the same twenty-five equally and you get a smaller-company tilt, a different volatility profile and a genuine rebalancing cost as you trim winners into losers each period. Both are legitimate. Choosing without looking is not, and the comparison is worked through in market cap vs equal weight.

Test the construction before you fund it

The cheapest version of a bad basket is the one you modeled and rejected. Before you place twenty fractional orders, run the exact weighted combination over real market history and read the drawdowns, not only the returns. Then run the same members with a different weighting and compare the two curves. That single comparison usually settles the weighting argument in about two minutes, and it costs nothing.

None of the brokers above will do this. Fidelity and M1 will faithfully execute a construction you have never tested; Schwab and Robinhood will faithfully execute individual orders. The modeling step belongs before the brokerage step, which is what our build your own ETF tool is for: define the members, set the weights, backtest the exact combination, compare weighting methods against each other, and keep the result as a named index tracked against the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100 or BTC. It holds nothing, connects to nothing and places no trades. You still buy the shares wherever your account already lives.

Two habits make the difference over a few years. Write the rebalancing schedule down before you buy, because a cadence chosen while nothing is at stake is the only one you will follow when something is; portfolio rebalancing covers how to choose one and what the evidence says it earns. And re-read the weight column once a quarter, because a position bought at 5% that doubled while the rest stayed flat is now close to 10% and nobody decided that. The single-position concentration limits are worth having in mind before the drift happens rather than after.

Any backtest is hypothetical historical performance over a period that has already happened. It is useful for understanding how a construction behaves and useless as a prediction. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.