“Fractional Shares” allow you to buy less than a single share of the stock or ETF that supports it. Fractional shares ensure that every last penny of cash in your account is actively invested, which, in my view, is a Good Thing. Non-interest earning cash isn’t helping you meet your retirement goals.
Questrade currently holds the majority of my retirement savings, mostly because they were offering free money last year to move accounts over to them1.
They provided support for fractional US ETFs over a year ago, to great fanfare, with Canadian ETFs “coming soon”. It would appear that “soon” is “now”. There’s no way to see which Canadian ETFs have support for fractional trading in any sort of list, but here’s the status of the Canadian ETFs on my magnificent seven ETFs list2, which you can see if you ask for a quote of any symbol you’re interested in.
| ETF | Fractional share support? |
|---|---|
| XGRO | Yes |
| XEQT | Yes |
| XIC | Yes |
| VFV | Yes3 |
| XCB | No |
| ZST | No |
| ZMMK | Yes |
I’ve tested it out, and the one flaw I’ve found is that you cannot enter a dollar amount for a trade when using the Edge Web version of the Questrade platform. You’re free to do the math yourself and enter a decimal number of shares when using Edge Web4.
Wealthsimple also offers fractional ETFs, and there I have found no restrictions. Questrade is catching up, but still behind Wealthsimple in this regard.
- And if you are considering Questrade yourself, you can earn a bit of free money if you use my referral code: 755609544498867 ↩︎
- These are the ETFs that make up the lion’s share of my retirement portfolio. ↩︎
- Fractional VFV is particularly valuable since its unit cost is north of $100. ↩︎
- Which you are forced to do if you want to make trades on accounts for which you are the authorized trader. ↩︎