Tag: ChatGPT

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Questrade: Custom Indexing extends to CAD stocks, more AI platform support

RobHLeave a comment

Questrade has been beavering away on a raft of new features, some of which were promoted with great fanfare in an online event last month. I covered that in some detail in a previous post. There are already some significant developments to these features so I thought I’d mention them here so you have the latest view.

Custom Indexing now includes Canadian Equities

Custom Indexing, in Questrade’s estimation, allows you to

“Combine the control of picking stocks with the ease of owning ETFs to put your own spin on the market. Then, keep the whole thing in sync with one click.”

Questrade website: Custom Indexing

Custom Indexing wasn’t actually part of last month’s event, but was quietly released earlier in the year. I covered its first release in this post. In essence, it gives you the ability to create your own all-in-one fund. In its first release, I thought it showed promise but as it only permitted the inclusion of US Equities, the feature was of limited use to most people. (Including me, since I’m nearing the end of my multi-month initiative to kick USD out of my retirement portfolio.)

Now that Custom Indexing supports Canadian equities, you can build your own all-in-one fund, and save on the additional management fees these funds typically attract (I broke down how much a fund like XEQT costs in a previous post). It’s quite easy to set up, I built an equivalent to XEQT in about 5 minutes using its underlying funds (XTOT, XIC, and XEF). And with one click you can reset the desired percent allocations of each fund)1.

I could see using this in my TFSA accounts as a result; I’d really like to use this in my RRIF accounts, but you can’t have a RRIF that uses custom indexing, inexplicably.

Questrade’s MCP expands

If you missed it, the MCP is what allows your Questrade accounts to be connected to an AI platform. I’ve been experimenting with Anthropic’s Claude. I talked about my experiences using it previously. But already it’s expanded in scope.

  • The MCP now supports ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex and VS Code
  • The MCP now supports trading — all trades have to be approved via push notification

I continue to tinker with this feature. There’s a lot of promise here to get rid of some of the manual tasks I have to execute on a monthly basis. Using free versions of these AI platforms is in itself a bit limiting2, but since I’m still learning, I don’t mind.

  1. For longtime Questrade customers, this will seem eerily familiar; “one click rebalancing” is one of the features of Passiv Elite, a service that used to be offered gratis to Questrade users. ↩︎
  2. For example, I can’t connect both my wife’s Questrade accounts and my Questrade accounts to the same instance of Claude without paying for a Claude subscription. But I can use multiple AI programs, no big deal. ↩︎

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” ↩︎