Who Owns TD Ameritrade?

J. Joseph Ricketts founded First Omaha Securities in 1975 in Omaha, Nebraska, one of the first discount brokerages created after the SEC abolished fixed commission rates that May. The firm grew through the 1980s as Accutrade, an early adopter of touch-tone phone trading and, in 1996, one of the first brokers to offer internet trading.

The company went public in 1997 as Ameritrade Holding Corporation and expanded aggressively through acquisition. It bought Datek Online Holdings in 2002 for $1.3 billion, and in 2006 completed its defining deal: a merger with TD Waterhouse USA, the discount brokerage of Toronto-Dominion Bank, for roughly $2.9 billion. The combined firm took the name TD Ameritrade, with TD Bank holding a large minority stake that peaked near 45 percent.

TD Ameritrade bought the thinkorswim platform in 2009 for approximately $606 million, giving it the industry's leading active-trader software, and acquired Scottrade in 2017 for $4 billion, further consolidating the sector. When Schwab eliminated online equity commissions in October 2019, the industry's economics collapsed overnight, and within weeks Schwab announced its acquisition of TD Ameritrade in a deal valued at approximately $22 billion.

The acquisition closed in October 2020 after regulatory review. Integration ran through 2024: Schwab migrated client accounts in stages, decommissioned TD Ameritrade systems, wound down the Omaha campus, and retired the brand. The merger created a broker with more than $8 trillion in client assets at the time, and the combined company held $11.90 trillion at the end of 2025.