Category: Tools

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Recent DIY Investing tools I’ve heard about

RobHLeave a comment

Lately, I’ve been exposed to a flood of new1 tools that target the DIY investor. Some I read about in the media (the Globe and Mail’s On Money newsletter is a good read), and some I get wind of through mails I get to comments@moneyengineer.ca (I do read all my mail).

I figured I’d summarize what I’ve seen; appearance here means I know they exist; I don’t use any of them at the moment.

I have taken (relatively) recent closer looks at tools like MyACB/AdjustedCostBase, Portfolio Pilot, Snowball Analytics and Portfolio Tracker should you be looking for a more in-depth review. I may at some point spend more time with some of tools below — let me know if you’ve got a favourite you’ve got in mind at comments@moneyengineer.ca, or tell me about your own experience with any of them!

ActiveACB: An ACB Tracker

Their website: www.activeacb.ca

Their pitch: Canada’s most complete ACB calculator for every investor. ActiveACB reads the trade history your broker already exports, rebuilds the ACB of every security you have held across all of your accounts, and turns the result into the proceeds, adjusted cost base, outlays, and gain or loss that Schedule 3 asks for on each disposition.

My quick take: Everyone who owns assets in a non-registered account should be tracking their ACB themselves, as brokers are notoriously bad at it2. ActiveACB has explicit support for options trading, and for assets held across multiple non-registered accounts, which might be of interest if that reflects your own situation. I can say from firsthand experience that the development team is VERY responsive to feedback.

Gilded: A financial planner/advisor

Their website: https://www.gildedfinancial.com

Their pitch: “Gilded is a future-focused financial planning app for a new generation of wealth builders. Through accurate projections, easy data tracking, and seamless simulations, we empower you to take control of your money and be your own best advisor. You don’t have to guess your financial future. You can know.”

My quick take: Canadian fintech. Projections, what-if scenarios. Includes retirement planning, too. I paid for a personal financial plan when I was getting ready for retirement to give me a sense of ease that I actually had enough to retire. I recommend some sort of oversight for everyone. Gilded isn’t just for retirement, it looks like it can also help people saving for that future, too.

Greenline: A portfolio tracker

Their website: https://usegreenline.com/en-ca

Their pitch: “See everything you own. In one place. You’re probably checking a few different apps just to see what you own. Greenline brings every account into one view.”

My quick take: Currently (October 2026) in free public beta. “Canadian focused, and Canadian built”. Lots of nice looking charts to take a closer look at what’s inside your portfolio. If you want a dashboard view of your overall portfolio across multiple accounts and providers and don’t like using spreadsheets, this is worth a look. I track my portfolio performance using my Google Sheets template. I’m ok with that.

Looniee: A portfolio tracker

Their website: https://looniee.ca

Their pitch: “Track your net worth and your TFSA/RESP/RRSP/FHSA room. If you invest in Canada, your money probably sits in more than one place: a TFSA at one app, an RRSP at the bank, maybe a pension and a home. Each one shows you a piece. None of them show you the whole thing. Looniee puts it on one screen, in Canadian dollars, with the room you have left in each account.”

My quick take: Looniee has some unique features that would be of interest to those who are still in the accumulation phase of their financial journey. For instance, tracking remaining contribution limits for Canada’s various savings vehicles can be challenging, at least based on my reading of the community of savers out there. Unlike some other tools, they work off of your statements, so there’s no need to trust Looniee with brokerage login information. I’ll probably take a closer look at this one.

Manticore: A portfolio tracker

Their website: https://manticorefinance.com

Their pitch: “Your entire financial life, in one place. A premium desktop app that tracks stocks, ETFs and crypto with auto-updating prices, plus your bonds, your net worth, budgets and a full suite of institutional-grade analytics: private by design, encrypted at rest.”

My quick take: It’s Windows software and I have nothing to run it on. It doesn’t support Canadian taxes, but may someday. And, like I said earlier, I’ve already got a portfolio tracker that suits my needs. If you’re Windows user and you want to do deep analysis on your portfolio, then this might be for you.

TextPhi: A finance companion

Their website: https://www.textphi.com

Their pitch: “The future of investing is in your contacts. Research. Watch. Test. In your texts. Whatever you want to understand, track, or test, just text Phi. Research that runs 24/7. Filings, earnings, markets, news, social, and more. Phi keeps digging even when you’re not. Phi remembers everything that matters. Over time, Phi builds a model of you as an investor, not just a record of your portfolio.”

My quick take: Built by UW students3, this product is still in invitation-only beta. Its innovation is relying on text messages to inform you about things you might want to know about your portfolio. You can ask it questions and get answers, all from the comfort of your phone. If you like to buy individual stocks, this might be for you. Given that I’m a boring asset-allocation passive index investor, I don’t trade on news, quarterly earnings or the latest social media post. I just stick to my asset allocation targets.

ValuEdge: an investor terminal

Their website: https://valuedge.app

Their pitch: For long term investors who want clarity, not noise. Know what you own, what it’s worth, & what changed. ValuEdge brings your brokers, valuations, watchlists, dividends, and alerts into one investor terminal — so you can track business value instead of just price.

My quick take: Although ETF tracking is supported, the focus of the tool and the included analytics would be more useful to the stock picker. I don’t buy individual stocks, preferring to buy the market through the use of all-in-one ETFs, primarily.

  1. Well, new to me ↩︎
  2. I use adjustedcostbase.ca myself. ↩︎
  3. Gotta support the alma mater ↩︎
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A new asset tracker

RobHLeave a comment

My entire retirement strategy is built around the idea of maintaining my asset allocation1 within the 5 categories I’ve (somewhat arbitrarily) decided to care about, namely:

  • Cash and ultra short term bonds, which make up 5% of my retirement portfolio
  • Bonds, which make up 15% of my retirement portfolio
  • Canadian Equity, which makes up 23% of my retirement portfolio
  • US Equity which makes up 37% of my retirement portfolio
  • And International Equity (anything that’s not the US or Canada) is 20% of my portfolio.

Tracking these percentages across the multitude of accounts2 me and my spouse hold, across multiple brokers requires some external tool help. For many years, it was based on the multi-asset tracker I have linked on the Tools I Use page. But in the past few months, I’ve migrated to a “new, improved” version of that tracker that has been re-architected so it is now based on pivot tables. Here’s some screenshots:

Pivot tables make maintaining the values in my portfolio much, much easier, and having structured tables makes it really easy to create new ways to analyze my holdings.

For instance, with the old asset tracker, say I wanted to compare the total value of my RRIF accounts with that of my spouse. Since we’re too young for income splitting, I’m motivated to try to keep the values between them relatively equal, so that we’re both withdrawing roughly the same dollar amount every year (thankfully, my spouse and I are the same age).

I could do this with the old asset tracker, but it would involve creating a new sheet, linking to the relevant values, (not so easy when you’re working from a single screen) making the calculations and looking at the result. And I would make it quick and dirty, since I wouldn’t know at the time whether it was something I wanted to track long term or not.

With the new asset tracker, it’s just a pivot table away. Takes seconds.

I’ll be posting a more thorough walk-through of it in the coming days, but if you want to check it out, it’s available here.

  1. If you want to learn more about asset allocation, this is a good starting point: Investment basics: Asset Allocation ↩︎
  2. TFSAs for both. RRIFs and Spousal RRIFs for both. Non-registered accounts for both. An extra non-registered account that serves as a cash cushion, and an extra RRIF at Wealthsimple because I needed a new laptop 🙂 ↩︎
hands grasping dollar bill in competitive struggle

News: Passiv adds support for more brokerages

RobHLeave a comment

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. ↩︎
ai chat interface on laptop screen

Mini-Review: Questrade MCP support for AI agents

RobHLeave a comment

I’ve had AI on the brain lately; it’s partly because I’m always curious about new technology — but I also recognize that my own portfolio management is more labour-intensive than it needs to be. That’s partly because I enjoy the tinkering, partly because I like things done in a certain way. My spreadsheets help a lot with making things more mechanical, but I still have to manually update them to get useful results1.

Now, I’m far from an expert on this sort of thing, but I’ve been experimenting with Anthropic’s Claude2 for a few days, getting familiar with how it works, and downloading the desktop client to my laptop.

Coincidentally, this week, I noticed a new little popup in my Questrade portal this week which promoted a new capability, namely MCP support: How to Connect Questrade to AI Tools with MCP3.

“MCP” stands for “Model Context Protocol”. Gemini helpfully describes it as “… a universal USB-C port for artificial intelligence”. Clear enough. In other words, MCP allows Claude read-only access to my Questrade account, which sounded rather useful and instead of pages of documentation (typical for an API integration), I got a three step process to make the connection.

  • copy the MCP URL from Questrade
  • Plop it in Claude’s Custom Connectors setting
  • Login to Questrade and permit access from Claude

I successfully followed these three steps in roughly 60 seconds, and next thing I knew, Claude was able to give me a list of my Questrade accounts and balances4.

That’s easy stuff, admittedly, so I figured I would ask it to please calculate the number of XGRO shares I would have to sell in order to make my monthly RRIF minimum payment. (This is something I actually do every month; you can see the steps I have to take to get paid in retirement over at What do you have to actually DO to get paid?

Claude was happy to help me — and it knew enough to ask me how old I was and what the value of my RRIF was at the beginning of the year. (This is how RRIF minimum is calculated, if you’re new to how RRIFs work, you might want to give Demystifying RRIFs a read).

But since I already know what my monthly RRIF minimum payments are, I told Claude to please use those. And it correctly calculated how many shares to sell based on the live cash balance in the RRIF account and the live quote for XGRO.

Claude immediately offered to set up a monthly schedule to do this…but, unfortunately, Claude scheduling is one of those capabilities that requires a not-free Claude subscription. The entry level subscription would be $24/month, or around $300 a year. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a ton of money, but as a rule I’m a bit reticent about subscription-based services since they have a way of slowly adding up and becoming a drain on your hard-earned savings5.

That was a silly, easy question to ask, and failing that test would have resulted in mockery.

So I asked Claude a more difficult question, namely to tell me how much Canadian Equity exposure I had across my entire portfolio.

Claude was quickly able to identify my 100% Canadian equity holdings (currently VCN, XIC and HXT), and correctly pointed out that my all-in-ones (XGRO, XEQT, ZEQT) were also sources of Canadian equity. With a confirmation to proceed, Claude was able to quickly create an aggregated table that showed all my Canadian equity holdings6.

But there remained a problem. Claude failed to uncover the Canadian equity portion of AOA, which is a USD-based 80/20 fund. My own calculation put the Canadian equity portion of AOA at 2.64% so it’s small, but not zero. But since I have a pretty large (if dwindling7) portion of my savings in AOA, this is a signifiant miss. I pointed this out to Claude who agreed (naturally) and fixed it8, along with a helpful and accurate observation9:

“Notes on AOA specifically: it’s a US-domiciled fund, so its 3.03% Canada weighting is small and comes through its international-developed-markets sleeve rather than a dedicated Canada allocation — nowhere near the home-country tilt you get from XEQT/XGRO/ZEQT. Its USD value was converted at the last USD/CAD rate we pulled (1.4087); today’s rate may differ slightly.”

Anyway, this experiment proved to be interesting, but without additional automation10, not particularly helpful to me. The key gaps right now are that it does not currently provide access to my spouse’s accounts (this I blame on Questrade’s design and decisions regarding how to treat TA accounts), and the lack of an MCP connector to Wealthsimple11 (where I have some retirement holdings). Have you connected your DIY accounts to an external tool? Tell me about it at comments@moneyengineer.ca!

  1. Questrade (my primary broker) has had API access for quite a long time, and I kept thinking I would figure out how to make it useful but I do find the security aspects of messing with this a little daunting. And there have been enough negative posts about its reliability and availability it makes me wonder whether it’s worth my time. ↩︎
  2. The free version, naturally. I am still a cheapskate. ↩︎
  3. It appears that the promotion of this capability is not showing up in everyone’s account. Whether it is being selectively enabled on a per account basis is unknown. ↩︎
  4. Well, not all of them. I’ve long complained about how Questrade handles accounts for which I have Trading Authorization (i.e. my spouse’s accounts). There’s no unified view from my login and this also shows up in my interactions with Questrade via Claude. Claude also doesn’t know about the accounts for which I have TA. ↩︎
  5. “Pay yourself first” (cfr The Wealthy Barber) cuts both ways. If you set aside money for savings before you ever see it land in your bank account, it is a bit like magic over time. If you are billed for a subscription service that automatically renews, it’s like magic for the provider of the subscription service. They’ve done the work to land a client, and now they can just watch the monthly revenues roll in, knowing that automatic renewals are unlikely to get noticed immediately, if ever… ↩︎
  6. It appears Claude took a look at the real time Canadian equity exposure of (for example) XEQT. I don’t myself bother doing this because XEQT (for example) has a stated objective of keeping the Canadian equity portion of its fund at 20% and it rebalances periodically to do this. So 20% is good enough for me. ↩︎
  7. I’m actively kicking USD assets out of my portfolio: Kicking USD out of my retirement portfolio ↩︎
  8. It set the percentage at 3%. ↩︎
  9. This wasn’t new or helpful to me since I own AOA, but I include it just to show the sorts of things Claude mentions. ↩︎
  10. Which may be possible; I’ll have to play with it a bit more ↩︎
  11. There are some 3rd party integrations I’ve seen, but I’d prefer it to come from the source. ↩︎

close up shot of rusty gears

AI and Financial Planning

RobH1 Comment

Although a fair bit of my retirement portfolio is wrapped up in AI companies, that’s not what I’m talking about this time. I’ve been exploring the use of AI in helping make investment decisions. And it’s a rapidly evolving and fascinating place, and ultimately, I think it’s a huge win for the DIY investor. There are many ways for you to use AI in your financial decisions today — you can use free and generic AI, a commercial financial product that uses AI under the hood, or a DIY financial advisor built from scratch using Claude. The choice is yours!

Free AI

Here I’m talking about using free tiers of AI to ask basic questions. Excellent for the lazy investor. Yesterday, for example, I asked Gemini1 “What’s the best foreign ETF for Canadian Investors”?

Gemini’s response when asked, “What’s the best foreign ETF for Canadian Investors”?

I rate this response a solid nine out of ten:

  • XAW and VXC are what I was actually after; they are both ETFs that allow you to invest in the world ex-Canada with one ticker. Like all such funds, they tilt pretty heavily towards the US (about 63%) because that’s the biggest market by far.
  • VIU is also a valid response, but excludes the US market. My question wasn’t overly specific.
  • VFV is on less solid ground as a response since it’s an S&P 500 ETF, meaning it only has US exposure. I suppose it’s technically a “foreign ETF”.
  • The answer preventing the perfect score here is XEQT, which, although featuring in the Magnificent Seven ETFs, is a wrong answer IMHO because it holds Canadian Equity.

I like Gemini because it always provides links indicating sources, and checking the source is always a good practice. This is a big time saver. I tried the same query on ChatGPT and Claude. ChatGPT’s answer was very close, but Claude figured that by “foreign” I meant, “Everything outside North America”, not “Everything outside Canada”. An interesting assumption…

Anyway, my experience using free AI for financial advice like this is generally pretty positive, but I’m using it like an assistant, not an advisor. I even see moneyengineer.ca show up as a source now and then, so what’s not to like 😉

Products that use commercial AI under the hood

Here you have products like Gilded2 or Truthifi3. Truthifi reminds me a bit of Passiv, whereas Gilded looks a bit like Optiml, products I’ve talked about in these pages. I’d expect to see more and more of these kinds of companies try to make a revenue stream by wrapping up commercial AI packages in a way that makes it easy for the AI neophyte to benefit. I very quickly took a look at Gilded, but the free version does not do very much at all, and targets people who haven’t retired yet. Truthifi looked more promising to me but only gets useful if you directly connect it to your brokerage accounts, something I’m not willing to do until I read a bit more about it.

DIY Financial Advisor AI

While researching this article, I was surprised to find an open source project that allows DIY financial advice based on Claude AI. The Canadian Finance Planner Skill on GitHub looks to be a comprehensive piece of work that targets Canadians, but requires a Claude subscription including Cowork to be useful. And a little bit of tech-savviness to get it running, but I presume anyone already paying for Claude Cowork qualifies.

I may have to invest some time and money into this one, it looks absolutely intriguing, covering the entire gamut of financial concerns from budgeting, to estate planning, insurance, taxation… In their words “Think of it as having your own AI financial coach on call who happens to know every corner of Canadian finance”. It’s a promise that seems a bargain for the cost of Claude Cowork at $24 monthly.

What about you? Are you using AI in your own financial decisions? Tell me about it at comments@moneyengineer.ca!

  1. Gemini is Google’s own AI and, being lazy, the one I generally use because it doesn’t require anything other than typing the question directly into my browser bar. I don’t use ChatGPT or Claude as much for this reason. ↩︎
  2. I found out about Gilded from a recent Globe and Mail article by the perportedly retired Rob Carrick. ↩︎
  3. Discovered by Googling “personal finance canada AI” ↩︎