I’ve talked about dividend investing before and I’ve shared guest posts about index investing. These are the two kinds of intelligent public market “passive investing”. But I haven’t talked at any length about implementing your investment strategy. There’s one risk-free, surefire way to improve your returns: lower the cost of building and maintaining your portfolio. Questrade (no, not Questtrade) helps you do that. In more ways than one. Today I’m going to sing the praises of Canada’s premier discount brokerage.
Questrade is a discount Canadian brokerage. By “brokerage” I mean a financial services firm that connects you with markets to let you buy and sell marketable securities — stocks, options, bonds, mutual funds, currencies, precious metals, etc. For our purposes, we’ll focus mostly on trading stocks. By “discount” I mean that Questrade is by far the least expensive brokerage in Canada (on any metric that matters to me). It’s not just me saying that Questrade is the best, by the way. So how can starting an account with this company save you money?
The most important feature of a discount brokerage is its low commission on stock trades. Not only is Questrade the cheapest in Canada, but its pricing is straightforward and fair. The commission structure for Canadian stocks is as follows:
- 1 cent per share
- Minimum commission of $4.95
- Maximum commission of $9.95
Compare this commission to the $20 or $30 or more per trade at the Big Banks’ “discount” brokerages. I also love the simplicity of Questrade’s stock commission structure. I don’t need to stress about making a certain number of trades each quarter to qualify for a lower commission rate.
If you’re a dividend investor, you’ve got to love building a portfolio for as little as a Wilfrid Laurier per company. You could create a huge portfolio of diversified, high-yield, Blue Chip, Canadian dividend stocks for next-to-nothing. If you want to trade US stocks, there’s a $5 fee for each day you trade on US markets (so try to execute a bunch of trades on the same day), but the commission is still ridiculously low and embarrasses the competition.
If you’re an index investor, you can probably do better by using Questrade. How? Well, the best index mutual funds, in my opinion, are the TD eSeries index funds. They carry MERs that range between 0.33% and 0.53%. But if you buy index ETFs on the open market, e.g. Vanguard ETFs, you can pay an MER that’s as insanely low as 0.09%. NOT 9%. Not 0.9%. Not even a TENTH OF ONE PERCENT. 0.09%.
About 1% of the value of your mutual fund portfolio is pocketed by your broker each and every year. Questrade believes you deserve to get it back.
The fees paid to brokers are called trailer fees. They’re paid by the fund company directly to your broker as compensation for procuring your business, and they can be as much as 1% (or even more!) of your portfolio. All other brokers keep this fee. Except Questrade – we’re giving it back to you.
I approve.
There are many other ways that Questrade could save you money. Let’s look at a recently-promoted one: their “USD in RSP” policy. Let’s say you transfer US dollars into your RRSP or TFSA. Questrade allows you to buy US dollar stocks with those US dollars — there’s no forced conversion fee before or after the sale. That can be a significant cost at other brokerages. Instead, the transaction is settled in the currency of your choosing: US or Canuck bucks. This may seem like a useless feature, but only until you have some American cash to invest. Don’t laugh — I know somebody who got a $5,000 US insurance settlement because of an accident on a trip. But with the US dollar in the toilet, he didn’t want to convert it to Canadian. Most importantly, I think the “USD in RSP” policy shows that Questrade is always on the look out for ways, big and small, to save its customers money. That’s why I use Questrade and why it’s the only brokerage I can wholeheartedly recommend.
Questrade seems to cycle through awesome deals throughout the year. Here’s a current example (assuming you’re reading this in early October 2012): a Questrade Client who opens a Registered Education Savings Plan before October 30th 2012 can get 10 free trades for the RESP. Again, that’s enough trades to set up a full portfolio for your kid’s college money. When you make the smart choice of becoming a Questrade Client, be sure to keep your eyes open for these kinds of deals.
Let’s sum up Questrade:
- Canada’s cheapest trades with no account minimum
- $50 in free trades
- Other stuff. Are you still reading this? Go sign up.
Great post! I’m looking to open an unregistered trading account outside of TD Waterhouse (because of the fees) and Questtrade looks like the way to go.
I used to be with TD Waterhouse, too. Thankfully Questrade saved me.
I noticed some complaints about Questrade’s inactivity fees. If you hold less than $5000 in assets at Questrade, you must trade every quarter, or pay a $19.95 fee. But that fee can apply to future trades.
This is better than the fees used to be though, seems reasonable.
So I had assumed, based on the fact that I’ve never paid an account maintenance fee, that there wasn’t such a fee (I’ve definitely gone a quarter without a trade). I looked it up, and you’re absolutely right. I therefore can’t recommend Questrade to people with assets at $5000 (or near it, because market fluctuations could put you under). If a person doesn’t have $5,000 to invest, they should probably work on their emergency fund anyway. But you’ve raised an extremely important caveat ($80 a year could go to waste for people with a micro-portfolio). Thanks as always Gene!
Questrade also waives the fee for individuals under the age of 25.
Also waived if you make 1 trade per quarter.
The $19.95 inactivity fee is rebated back as commission rebates if the client trades the following quarter.
“Yeah, Joe Wood treats you right.”
Good post.
hahahah thanks Mark!
So I deal with Questrade for multiple accounts, and I generally am very satifsfied. As you point out, they are far and away the least expensive to deal with, and it’s pretty hard to find anyone else even comparable, let alone better.
That said I do have the following small “suggestions for improvement”.
1) The Mutual Fund Maximizer is not as good as it sounds. Out of your “refunded trailers”, Questrade charges you a minimum fee every month (or quarter, I forget) to “process the rebate” or whatever. If your refunded trailers do not add up to greater than the fee, then you simply get nothing (so you never lose, which is good). However, practically speaking, if you look at average trailers and do the math against their fees, it basically means that you have to have somewhere North of $30,000 in mutual funds in a single account before you see a single penny. So this is only really a positive at all for someone with large amounts of rather expensive mutual funds. Further, Questrade actually charges $10/trade to transact on mutual funds – many other institutions will do this for less or even zero for a monthly purchase (though might stick you with some DSCs). Anyway – I don’t really like mutual funds to begin with – but if I were going to hold them, for smaller investors I am not sure Questrade is the best option there.
2) On the currency thing, you are right and I 100% love the ability to deal in USD. It should be noted that Questrade charges a 1.95% commission (I believe) on all FX conversions. So if you transfer CAD into your account and then buy something on the NYSE, even if you deal in USD afterwards, you’re subject to a 1.95% hit upfront. (This is not all that huge an amount for a brokerage – Questrade is still better than most all others – but even better still would be to ensure that you do your CAD-USD exchange somewhere else where the fee is even lower)
3) I have found on occassion that they are not stellar at processing mailed-in forms. I’ve done a lot and had more than one “lost” or not properly executed. Mildly annoying. I guess you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
As I said, I deal with Questrade and definitely find them the best of the bunch… but not perfect.
Questrade is now offering commission free trades on all ETFs – so now the Questrade + Vanguard options is even cheaper.
Agreed! Super awesome. I actually ended up doing a post about that in February: http://www.timelessfinance.com/2013/02/04/questrade-free-etf-purchase-trades/