Author: RobH

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News: Passiv adds support for more brokerages

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I was introduced to Passiv as a result of joining the Questrade family back in 2025; Questrade subsequently broke off ties with Passiv earlier this year and have been working on improving their own platform to do a lot of what Passiv did. (Like recently introducing custom indexing1).

Anyway, I still use Passiv since it makes it easy to see my entire retirement portfolio (including accounts owned by my spouse) all in one screen. Even its free version is useful in that regard2.

Anyway, Passiv up until this week only natively supported Questrade and Wealthsimple in the Canadian market. But I see that they now also support DIYers using BMO Investorline and CIBC Investor’s Edge. So if you’re a user of these brokerages, you can enjoy the benefits of one screen for all your accounts.

  1. A decent looking concept, but of no interest to me personally unless they add support for RRIF accounts. I’m not holding my breath. ↩︎
  2. The paid version allows you to execute rebalancing trades, among other things. Passiv’s main competition is all-in-one ETFs. ↩︎
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Questrade Developments: Lots of sizzle, but is there steak?

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A few weeks ago, Questrade hosted what used to be called a webinar. You can watch the replay here. It was a lot to take in. A lot of it seemed focused on the investor who likes to trade. A lot. None of that stuff was of any interest to me, since it’s the opposite of how I invest. If I were to summarize my investment strategy it sounds something like “buy index funds, maintain asset allocations, and keep fees you pay as low as possible”.

I’ll try to highlight some of what was announced that seemed potentially useful. With Questrade, it’s always “potentially” useful since they make what I feel are sometimes arbitrary restrictions on how the good-on-paper feature actually works in the real world.

Custom Indexing

Custom indexing has been around for a few months, but it’s gained additional prominence on the shiny new Questrade website1. I covered it in my article over here: Custom indexing. The quick summary? Until Questrade adds support for Canadian equities and the ability to have a RRIF account use this feature, it’s of zero interest to me.

“Agentic Finance”: Flows

If you can get beyond the eyeroll-inducing marketing tagline, Flows is something brand new and it looks quite promising. It needs work before it’s useful to me, though.

Flows are basically “if/then” statements you can write to automate tasks (including trades) in your portfolio. This feature was very attractive to me, since paying yourself in retirement takes a fair number of manual steps to put money in the chequing account. You can only write flows using Questrade’s “Pro” platform2, yet another way3 to interact with your Questrade account.

The first flow I dreamed up I thought was pretty easy: sell enough XGRO in my RRIF account to make my monthly RRIF payment (which is a fixed amount). The slight complexity is that the cash balance in my RRIF is not typically zero. It’s often pretty close, but there’s no need for me to sell more XGRO than I need to, right? So really what I wanted is to sell enough XGRO to cover my monthly RRIF payment, while dynamically accounting for any cash I happened to have in the account. And since Questrade recently started supporting fractional shares, you ought to be able to get this down pretty much to the penny.

Unfortunately, that flow didn’t work. One is a Flow limitation and one is a Questrade platform limitation:

  • The Flow limitation: there’s no support for variables. At present, you have to tell the Flow how much you want to trade, either in shares or dollars. It’s an exact amount, so while “Sell $100 of XGRO” is supported, “Sell $100 less the cash position in my RRIF account of XGRO” is not. This I suppose I could live with.
  • The Questrade limitation: although Questrade supports fractional shares, it’s not complete. With full support of fractional shares, you should be able to specify buy/sell transactions either as number of shares OR number of dollars. For reasons unclear, you can BUY shares OR dollars, but you can only SELL shares4. So while “Buy $11.14 of XGRO” is a perfectly valid command, “Sell $11.14 of XGRO” is not.

The next Flow seemed harmless enough: “scan my RRIF for cash every week and spend it on XGRO”. This worked, but again, a wee problem: the Flow did not distinguish between CAD and USD in my account so it happily spent USD on buying a CAD asset. Mildly infuriating, since that means a 1.5% (or so) loss to me because of the FX premium Questrade charges on such transactions.

Once I complete Kicking USD out of my retirement portfolio this will cease to be a problem and I should be able to enable this Flow such that I never have cash in my registered accounts5.

“Agentic Finance”: MCP Support for Claude

I covered this previously over here: MCP support. This feature is pretty cool but is less useful than it could be because of the way Questrade handles accounts for which you have trading authority.6 I actually successfully got it to create an asset-allocation view of my portfolio (not my spouse’s), equivalent to what I show in the summary tab of my Multi-Asset Tracker. The MCP support may ultimately allow me to automate a lot more since Claude is a lot smarter than the Flow interface 😉

It appears from the Questrade help pages that MCP support now supports making trades7, but I haven’t played with that capability. With trading ability, my monthly “getting paid in retirement” workflow could be totally (?) automated.

New, more expensive Questrade Plus

Questrade’s subscription service (dubbed “Questrade Plus”, not to be confused with free “Questrade Pro”) has increased to $20 a month, up from $12. I was ho-hum about the service when it launched, and I don’t think the new features are of much interest, but just in case…

  • 1% RRSP matching (useful if you’re still building your wealth, but this alone probably isn’t enough to make up the fees)
  • Some new Wealthsimple-like perks (free eSIMs, WSJ access…)
  • Reward $ if you trade options8 (USD only, it appears)
  • And the already existing level 2 quote and Norbert’s Gambit support

The one good thing about the new Questrade Plus is that I got a free 2 month trial of it. This is indeed useful, and will almost certainly accellerate Kicking USD out of my retirement portfolio since the 9.95 plus HST journaling fee is waived.

Balance Sheet

This is probably intended to help replace the once-free Passiv Elite subscription that Questrade customers enjoyed at one time. Puzzlingly, it’s only available from the mobile app, which is just weird. The idea behind it is to give you a full financial view of everything. You can connect bank accounts, other brokerage accounts — even your house can be added using a Zolo-provided evaluation.

I didn’t bother testing this feature because Passiv already does this for me. Balance Sheet doesn’t support QTrade, but it does support Wealthsimple and a bunch of other Canadian DIY brokerages. And, just to reiterate once again, Balance Sheet cannot currently be used to add your spouse’s Questrade accounts to the Balance Sheet9. Oh, and Balance Sheet seems to support most banks that Canadians use, but this isn’t interesting to me since I don’t consider my day-to-day banking part of my retirement holdings.

Overall Impression

Questrade’s automation moves are welcome; Flows look like something I would actually use once they get the kinks and limitations worked out. I haven’t yet decided how much I want to throw in my lot with Claude-linked features. They are demonstrably powerful, but I’m a bit leery about granting Claude the ability to launch trades, even if they require my approval.

As for the rest, I guess I’ll keep an eye on things. Is there anything here that you think is a big deal? Let me know over at comments@moneyengineer.ca.

  1. Is it just me or does the Q for Questrade look a little like Apple’s Quicktime logo? ↩︎
  2. Still in beta, and performance-wise it certainly feels like a beta ↩︎
  3. The number of ways to interact with your Questrade accounts is head-spinning: mobile app, classic web interface (Questrade.com), Edge web interface(ibid, accessed from the classic web interface), Pro web interface (pro.questrade.com) and then there are also desktop apps which I’ve never played with. ↩︎
  4. Wealthsimple has full support. ↩︎
  5. Just cash-like holdings like ZMMK or ZSP. ↩︎
  6. Brief recap: trading authority means you can make trades on behalf on the person granting authority. It’s how I keep sane managing me and my spouse’s retirement holdings. Questrade makes this way more difficult and restrictive than other brokers (QTrade makes this fantastically easy if this feature is important to you). ↩︎
  7. It appears that Claude-initiated trades have to be approved in the Questrade mobile app ↩︎
  8. I don’t ↩︎
  9. It’s like Trading Authority doesn’t exist at all when using the Questrade mobile app ↩︎

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CAA Cheapskate

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I’ve been a CAA member for a while (actually, it was my spouse who first signed up and I’ve been on the family plan ever since). Most people think of CAA as someone you can call if you have a car breakdown12, and that’s certainly a good bit of insurance, but they also have other good deals that maybe you were not aware of. I found these by navigating to my local site (CAA North and East Ontario).

Discounted Gas at Shell

Including your CAA membership number at Shell stations reduces the price of fuel by 3¢ a litre. That’s really easy to do if you use the Shell app on your phone, since you can link it right there.

Deals on Rogers services (wireless, internet)

I just discovered this myself while researching this article. There’s more-than-decent deals on wireless services (not as good as Fizz mobile, my cheapskate provider of choice) but $35/month for 85G of data and Canada-wide unlimited talk and text is a nice offer. There’s also offers that give you good deals on home internet and television services. Paired with my Rogers Red credit card, things are even better!

Deals on Insurance

I found cheap contents insurance for my parents’ retirement home unit through CAA. They were fast and efficient at getting it all set up. You can check it out at https://caaneo.ca/insurance/property-insurance/tenant-insurance/.

Deals on … Museums?

For the Ottawa crowd, CAA offers 25% discounts on the Ingenium museums. These include the very kid-friendly Science and Technology museum, the Agriculture Museum and the Aviation and Space museum. I didn’t know that either: https://caaneo.ca/rewards/partners/ingenium/.

If you’re already spending on a CAA membership, you might as well maximize your return on that investment. What’s your best CAA discount? Let me know at comments@moneyengineer.ca!

  1. Although patience is a good idea. Supply of CAA tow trucks seems to outstrip demand! ↩︎
  2. They also offer bike breakdown service: https://caaneo.ca/automotive/bike-assist/ ↩︎
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Battle of the Free Money Offers

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The gravy train that is run by the new account acquisition department of Canada’s online brokers continues to chug along. Here we take a quick peek at free money offers from BMO Investorline, QTrade and Wealthsimple. I’ve summarized them all here, and simplified. Some of the offers have extra contests and that sort of thing but I’ve ignored them for the purposes of the table below:

BrokerDeadlineCashback Max CashbackHold PeriodPayoutLink
BMO InvestorlineAugust 31, 20261%$10,000Until September 30, 2027Lump sum after holdhere
QTradeAugust 31, 20261%1$2000Until September 30, 2027Lump sum after holdhere
WealthsimpleAugust 31, 20261%$20,000+$160022 yearsMonthly for 24 months after funds landhere

As trading platforms go, I’ve used all three in the past few years. For the DIY buy-and-hold investor, they are all good enough. Unlike QTrade and Wealthsimple, BMO Investorline doesn’t offer free trades, but they have a long list of free-to-trade ETFs that are quite complete, and include all-in-ones like ZEQT and VEQT as well as range of ETFs that mirror various indices and bond markets (BMO has good bond funds, nice selection and inexpensive to own).

In my view, Wealthsimple has the best offer since it has the highest cap. You see payouts sooner, too, at the cost of having to keep your money with Wealthsimple a year longer, however.3

In all cases, you have to make your move this month, because you never know when the gravy train will come to an end!

  1. Sort of. It’s $2000 if you shift $200k. It’s $1000 if you shift $199.99k. ↩︎
  2. It’s 1% for the first $2M, dropping to 0.5% up until $10M ↩︎
  3. If you want to give me some free cash if you decide to take up the offer, my Wealthsimple referral code is www.wealthsimple.com/invite/WOWQT1 ↩︎
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What’s in my retirement portfolio (July 2026)?

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This is a monthly look at what’s in my retirement portfolio. The original post is here.

Portfolio Construction

The retirement portfolio is spread across a bunch of accounts:

  • 5 RRIF accounts
    • 3 for me (Questrade, Wealthsimple)
    • 2 for my spouse (Questrade)
  • 2 TFSA accounts (Questrade)
  • 4 non-registered accounts, (1 for me, 1 for my spouse, 2 joint, all at Questrade)

The view post-payday

I pay myself monthly in retirement, so that’s a good trigger to update this post. On July 301 before the markets opened, this is what it looked like:

The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars, (and if not an all-star, they are probably on the Magnificent Seven ETFs list).

There have been pretty big changes since last month as my strategy to Kick USD out of my retirement portfolio continues in earnest. This has focused on getting rid of AOA and ICSH in my spouse’s RRIF account this month as she takes advantage of the free Norbert’s Gambit included in her trial subscription to Questrade Plus2.

AOA is largely being replaced by XGRO, but because AOA is so heavily US Equity weighted, I always have to pick up VFV to make up the difference — I’m kicking USD out of my portfolio, not the US market. ZST is my pick for the RRIF to replace ICSH. It’s a similar idea to ICSH, but since Canadian interest rates are lower, I expect I’m sacrificing a bit of return there. I hope this will work itself out in the long run.

And I’m trying to respect my asset allocations at the same time.

Plan for the next month

The asset-class split looks like this; you can read about my asset-allocation approach to investing over here.

The moves I made to start reducing USD in my portfolio have quickly allowed me to get to my recently revised target allocations I have for each asset class:

  • 5% cash or cash-like holdings like ZMMK and ZST
  • 15% bonds/income (most are buried in XGRO and AOA, rest are in XCB)
  • 23% Canadian equity (mostly based on ETFs that mirror the S&P/TSX — HXT and XIC); this is up from the old 20% target
  • 37% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500); this is up 1% from the old target
  • 20% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets); this is down 4% from the old target

With the asset class splits under control, next month will see more moves to get rid of USD in my portfolio. There’s only USD in my RRIF accounts now, all invested in AOA and ICSH. These positions will be reduced by 1/5th in August as my target is to be fully USD free by the end of the year.

My timing for conversion looks to have been pretty decent; the USD/CAD rate continues to run north of 1.40, which for me is a good thing.

Overall

Part of using VPW3 as a strategy is the need to calculate your retirement net worth on a monthly basis. My three month winning streak has come to an end as I took a slight step back month over month. However, I’m worth 19% more than when I started my retirement journey in January 2025.

Irrespective of my net worth stumble, my VPW-calculated salary continues to increase, albeit at a more modest rate, as expected. The VPW cash cushion (now 100% invested in ZMMK) acts like a shock absorber to my salary, smoothing out the more volatile month to month variations in my net worth.

  1. I did all the trading I needed to do on the 24th; it takes a few days for everything to settle and for money to get sent to the bank account. My net worth is quite a bit lower after the mini-crash on the 29th! ↩︎
  2. Questrade Plus is 11.95 monthly, but offers a 30 day free trial. I’m a cheapskate, remember? Norbert’s Gambit is otherwise 9.95 a go plus HST. ↩︎
  3. Variable Percentage Withdrawal, my chosen decumulation strategy. ↩︎