Investor's Business Daily asked financial services customers who they actually trust, and among investing and wealth management firms, the names at the top won't surprise anyone who has been in this business a while. Charles Schwab and Fidelity topped the investing rankings in IBD's latest trust survey, which graded firms on financial soundness, quality of products, and data security. Worth noting: across the full list of 64 financial firms, USAA earned the No. 1 spot overall, so the brokerage names led their category, not the entire survey. You can read the full results here.

I bring this up for one simple reason. For the kind of investing most of you should be doing, the differences between the major firms are small. Expense ratios on the big index funds are near zero everywhere. Trades are free everywhere. What separates the good from the merely adequate is exactly what this survey measured: whether the firm is solvent, whether the products are honest, and whether your data stays put.

Trust, in other words, works better as a checklist than as a marketing word.

Schwab and Fidelity topping an investing category like this is about as surprising as sunrise. Both firms have placed high on IBD's most-trusted lists year after year, and that kind of consistency is itself information. Firms that don't lose people's money tend to keep showing up on these lists.

But notice what the survey is really asking customers to judge. Financial soundness. That question matters more than people think, because your brokerage is not a bank, and the SIPC coverage protecting your account has limits. If a firm takes wild risks with its own balance sheet, you want to know about it before you park three decades of retirement savings there. A trust survey is a crude instrument, crude but useful, like checking whether a used car has been in any accidents before you kick the tires.

Data security is the one I'd weight heaviest, and I suspect most readers under forty would agree. A brokerage knows your name, your Social Security number, your account balances, and your beneficiaries. A firm can have the best fund lineup in the world and still not deserve your business if it treats cybersecurity as an afterthought. The fact that customers ranked firms on this at all strikes me as a newer development, and a welcome one.

Now, the part where I pour a little cold water on the parade. A trust survey measures how people feel. Feelings and fees are different things, and only one of them shows up in your returns. If Firm A ranks three points higher than Firm B on trust but charges you an advisory fee of 1 percent when you could get the identical index fund portfolio for a tenth of that, the feelings are expensive. Trust earns a firm the right to a conversation. It does not earn the right to your money at any price.

So my practical read is this. If you're with one of the big, well-known brokerages, and your costs are low and your money is in broad index funds, this survey is a quiet pat on the back. Do nothing. If you're with a firm nobody has heard of, offering yields or products that seem a little too generous, this is a fine week to ask some questions. The best time to check whether your money sits on solid ground is before anything shakes.

And if you haven't looked at what your brokerage actually charges you in a year or more, that's a better use of twenty minutes than any market forecast I could write. Ask yourself that. Then go look.

The usual disclaimer applies, as it always does. I'm sharing perspective from forty years of managing my own money, not professional financial advice.