Tag: vcn

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. ↩︎

The magnificent seven ETFs

RobH5 Comments

***Updated September 2026: The USD portion of my portfolio is now no more, and this post reflects the current reality.

Since my investment strategy is to own the market via passive index investing, I know that some of my retirement savings are tied up in those famous seven tech stocks1. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

For a year or so I’ve been talking about my ETF All-Stars, but I’ve come to the realization that the list isn’t complete. I discovered that I could do better in terms of where I hold certain assets, I’ve now also realized that I need seven ETFs to achieve my investment objectives across non-registered, TFSA and RRIF accounts. These seven ETFs are 90% of my retirement portfolio. The other 10% are found in the non-registered account and are legacy investments. Over the next 5 years, these legacy investments will disappear altogether.

Here’s how the seven break down:

XGRO: An all-in-one Canadian ETF2

XGRO is an 80% Equity/ 20% bond ETF, about 50% of my retirement savings. It holds 20% Canadian equity and 36% US equity. It’s held exclusively in my RRIF accounts.

XEQT: An all-in-one Canadian ETF

XEQT3 is from the same family as XGRO but doesn’t hold any bonds. It helps take down the bond percentage of my overall portfolio from 20% to 15%. Since equities tend to grow faster than equity/bond combinations, and since my TFSA is the last account to be touched in my retirement income planning, XEQT is held only in my TFSA accounts.

VFV: A low-cost US Equity ETF in CAD

VFV is my choice for US Equity, both for its low MER and for the fact it mirrors the S&P 500, which focuses on profitable companies only. It doesn’t hold mid/small cap US stocks but I’m ok with that since XEQT has some holdings there.

VIU: An “ex-North America” equity fund

VIU invests in developed markets outside of the US and Canada. By Vanguard’s rules, this means “yes” to Japan and Korea, but “no” to Taiwan, China, Brazil and India. I get coverage of those markets in XGRO and XEQT, so I’m not too concerned.

XCB: A Canadian Corporate bond fund

The way the math works at present, I’m a little short in bonds, and so I have a bit of XCB sitting in the RRIF to keep my asset targets in line. XCB is a nice low-cost corporate bond fund; I chose corporate XGRO gives me plenty of exposure to government bonds.

ZST: A very short term Canadian bond fund

I suppose I could have used ZMMK in my RRIF accounts, but I didn’t want to attract superficial loss rules as ZMMK will be bought and sold in my non-registered accounts. I wanted to hold something different in the RRIF side. ZST has a slightly longer duration4 than ZMMK, but since it’s in my RRIF account, I can withstand the tiny bit more of extra volatility it brings to the table.

ZMMK: A CAD money market fund

ZMMK is held exclusively in the non-registered cash cushion. It holds mostly very short term (<6 month) debt. I consider ZMMK equivalent to a HISA, with a slightly better return.

  1. My retirement portfolio is about 36% US equity, and the mag 7 make up about 10% of the US market, so say 4% of my retirement savings. ↩︎
  2. You could also consider ZGRO, TGRO, VGRO from BMO, TD, and Vanguard respectively. They are all pretty similar. ↩︎
  3. You could also consider ZEQT, TEQT, VEQT. Tomato, Tomahto. ↩︎
  4. Longer duration bond funds are more sensitive to changes in interest rates. ↩︎

News: HISA Table updated, TD adds free-to-trade ETFs

RobHLeave a comment

High Interest Savings Page Updated

As reported last week, the USA cut their prime rates while Canada did not. The latest rates are now reflected in the HISA and short-term bond table (Canada & US). No changes for at least 6 weeks at this rate. Most cash I hold in my retirement savings is invested in an ultra-short-term bond fund, namely ICSH (one of my ETF all-stars) so I can squeeze out a few more basis points on my cash holdings.

TD Cuts Trading fees on 100 ETFs

TD seems to be upping its game. Not only are they throwing free money around, but an observant reader (thanks, big brother 🙂 ) alerted me to a recent change. You can read all about it here, but the skinny is that they cut trading fees on a list of 100 ETFs. Paying trading fees of any kind seems to be a dying business model, so it’s nice to see TDDI join the free club, at least a little bit. Some of these ETFs are even worth holding; I’ll save you the trouble and show you which ones:

NameSymbolWhat it holds
Vanguard S&P 500 IndexVFVLargest US Companies
SPDR S&P 500SPYLargest US Companies in USD
Vanguard 500 IndexVOOSame as SPY
iShares Russell 2000IWMSmall cap US Equity in USD
TD all-in-onesTEQT, TGRO, TBAL, TCON100% Equity, 90% Equity, 60% Equity, 30% Equity. Read more here and here.
TD Aggregate Bond IndexTDBCanadian gov’t and corp bonds.1
TD International EquityTPEDeveloped international market equity.2
TD US EquityTPU/TPU.USimilar to VFV/SPY3
TD Canadian EquityTTP300 Canadian stocks (aka “the Canadian market”)4
TD Cash Management TCSH/TUSD.UUltra short term debt in CAD/USD5
Vanguard all-in-onesVEQT, VGRO, VBAL, VCNS100% Equity, 80% Equity, 60% Equity, 40% Equity
Vanguard Canadian Agg BondVABCanadian gov’t and corp bonds6
Vanguard FTSE GlobalVXCAll equity ex-Canada (65% US Equity)
Vanguard FTSE DevelopedVIUAll developed equity ex-North America7
Vanguard US Total MarketVUN/VTI~3500 US Stocks in CAD/USD (aka “The US Market”)8
Vanguard FTSE Canada VCNTop 200 Canadian Stocks, so similar to TTP9
Newly free-to-trade ETFs at TDDI that are moneyengineer.ca approved

All the above funds would be worthy of consideration since they adhere to my rules about being passively managed, low cost, and aligned with my asset-allocation strategy. The simplest purchases here would be one of the TD or Vanguard all-in-ones (new to all-in-ones? read about them here) best aligned with your risk profile. There’s a bunch of other ones that aren’t of interest to me — bitcoin, leveraged, actively managed, segment-based…nah, I’m good.

  1. Used in TGRO, TBAL, TCON ↩︎
  2. No “emerging” market exposure. Used in TEQT, TGRO, TBAL, TCON ↩︎
  3. TPU is used in TEQT, TGRO, TBAL, TCON ↩︎
  4. Used in TEQT, TGRO, TBAL, TCON ↩︎
  5. Similar to my use of ZMMK/ICSH ↩︎
  6. Used in VGRO, VBAL, VCNS ↩︎
  7. Used in VEQT, VGRO, VBAL, VCNS ↩︎
  8. Used in VEQT, VGRO, VBAL, VCNS ↩︎
  9. Used in VEQT, VGRO, VBAL, VCNS ↩︎