Tag: Claude

a robot holding a cup

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. ↩︎

juicy steak grilling on open flame bbq

Questrade Developments: Lots of sizzle, but is there steak?

RobH1 Comment

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 ↩︎

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” ↩︎