Tag: questrade

News: Questrade and QTrade changes afoot

RobH1 Comment

I have financial relationships with 4 different brokers, soon to be reducing to 2, if things go according to plan:

  • My long-term relationship with QTrade will come to an end by the end of the year as I move the last of my RRIF accounts out1
  • Questrade holds the vast majority of my retirement savings; they will inherit most of my remaining QTrade holdings this year2
  • Wealthsimple holds a small percentage of my retirement holdings, normally because I’ve been chasing a particularly attractive promotion (free money, or last year, a free MacBook Air)
  • My mother’s estate is held by BMO Investorline and if all goes according to plan (CRA willing), I’ll be done with them early next year as the estate wraps up.

I mention all this because I sometimes get wind of new developments from these providers in near-real-time, if they chose to share those developments with their existing clients. You benefit by hearing about them at the same time I do.

QTrade joins the realm of commission-free brokers

Starting October 28th, QTrade is eliminating trading fees on ALL stocks and ETFs, bringing them in line with Questrade, Wealthsimple, Desjardins, and National Bank. This, combined with their reasonably generous cash back offer3 that runs until the end of the year, makes them a serious contender for your investing dollars. Read more at https://www.qtrade.ca/en/investor/campaign/cashbackoffer.html.

Questrade to ditch Passiv in favour of home-grown tool

One of the things I like about Questrade is their support for Passiv, which I covered here. The main thing I like about Passiv is the integrated dashboard that can span both mine and my spouse’s accounts, especially since Questrade’s native support of Authorized Traders is absolutely abysmal.

This week I received an email from Questrade with subject line “Your Passiv integration will be changing soon”.

Uh-oh.

Anyway, in what I suppose is an effort to make their product “stickier”, Questrade appears to be working on their own Passiv-like “Portfolio Monitoring and Rebalancing Tools”, which are supposed to launch “in 2026”. As a result, the current annual access to Passiv Elite will end at the end of the current renewal date, or on January 30, 2026, whichever is later.

Passiv Elite4 is the tier of Passiv that can do rebalancing trades on your behalf. It’s not a feature I really cared about since Passiv doesn’t model all-in-one ETFs the way I think about them. You might say Passiv is an alternative way of getting the benefits of all-in-one ETFs without actually holding them.

Passiv Elite is $99/year, (which is a bargain compared to the cost of all-in-ones), so I’d expect Questrade’s own tools to be bundled into some tier of their current Questrade Plus offering.

No action required at this juncture, but I’m very curious as to how Questrade’s intended offer will work…and what it will cost.

  1. As mentioned elsewhere, it was mostly because I decided to chase some free money being offered by Questrade at the time. ↩︎
  2. I would have moved everything back in March, but I hit a snag concerning how RRIFs work. In essence, there’s no support offered for changing RRIF providers mid-year. Once the RRIF calculation has been done for the calendar year, your current broker is obligated to pay out the RRIF minimum. If you decide to move RRIF providers mid-year, the current RRIF provider still has to pay you your RRIF minimum for the entire year before allowing the transfer. Read about it here: https://moneyengineer.ca/2025/03/27/cautionary-tale-changing-brokers-when-you-have-a-rrif/ ↩︎
  3. Up to $2000 available for the taking ↩︎
  4. I think this is what I have, currently. I became a Questrade client just before the launch of Questrade Plus and probably got access to the “full” Passiv experience for the current year (March 2026 to be exact) by virtue of the assets Questrade has under their management from me aka “Questrade Elite”. ↩︎

News: Norbert’s Gambit Tracking Update

RobH2 Comments

If you have no idea what Norbert’s Gambit is, it’s a way to cheaply convert USD/CAD in your online brokerage account. Most brokers support it1.

Because I hold a lot of USD assets in my retirement savings, and since I live and spend most of my money in Canada, I need a way cheaply convert to Canadian funds in my RRIF. So last week, I had to convert some of my AOA holdings into XGRO holdings and so I updated the log I’m keeping. So far, I’ve done the Gambit three times this year, and twice I’ve lucked out on the FX rate changes and actually made money2 on the transaction.

  1. And many people expect Wealthsimple to join this club soon. ↩︎
  2. What I mean: if the funds had converted instantaneously with no fees rather than waiting around for the 3-5 business days for the Gambit to complete, I would have received LESS money than by using the Gambit. Over time, I expect this will even out, but right now I’m about $55 CAD ahead. ↩︎

Online brokerage promos: when does the gravy train end?

RobH5 Comments

Online brokers are busily throwing money around to attract new customers; a quick search reveals many active promotions as I write this from Webull Canada, RBC, TD, QTrade, Wealthsimple….All of it has a bit of “if this seems too good to be true, it probably is” flavour to it.

I asked this same question on Reddit and the consensus seemed to be that this is the new normal in the online brokerage world, just like it’s normal for telcos/cablecos/ISPs to throw around big discounts in order to steal customers from one another.

But yet, I feel a little uneasy how money for nothing has become the norm. For DIY investors like me, it’s hard to see how my providers make any money off of me. I did a bit of research into the best proxy I could think of…Robinhood.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Robinhood is now part of the S&P 500 lineup; this is no fly-by-night company. Their quarterly results are public, and it was quite illuminating. Robinhood’s most recent quarter’s results are shown below.

Robinhood revenue sources: Source Robinhood Q2 2025 Earnings Presentation

So it looks pretty straightforward; revenue is coming from three sources, and their average revenue per user (ARPU) is a pretty healthy $151 dollars. Let’s look a bit further:

  • Transactions: Options trading and Crypto trading make up the bulk of the revenues here, but roughly 15% of their transaction revenue comes from basic equity trades ($66M in Q2’25).
  • Interest: a large chunk of this is interest made from margin ($114M in Q2’25), but a growing percentage comes from credit card interest charges.
  • “Other”: not elaborated further, but it’s small, so we can ignore it. Perhaps this accounts for the revenue from their 3.5M “Robinhood Gold” subscribers1

The transaction revenue was surprising to me since equity trades are free on Robinhood, yet they are still finding a way to make money. Further reading indicates that the exchanges are sharing some of their bid/ask spread revenue with Robinhood, which seems like a win/win/win: Robinhood makes a tiny bit of revenue on each trade, the exchange gets more volume which allows them to make more spread revenue, and the customer gets free trades2.

Robinhood transaction revenue: Source Robinhood Q2 2025 Earnings Presentation

So, assuming the Wealthsimples and Questrades of the world are following Robinhood’s lead, they are making money off of me every time I place a trade. (Sorry, I don’t trade options, I don’t trade crypto, I don’t trade on margin, and I don’t run a balance on any credit card I use). Since switching to Questrade (and getting free trades) I can tell you that my own behaviour has changed; I have always hated seeing non-productive cash in any of my accounts, and so with free trades, I can freely buy one share of something to clean up the last dribs of cash I may have in any given account. My “getting paid in retirement” strategy also requires a monthly flurry of trades (see the details here).

All this to say I feel less uneasy about the free money being thrown around; Canada’s online brokerage community seems to be following a successful playbook:

  • Get lots of customers, even if you have to pay them to get on board
  • Expand your offers, especially profitable offers, and entice as many of your army of fans to use them (crypto, margin trading, options trading, credit cards, subscription offers)
  • Invest just enough in your platform to not lose too many clients; switching online providers can take a lot of work (I know, I did it: read more here)

So my advice is to absolutely take advantage of the free money out there and enjoy the gravy!

  1. Perhaps serving as the inspiration for Questrade Plus? ↩︎
  2. Not everyone thinks this is a great idea ↩︎

Tracking Norbert’s Gambit Costs with Questrade

RobH9 Comments

Since I hold a fair amount of USD in my retirement portfolio and most of my expenses are in CAD, I do have to convert between the two worlds from time to time. Most of the time I’m converting USD to CAD, but because of higher US interest rates, I’ve recently converted some CAD into USD to take advantage of that fact and earn a little more money on my cash positions1. My normal way of dealing with this conversion is using Norbert’s Gambit, which I’ve talked about here and here.

Anyway, I’ve decided to keep track on what these movements are costing me using my current broker of choice, Questrade. The answer is not quite as straightforward as you might think.

Fixed Cost

With Questrade, a journaling2 fee is charged every time you do the Gambit. This costs $9.95 plus HST for a total of $11.24, always charged in Canadian dollars. If you choose to subscribe to Questrade Plus, then your monthly fee covers these costs. I’ve done the Gambit twice this year, with one more planned in the 4th quarter. So for me, the cost of journaling is a pay-as-you-go cost. This cost is the same whether you are journaling one share or 10,000 shares, so larger transactions are better here.

Variable Cost: Changes in USD/CAD rate

Performing the Gambit using Questrade takes several business days. The foreign exchange rate moves all the time, so by the time you complete the conversion, the rate has almost certainly changed from when you started the process. Sometimes this works in your favour, sometimes not. Most of the reading I’ve done suggests you ignore this variability, since over time it should even out. For kicks, I’m tracking it.

Variable Cost: Buying and Selling DLR/DLR.u

Any trade you do has an inherent cost, even if you pay $0 commissions3, as I do. That cost is buried in the bid/ask spread. You may have noticed this at work immediately after completing a trade — it almost always seems that the market value of what you just bought is a little lower than what you just paid4. This variable cost is buried, but can be estimated by looking at the average bid/ask spread of DLR, which is featured on its fact sheet. It’s currently stated to be 0.07% when buying/selling DLR and 0.1% when buying/selling DLR.U5 . So, on average, you will sustain a total 0.17% cost when doing the Gambit. But I must reiterate — this cost is buried in the actual price per share you get when buying/selling DLR. Now, I actually paid very close attention to the bid/ask pricing last time I did the Gambit and I paid about half that rate but that’s all down to things like the volume of trading on the day, how many shares you’re moving and a whole bunch of other things that I don’t fully comprehend.

Anyway, here’s my tracking table that I’ll update as I do more of these trades:

Some definitions are in order:

  • DLR Buy: date upon which DLR (or DLR.u) was purchased.
  • DLR Sell: date upon which DLR (or DLR.u) was sold. There’s a lag because that’s how long Questrade takes to complete the journaling request. Seems like it’s 3 business days.
  • USD: The USD value of DLR bought or sold as reported by the trade confirmation6
  • CAD: The CAD value of DLR bought or sold as reported by the trade confirmation7
  • Effective rate: divide the previous two columns to come up with a USD in CAD rate8
  • Spot Rate on BUY/SELL date: daily average exchange rate9 as reported by the Bank of Canada
  • Target currency: what we end up with, USD or CAD. It’s the opposite of what we start with
  • Ideal in target currency: This is a calculation that takes the starting currency and applies the spot Rate on the DLR buy day to come up with the target amount. The ideal would be what you would have gotten if you had access to a no-cost conversion on the day you decided you wanted it.
  • Net Cost subtracts either the USD or CAD column from the ideal amount. If it’s negative, it means the foreign exchange rate moved in our favour between the buy and sell dates. Net Cost is given in the target currency.
  • Journal fee is charged by Questrade
  • Total cost adds the journal fee and the net Cost and converts everything to CAD using the spot Rate on the buy day. If it’s negative, we actually made money doing the conversion.
  • % cost takes total cost and divides by the CAD column

If you want a comparative cost, a typical broker charges 1.5% of the amount changing hands. Looks like I’m doing far better than that so far!

  1. And by “cash” I mean either ICSH or ZMMK, which are ultra-short-term bond funds denominated in USD and CAD, respectively. They are both featured as ETF All-Stars. ↩︎
  2. “Journaling” is the technical term for moving an interlisted stock/ETF from the CAD side to the USD side of your account or vice versa. ↩︎
  3. An attractive feature of Questrade, among others ↩︎
  4. This effect is often masked by the volatility in the asset you’re buying, but when you buy very stable priced assets like ZMMK or ICSH or CASH it becomes quite noticeable. ↩︎
  5. And 0.07% happens to be one cent divided by the current DLR Canadian price of $14.12. And 0.1% happens to be one cent divided by the current DLR.u price of $10.24 USD. ↩︎
  6. And thus includes the bid/ask spread ↩︎
  7. And thus includes the bid/ask spread ↩︎
  8. And 1/effective rate gives you CAD in USD ↩︎
  9. And this is an approximation since the rate changes throughout the day ↩︎

Cautionary Tale: Staying safe as a DIY Investor

RobHLeave a comment

A recent Globe and Mail article featuring a Questrade client who lost $70k from their investment account due to unauthorised access caught my eye. The article is behind a paywall, but I’m a subscriber and can gift you a link if you’re curious1.

This didn’t seem like a garden-variety incident; the victim seemed reasonably well-educated concerning cyber-security best practices, and the hack may have involved a compromised device. But there are steps we should all take to make it harder to fall victim to an attack.

Use Strong, Unique Passwords2

Don’t reuse them. Don’t think that by adding a random character to an existing password buys you safety. The best way to avoid reusing passwords is to not know any of them. You do this by using some sort of password manager3 that can generate long and complex passwords. Even a notebook in a locked cabinet is better than using “password”4.

Use Two Factor Authentication (2FA)

Most online brokers have some sort of two factor authentication you can enable, but it may not be mandatory. Turn it on. This is a second step added after you enter your password to make sure it’s you, since it’s based on something you have. Most brokers I’ve dealt with use SMS as a 2nd factor, but both Questrade and Wealthsimple offer the use of a separate authenticator app like Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, or Apple’s Passwords app. I prefer authenticator apps because they work with or without cell phone coverage. And the experts don’t much like SMS as an authentication method because it’s not that difficult to hack for the determined criminal.

Don’t “trust” devices

While it will considerably speed up the login process to your online broker if you “trust” a given device, I never do this. Trusting a device typically does things like render 2FA unnecessary, which becomes very dangerous indeed if the device itself has somehow become compromised.

Know how to contact your provider over the phone

Store their contact number so you can call them directly if you are at all suspicious of anything. This is far safer than absent-mindedly clicking a link received in an email or text message. And if you do get a call/voicemail from your provider, follow up quickly.

Add a Trusted Contact Person (TCP) to your account

The TCP is someone your provider is authorised to call if they have concerns about your account. I don’t know under what circumstances “concerns” are raised, but having one seems to me a better idea than not having one. A quick primer on TCP here. Your broker will have a process by which they can add a TCP, take advantage of it.

Got other tips for staying safe while investing? Drop me a line!

  1. Just drop a line to comments@moneyengineer.ca. ↩︎
  2. Or, if supported, use passkeys instead; I don’t know of any Canadian broker using them. ↩︎
  3. I use Apple’s native Password app but in my working life used Bitwarden. ↩︎
  4. The 4th most common password used, findable by brute force methods in less than a second, per https://nordpass.com/most-common-passwords-list/ ↩︎