Category: Online Brokers

Reddit groups worth watching

RobH1 Comment

I try to stay informed about the options out there for the DIY investor. Reddit has a lot of decent groups that help me stay in the know. Here’s a few I follow. And sometimes contribute to1.

r/Questrade

The Questrade subreddit is a good place to hear about changes on the platform. Questrade is currently my provider of choice since they are currently paying me to use their platform. Questrade employees do pay attention to this sub and will sometimes personally reach out to help (I’ve had this happen to me).

r/Wealthsimple

I have a growing relationship with Wealthsimple. I have one RRIF account with them (history of why is found here), their Cash card is a wonderful tool to save money when traveling and their chequing accounts actually pay reasonable interest rates. Lots to like. Their platform is ever evolving and the folks on the Wealthsimple sub help me to keep an eye on what’s coming up. I’m a fan of this product, and would consider using them as my primary financial services provider, once they have all the pieces I need in place. (Current shortfalls: USD support is weak, no spousal RRIF accounts last time I checked).

r/Bogleheads

No, not that kind. “Bogleheads” are folks that are disciples of Jack Bogle, credited for creating the first ever passive index fund. Bogleheads, like me, are passive index investors. The posts on the Boglehead subreddit are comprised of primarily US investors, but the concepts they talk about are applicable to the Canadian investor. My own investment philosophy is, as it turns out, strongly aligned with that of the Boglehead crew.

r/JustBuyXEQT

This sub’s biases are pretty plain to see. It’s populated by uber-fans of the all-equity all-in-one that I hold in my own portfolio,2 although not exclusively. (I prefer XGRO as it provides a bit of downside protection, but my thinking may be flawed on that front). XEQT is on my all-stars list. Posts are generally from younger investors who are looking for an easy way to invest and forget. Given my recent analysis, I’ll probably start buying into TEQT to save a few dollars on the MER front.

r/CanadianInvestor

This sub is more generally about investing in the Canadian market, and in some ways serves as a counter to the other subs that are more closely aligned with my couch potato style of investing. Unlike the other subs, I lack sufficient karma3 to contribute…I’m very close though.

r/cantax

This sub is all about the Canadian tax system. I sometimes pick up good tips this way.

Are there Reddit groups you think this community should know about? Let me know at comments@moneyengineer.ca!

  1. as u/RobHemm ↩︎
  2. About 6% as of July 2025 ↩︎
  3. You need a score of 50. I’m at 45. ↩︎

Give more to charities, less to the CRA

RobH1 Comment

It’s probably not news to most of you that charitable giving in Canada attracts tax breaks that reduce your tax owing to the CRA. It’s a nice deal — support the causes that are meaningful to you while saving a bit of tax owed.

But for those of you with non-registered accounts holding stocks and ETFs, did you know there’s even a better option that can save you even more tax? By donating shares in-kind to your chosen charity, you get the same donation credit AND you avoid paying capital gains tax on the shares donated!

The differences can be sizeable depending on the unrealized capital gains you have in your portfolio.

Here’s a quick example: let’s say I bought $10,000 of XGRO1 5 years ago in my non-registered account. Per this dividend calculator featured in “Tools I Use” I see that it’s currently2 worth $15,850.

Say I want to donate $1000 to a charity — selling $1000 of XGRO today would generate a capital gain of $369. That’s taxable at 22.48% marginal rate in Ontario in 20253, so I have to pay an additional $83 in taxes4.

If I instead donate the shares in kind to the charity, I pay nothing on the capital gain, and I keep $83 either for me, or for additional charitable works.

So how do you do this? Well, it will depend on the online broker you deal with, but generally the steps are something like:

  • Let the charity know you’re intending to do this. Larger charities will have a published process, for example the Ottawa Food Bank’s is here5. Smaller charities can still benefit if you use a service like CanadaHelps6.
  • Let your broker know your intent. Every broker will have a different process, usually including some kind of form. Here’s some examples I found:7

And that’s it. The receiving charity will issue a donation receipt reflecting the market value of the donated securities for your tax filing. The nullification of the capital gain is done using form T11708 when it comes time to file your taxes.

I plan to do this more systematically for the charities I support; it’s admittedly a bit more effort than automated contributions. Since Questrade (my current broker) charges me $25 every time I do this, I’ll have to be a bit more strategic about amounts and timing.

  1. XGRO is a significant part of my portfolio, and as such it is included in my ETF all-stars page. What is also true is that I don’t hold much of it in my non-registered portfolio, but that’s just a historical investing habits showing up. ↩︎
  2. 5 year return, WITHOUT dividends reinvested as of July 17, 2025. Not reinvesting the dividends means my cost base is clearly $10k, useful for the example that follows. ↩︎
  3. Per https://www.taxtips.ca/taxrates/on.htm for taxable income between $114k and $150k. Don’t forget that capital gains are only taxed at 50% of the value of the gain. ↩︎
  4. Ignoring the tax savings generated by the charitable donation in the first place since that’s the same in both scenarios. ↩︎
  5. Googling “donate securities” <charity name> is helpful ↩︎
  6. They do keep a portion of the donation to offset their expenses, so it may not be a good idea for small donations. ↩︎
  7. Sorry Scotia iTrade users, I did my best but could not find their form. Let me know if it’s available somewhere and I’ll update. I’ve successfully used the process with both BMO and QTrade. ↩︎
  8. i’m not an accountant. Consult a professional if you have concerns. ↩︎

Review: Questrade

RobH3 Comments

I switched online brokers a few months ago to take advantage of Questrade’s bonus offer. The amount of money to switch was sufficiently attractive to tackle the not-insignificant hassle of going through with it1.

Shortly after getting started, I posted a short “unboxing” review, but now that I’ve been using Questrade for a few months I can provide a bit more detail.

It’s probably worth stating that my needs for an online broker are pretty simple and straightforward.

  • I hate paying fees.
  • I’m a buy-and-hold investor: I buy pretty much only what’s on my ETF all-stars list.
  • I hold USD denominated ETFs.
  • I need to easily (and preferably quickly) move money to and from my bank account. My “how I get paid in retirement” scheme necessitates at least monthly money moves.
  • I need a way to cheaply convert USD to CAD. Because I have a fair bit of retirement holdings in USD.
  • I need to be able to easily manage accounts that are held in my spouse’s name
  • I have a bunch of different accounts (RRIFs, Spousal RRIFs, TFSAs, non-registered accounts) and being able to quickly see which is which is highly desirable.
  • I’d like the ability to use a mobile app to do the tasks I need to do.

The TL/DR here is that Questrade meets my needs, but there is certainly a lot of room for improvement, especially in the domain of managing accounts for which you have been granted trading authority.

With that in mind, let’s see how Questrade stacks up.

Platform General Thoughts

I spend about half my time using the web interface2, and half using the mobile app. I have not bothered with the “desktop” app3 because I move from computer to Chromebook too frequently for that to be useful.

Questrade serves two rather different market niches. Investors like me are one, and high-frequency traders are another. There are two different web interfaces for these two audiences, called “My Portal” and “Edge Web”, respectively. I’d be happy to stick with “My Portal” (it’s the prettier interface) but am forced to use Edge Web in order to access accounts in my spouse’s name. The integration of the two is very clunky. Useable, but not pretty.

I’ve experienced a few issues with the web platform, and I don’t seem to be the only one:

  • There are random, reasonably frequent logouts (or partial logouts, where you can’t see any of your accounts)
  • Saving banking information for EFT deposit/withdrawal gets broken pretty frequently

The mobile app is more polished, but only offers a subset of the features of the web interface. Whether this impacts you or not will generally only be discovered when you want to do something and can’t find it in the mobile app. (e.g. currency conversion, accessing accounts your spouse owns). In my experience, lots of development time and effort goes into improving mobile apps, so shortcomings reported here may be gone by the time you try them out.

A quick word about security. Questrade offers the option to do 2FA using an authenticator app4 which I appreciate. Phone discussions with agents also rely on 2FA, but here you need to have access to your mobile phone since they only do SMS.

Fees: Excellent

Questrade charges no fees to buy or sell any stocks or ETFs. This is most excellent. They do charge a $9.95 journaling fee which is required in order to pull off a Norbert’s gambit but since this is not something I do frequently, it’s a small annoyance. It’s still way cheaper than converting USD to CAD using Questrade’s “Exchange” feature.

One quirk that I found annoying is that Questrade charges $25 if you want to donate shares to a charity. Seems a little mean-spirited, and discourages smallish donations, something I had been wanting to do.

And the other quirk is that there is no way to buy HISAs without paying a transaction fee. Of course there are substitute ETFs you can buy instead (e.g. CASH, HISA) but they skim off MER fees. That’s the main reason ZMMK and ICSH are now in my portfolio.

Trading interface: Meh

It works well enough, but it feels like I have to click around a lot to get things done. And there are some annoyances:

  • Good: The web interface allows you to automatically set a limit price equal to either the Bid or the Ask price, which is a nice touch. That’s not offered in the mobile app.
  • Bad: The interface won’t calculate the max number of shares of your chosen ETF you can buy with cash on hand5.
  • Bad: For margin accounts6 the interface favours displaying “buying power” over “cash on hand” which of course encourages margin trades. I suppose this is understandable, but not what I want to see.
  • Meh: for all the web space Questrade dedicates to fractional trading, none of the ETFs I routinely buy and sell are eligible for fractional trading7. This isn’t a big deal to me but figured I’d mention it since Questrade likes to promote this capability so heavily.

CAD/USD support: Good

Questrade’s accounts (e.g. TFSA, RRIF) allow you to hold both CAD and USD assets simultaneously. The interface is very flexible on how your assets are displayed in your accounts:

  • You can show JUST CAD assets by selecting “CAD” (and this hides the USD ones)
  • You can show JUST USD assets by selecting “USD” (and this hides the CAD ones)
  • You can show ALL your assets in CAD or USD by selecting “”combined in CAD” or “combined in USD”

Two things I have not tried

Moving Money: Good

Moving money between accounts and moving money to my USD and CAD bank accounts is easy with EFTs. I use Bill Pay from my bank account for TFSA contributions. All seem to work quite well, as long as the interface doesn’t “forget” your already linked bank account, which is a problem that’s cropped up a few times in the past few months.

Using trading authority: Terrible

Setting up trading authority in Questrade was a royal PITA…forms to fill out and upload, and then special enablement links, secret passwords…very labour-intensive. And then? From the web interface, you are forced to use the Edge Web platform if you want to trade on your spouse’s accounts. This interface hides the carefully crafted nicknames you’ve chosen in the “My Portal” view of things, so this is just barely usable.

You are also not able to move money involving your spouse’s accounts, even if the bank account is jointly held. This isn’t how my former provider (QTrade) handled things, and this feels like a significant downgrade.

If you use Passiv, it’s actually a much better view of you/your spouse’s combined accounts. Passiv Elite is moving behind the paywall of Questrade Plus, so you won’t be able to trade using Passiv unless you pony up for the subscription fee. But the combined view is nice, something you can’t get with Questrade’s own platform.

Forms: Meh

Although most of the forms are now done with (trading authority were the last ones I had to deal with), there are still forms for day to day management. RESP withdrawals for instance require a form. Searching for forms you need is reasonably straightforward but auto-population of form fields that Questrade knows (e.g. like account number, sometimes names/addresses) isn’t a thing. So it’s just busywork.

What’s nice is you can see the status of submitted forms from the web interface (not mobile) and you get prompt notification when forms are processed via email.

One big annoyance with the account setup process is that the automated emails generated by the document workflow do not reference the account number. So if you’re submitting multiple forms for multiple accounts, there’s no way of knowing which one is having a problem unless you log in to the web, and even then you are generally given a one liner description of the problem that may or may not be meaningful to you.

And you cannot submit forms on behalf of your spouse.

Support: Meh

Although I was initially excited about a support feature based on chat, the day to day use of it has been less than stellar. I always feel that the agents staffing chat are less knowledgeable. So now I rely on the phone when I need to talk to somebody.

Questrade Reserve exists if you have a larger balance and trade frequently which gives you access to a “better” support team. Although I don’t qualify since I don’t trade enough, I think I’ve somehow been included in this service. (It might be temporary, part of the transition time as Questrade Plus rolls out. I covered that here).

During their promo it was downright painful, to get a hold of someone, but in “normal” times it’s generally pretty easy to get a hold of someone who can help. Perhaps avoid calling during busy times of the year (promos, RRSP deadline, end of year).

Reporting: Meh

The Questrade built-in reporting is pretty basic, but it’s fine. I don’t really rely on it. The included access to Passiv is a much better tool for visualising your portfolio across multiple accounts. QTrade (my former broker) had much better tools in this domain.

All in all, the money involved with making the switch more than outweighs the new annoyances I have to deal with. I have found the Questrade subreddit a good place to keep tabs on what’s going on at Questrade. Questions? Your thoughts? Let me know at comments@moneyengineer.ca.

  1. As a retired person, I don’t pull in a traditional salary so I look at form-filling for cash as a way to contribute to our household’s net income. ↩︎
  2. Various browsers, various platforms with no real discernible difference in user experience. There are actually TWO web interfaces that are jerry-rigged together — the pretty one (Portal) and the “powerful” one (Edge). ↩︎
  3. AKA “Edge Desktop” per https://www.questrade.com/self-directed-investing/active-trader#advanced-platforms-and-tools ↩︎
  4. Including MS Authenticator, Google Authenticator, Apple’s Passwords ↩︎
  5. Unlike Wealthsimple. ↩︎
  6. And I had to open margin accounts in order to get a joint non-registered account with Questrade. On my to-do list is to see whether I can convert them to non-margin joint accounts or not. ↩︎
  7. Unlike Wealthsimple, if you’re keeping score ↩︎
  8. And it looks like you CANNOT convert between USD and CAD from the mobile app. Annoying. ↩︎

News: Webinar Roundup

RobHLeave a comment

Global X: “Beyond Borders: Why International Equity is Capturing Attention”

This webinar (registration link) takes place on July 28 at 11:30am EDT. I don’t myself make bets on any particular segment of the market, choosing instead to maintain my geographic splits consistent, including international equity (see my latest report on that). But maybe you don’t have any exposure to international Equity at all; this might be worth checking out in that case.

Global X is the newish name of Horizons, a company I’ve been dealing with for a long time thanks to their innovative swap-based ETFs, namely HXT (Canadian Equity), HXS (US Equity) and HXDM (International Equity)1 . They are useful funds to hold in non-registered accounts because they pay no dividends of any kind; this allows you to defer tax until you need the money and sell them2.

Wealthsimple: Five Costly Retirement Spending Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

I listened to the recording of this webinar, and you can too by registering here. Fair warning: this webinar is at least partly a sales pitch for Wealthsimple’s managed portfolios3, and you can expect a follow-up if you do register.

Sales pitch aside, I thought the presenters did a decent job in explaining the common errors associated with

  • Asset mix
    • Getting the asset mix wrong based on your needs. I talk about the concept of asset mix here.
  • Order of withdrawal (RRIF versus TFSA versus non-registered)
    • This was something my fee-based financial advisor helped me with. Even a DIY investor can benefit from a bit of oversight as you make the preparations for retirement.
  • Age to start CPP/OAS
    • Lots of Canadians take the money as soon as they’re eligible (age 60 for CPP, 65 for OAS) but that’s not always the best choice. I used the CPP calculator to figure out what my best option was.
  • Underspending
  • Ignoring Estate and Final Tax costs
    • These can be significant. In the case of my mother’s estate, Final Tax (and not Probate) was the expensive one4. The easiest way to reduce Final Tax is to give away your money while alive.

  1. Full disclosure, I own all three in my non-registered accounts. ↩︎
  2. At which point you will have to pay tax on capital gains, naturally. ↩︎
  3. And although I like and am more than capable of doing a DIY retirement, I need a plan B in the event I lose the capability to do this sort of thing myself. And so I pay attention to service offerings out there. Wealthsimple’s fees seem less onerous so that’s a vote in their favor. I hate fees of all kinds. ↩︎
  4. They would have been horrified at the tax bill and probably would have more aggressively donated their wealth had they known. ↩︎

Happy Retirement, Mr. Carrick

RobH2 Comments

Someone to whom I am greatly indebted is Rob Carrick, a personal finance columnist for the Globe and Mail. His insightful columns helped guide me over the course of many years as a DIY investor.

He recently announced his retirement, and I wanted to take this space to wish him well, and to thank him for his help over the course of his career. You made a difference, sir!

Things he has helped me with, just off the top of my head1:

In the course of writing this article, I stumbled across Rob’s guide to ETFs, a new-to-me resource which looks pretty awesome. And even better, it’s not paywalled: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/files/editorial/ebooks/Guide_to_ETFs_-_The_Globe.pdf

Once again, thanks so much Mr. Carrick, and I wish you a long, healthy and income-stable retirement!

  1. All of these are paywalled articles; you can probably get them online through your local library (the OPL link is here). As a subscriber, I have a few free articles I can share monthly, hit me up if interested. ↩︎