Tag: ZEQT

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Battle of the Free Money Offers

RobHLeave a comment

The gravy train that is run by the new account acquisition department of Canada’s online brokers continues to chug along. Here we take a quick peek at free money offers from BMO Investorline, QTrade and Wealthsimple. I’ve summarized them all here, and simplified. Some of the offers have extra contests and that sort of thing but I’ve ignored them for the purposes of the table below:

BrokerDeadlineCashback Max CashbackHold PeriodPayoutLink
BMO InvestorlineAugust 31, 20261%$10,000Until September 30, 2027Lump sum after holdhere
QTradeAugust 31, 20261%1$2000Until September 30, 2027Lump sum after holdhere
WealthsimpleAugust 31, 20261%$20,000+$160022 yearsMonthly for 24 months after funds landhere

As trading platforms go, I’ve used all three in the past few years. For the DIY buy-and-hold investor, they are all good enough. Unlike QTrade and Wealthsimple, BMO Investorline doesn’t offer free trades, but they have a long list of free-to-trade ETFs that are quite complete, and include all-in-ones like ZEQT and VEQT as well as range of ETFs that mirror various indices and bond markets (BMO has good bond funds, nice selection and inexpensive to own).

In my view, Wealthsimple has the best offer since it has the highest cap. You see payouts sooner, too, at the cost of having to keep your money with Wealthsimple a year longer, however.3

In all cases, you have to make your move this month, because you never know when the gravy train will come to an end!

  1. Sort of. It’s $2000 if you shift $200k. It’s $1000 if you shift $199.99k. ↩︎
  2. It’s 1% for the first $2M, dropping to 0.5% up until $10M ↩︎
  3. If you want to give me some free cash if you decide to take up the offer, my Wealthsimple referral code is www.wealthsimple.com/invite/WOWQT1 ↩︎
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. ↩︎

Quick links for the long weekend

RobHLeave a comment

(Quick aside: as a retiree, I did have to make sure this coming weekend was, in fact, a long weekend 🙂 )

What’s the deal with AOA?: updated

While many Canadians are familiar with all-in-one products that trade on the Canadian exchanges (XEQT/XGRO, VEQT/VGRO, TEQT/TGRO, ZEQT/ZGRO), there is also a USD product that I use quite heavily in my retirement portfolio. That ETF is AOA. In this updated post, I break down what’s inside it. TL/DR: lots of US Equity, lots of International Equity, a tiny slice of Canadian equity, and broad coverage of the US and international bond markets.

Rob Carrick is back in (digital) print

One of my favourite ex-Globe And Mail staffers was Rob Carrick, the keyboard behind such valuable assets as the ETF Buyer’s Guide. He retired last year, but it seems he’s back doing the same job in a different way. He’s now writing on Substack, and you can find his words of wisdom over here: https://substack.com/@robcarrick1.

PWL on Retirement: “Finding and Funding a Good Life”

Not a new publication, but new to me…It’s penned by Ben Felix, a certified Canadian financial rockstar. Looks like a good read over a cup of coffee. Finding and Funding a Good Life.

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. ↩︎

XEQT, TEQT, VEQT, ZEQT, HEQT Fee Showdown

RobHLeave a comment

Summary: Although iShares(XEQT/XGRO) and Vanguard(VEQT/VGRO) get all the love, the all-in-ones from BMO and TD are actually the current winners in the “lowest all-in-one fee award”. Given how similar they are to their competitors, I see no reason not to park money there.

I’m a fan of all-in-one1 ETFs in my retirement portfolio. If you’re new to the world of all-in-ones, you might want to start here. There’s at least five competing families of products out there, courtesy of iShares (XEQT, XGRO, XBAL et al), TD (TEQT, TGRO, TBAL et al), Vanguard(VEQT, VGRO, VBAL et al) BMO(ZEQT, ZGRO, ZBAL et al) and GlobalX2 (HEQT, HGRO, HBAL et al). We’ve taken a look at some of them “under the hood”, so to speak, but didn’t really find super-significant differences.

One facet I haven’t looked at yet is the fees each of these companies charge. As I’ve shown elsewhere, small differences can add up if you have significant investments or are holding them for a significant time.

With the news that iShares is reducing their management fees, (BMO did earlier this year) I figured it was time to do a head-to-head fee comparison for the four major families.

Here you have it:

CompanyRelevant TickersManagement Fee3
iSharesXEQT, XGRO, XBAL et al0.17%, effective Dec 18, 2025
VanguardVEQT, VGRO, VBAL et al0.17%
TDTEQT, TGRO,TBAL et al0.15%
BMOZEQT, ZGRO, ZBAL et al0.15%
Global XHEQT, HGRO, HBAL et al0.18%

TD and BMO are the low fee winners at the moment, but the gap has narrowed significantly from earlier in the year. I like low fees, and so I’ve started to invest in these families.

  1. Technically called “asset allocation” ETFs, which is good, since asset allocation is how I view my own portfolio. ↩︎
  2. Formerly known as Horizons, which explains the stock tickers used here. ↩︎
  3. Most of the time I use MER (Management Expense Ratio) to report on fees, but since a few of these companies have lowered their Management fees this year, and since MER is only calculated annually, the MER values only become relevant again on Jan 1. They are a few basis points higher than the management fee, but just a few. Most of the cost is buried in the management fee. ↩︎