The platforms are more or less the same. Schwab, E-Trade, TD Ameritrade, even Robinhood, all will take your deposits and buy your stocks. If you're depositing $10k plus, some of them might give you $100+ to go with them.

Your bigger decision is whether to go active or passive. For 90% or more of the population in your situation, the best thing to do is buy a Target Retirement Date fund, contribute to it regularly, and gradually build wealth the safe and boring way.

There is a very small percentage of people who can genuinely beat the market. If you're asking the question in OP, you're not there yet. Go back to option 1, park your money there, and do a lot of reading. "Where Are the Customers' Yachts" and "You Can Be a Stock Market Genius" (terrible title, great book) are good places to start.

I have read many of the recommend books. Here are my two pence.

Books on Wealth

    1. "Rich Dad Poor Dad"
     and find out exactly why someone becomes rich.
    (if you like this one, at some point you may also
     want to quickly scan through "Cashflow Quadrant
     Rich Dad's Guide to Financial Freedom".)

     2. Also "chapter 6 - How to make wealth"
     from "Hackers and Painters's chapter 6 - "

     3. "The Way to Wealth by Benjamin Franklin"

Investing books in this order

    1. Peter Lynch's One Up on wall street
    2. The Intelligent Investor  (Ben Graham)
    3. Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits
    4. Security Analysis (Ben Graham)
    5. The Warren Buffet Way is a famous business read not exceptional but read it if you have some time left
    6. A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Read it for a good laugh)

Do NOT read

    1. AA- The Motley Fool Money Guide
    2. How Gerge Soros Knows What He Knows
    3. Investing Online For Dummies
    4. Malkiel Burton - A Random Walk Down Wall Street
    5. Cracking the millionaire code
    6. Joel Greenblatt - You Can Be A Stock Market Genius

But you can beat the market by doing a few things:

1. Invest, don't trade.

That means buying companies in large quantities when they're at a bargain, and holding for a long time (think years or even decades). This will keep your costs and commissions down.

2. Look where others won't.

As Ben Graham and Seth Klarman have pointed out in their books, you want to look for companies that no one else is looking at for a variety of reasons:

* They've hit rock bottom in the last 1/3/5 years. If people are selling, you should look at buying.

* They're special situations. Is the stock going through the process of bankruptcy, merger/acquisition, spin-off? This is the basis for books like Margin of Safety and You Can Be a Stock Market Genius.

* They're complicated. Distressed debt, credit-default swaps, and other alternative investments to access by the public can be profitable if one is willing to put in the time (years) and dedication to analysis, but I generally wouldn't recommend it

* They don't fit the fund's portfolio / low institutional ownership. Active funds may employ thousands of people to work full-time on investments that suit their fund. This generally means large cap companies because the funds have to utilize so much capital that they can't waste it on institutional ownership of small and micro cap companies. Everyone and their mom has done research analysis on Google, few spend their time on Sanderson Farms, which only broke into mid-cap territory for the first time in over a year, and has since risen by over 10% after being massively undervalued.

If you are in a diversified basket of 15-30 value-oriented stocks with at least some focus on quality, you can stand to beat the market over the very long term.

I studied economics in college, then I worked for a few years as a business journalist before I finally switched careers to IT systems engineering. The following is a list of my favorite books on financial securities, banking and investment theory. These books are generally comprehensible to anyone with an interest in the subject, regardless of their educational background.

Arrighi, Giovanni (1994) The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times

Brealey, Myers, Allen (2011) Principles of Corporate Finance, 10th ed.

Bruck, Connie (1988) Predators' Ball: Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and Rise of Junk Bond Raiders

Fisher, Philip (2003) Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings, 2nd ed.

Fridson, Martin and Fernando Alvarez (2002) Financial Statement Analysis, 3rd ed.

Graham, Benjamin, J. Zweig, D. Dodd (2006/08) Intelligent Investor, rev ed; Security Analysis, 6th ed.

Greenblatt, Joel (1999) You Can Be a Stock Market Genius

Greenwald, Kahn, Sonkin, Biema (2001) Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond

Henwood, Doug (1997) Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom

Levitt, Arthur (2003) Take on the Street: How to Fight for Your Financial Future

Lewis, Michael (2010/1989) Big Short; Liar's Poker

Lynch, Peter and John Rothchild (2000) One Up on Wall Street, 2nd ed.

Mishkin, Frederic (2004) Economics of Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 7th ed.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2005/10) Fooled by Randomness, 2nd ed.; Black Swan: Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2nd ed.

Vilar, Pierre (1976) A History of Gold and Money: 1450-1920

Tracy, John A. (2009) How to Read a Financial Report: Wringing Vital Signs out of the Numbers, 7th ed.