ULTIMATE Questrade Review 2013: An In-Depth Look

New Account Sign-up

The process of opening an account online was remarkably intuitive, painless, and very quick (15 minutes). You will need your social insurance number (SIN), bank account information, and employer details (or source of income if unemployed). And although they have an offline printout alternative I highly recommend their secure online process instead because it reduces the amount of write-in errors and legibility issues, and supports e-Signature and online personal verification (via your SIN#).

One of the first things you must do while signing up is to create a user ID (8-20 characters) and password (min. of 8 characters incl. 1 uppercase, 1 lowercase, and 1 numerical or symbol) for your new account. In earlier days Questrade had an automated process that generated and emailed this password, and along with your email address served as your primary login credentials. This old way became a security risk and so they thankfully changed it back in 2011 to what you see now. The benefit of creating your own user ID and password also makes it much more convenient to return to an incomplete application at a later date. Sessions time out after 30-mins of inactivity giving you ample time to collect and go over your details. After signing up online you are able to immediately sign into your new account and have a look around.

However, to officially activate your account (so as to begin trading) an initial deposit is required — $1,000 for margin accounts, $1,000 USD for forex accounts (CAD deposits are auto-converted to USD), $5,000 to trade option spreads, and $25,000 to write/sell uncovered options. Once the initial minimum deposit has cleared Questrade emails you a confirmation message. For offline applications you will be contacted by a representative confirming trading can begin. To maintain your active account in good standing a minimum equity balance of $250 is essential. It takes 1-3 business days from signing up for your account to begin trading. The longest part of the process is waiting for the funds to be received and processed by Questrade.

Questrade supports several methods to fund your account including EFT (from CAD accounts), wire transfers, cheques, pre-authorized deposits, and broker-to-broker transfers. It should be noted though that you cannot use the EFT method to send USD to your Questrade account. The reverse is possible where you can withdraw USD funds to a USD bank account (they require a void check or a pre-authorized deposit agreement form signed and stamped by the bank). To deposit USD you can set up a pre-authorized deposit agreement with Questrade which takes about 1-5 business days, or send a certified cheque/bank draft to their office, or wire transfer the funds directly to your account. The final option is to just convert your existing CAD balance (within your Questrade account) to USD which can take up to 24 hours to process. Funding your account by either currency type will automatically be placed into a sub-account (more about sub-accounts later) of the same type (they do not perform automatic conversions — you must execute the request on your own). Electronic withdrawals take roughly 3 business days to process and arrive into an external bank account.

An interesting related note is that Questrade is the only brokerage in Canada to accept and hold USD inside registered accounts which in and of itself can save a tremendous amount of money in unnecessary conversion fees.

Back in October of last year Questrade rolled out a subtle but important revision to its inactivity fee policy. It’s actually not that bad when you peruse the details. If anything it’s quite reasonable. As has been long known Questrade does not charge an inactivity fee, but this pending policy adjustment can potentially leave you being charged $19.95 per calendar quarter. If, however, you make at least one commissionable trade per quarter (once every 3-months) you will not get charged any inactivity fee at all. If you are inactive for a quarter and do get charged that fee, but then go about making at least one trade in the following quarter you will receive up to $19.95 in commission-free trades. It should also be noted that all new accounts younger than 6-months are exempt from this fee (you will not get charged for being inactive). The same applies to those who are 25 years of age or younger (no inactivity fee). Also, all clients of Questrade, and households having the same physical address, with combined equity assets of at least $5,000 are exempt from this fee. For most investors this change is trivial since their assets are almost always over $5,000, and so will never get charged this inactivity fee. As I pointed out earlier, I think this change is perfectly reasonable and still miles better than all other discount brokerage houses who not only charge an inactivity fee, with no exceptions, they do so more frequently (each month) and tack on countless hidden fees which Questrade does not.

Member Login

Your account’s primary control panel is known as myQuestrade and quite simply put it is a beautiful experience with well thought out organization and visual appeal. Someone put a lot of love into this area. Within the panel you can view your account activity, balances and positions, manage your personal details, view statements, make fund transfers in/out of your account, upload/download your documents, link multiple accounts, take corporate action on shareholder communications, open additional accounts, and interact with mutual funds.

Within Account Management is the handy Upload Documents tool serving as the fastest direct delivery method for any of your documents to any of your accounts held at Questrade. No more snail mailing, faxing, or even coordinating deliveries with a representative.

Accounts #’s consist of 10 numerical digits (e.g. 12345678-90). This is a big jump from their pre-2011 6-character alphanumeric size and as such some external banks have been reported to still impose an 8-character limit for payee accounts when you attempt to send money to Questrade. To get around this you only need to provide the 1st 8-digits of your Questrade account # and the funds will still arrive successfully.

If at any time you need help on practically anything you can always use the online Questrade Live Help session (usually accessible as an icon on the left or right side of Questrade’s site) — operational on weekdays (excluding holidays) from 7:30am – 10:00pm EST. I have found that using Live Help is much quicker than calling into their offices. And after speaking to several of their online representatives (those who deal with potential new accounts and others who deal with existing accounts) I found them to be very well-informed, professional, and quick in their responses. They all also took the extra time to provide web links for further reading which was a nice bonus.

As a handy note, sharholder communication is often times sent through normal mail, however, there is now a new way to change this allowing you to receive all investor correspondence electronically. Visit Investor Delivery for more details.

Account Activity / History

Located under the My Accounts tab is a slew of subcategories for providing details about trading and general account activity. These subcategories are: Balances and Positions (pictured above as My Accounts), Trade History, eStatements, and Account Activity. When Questrade made significant changes to its UI back in 2011 they in effect moved all trading activity history into myQuestrade. This is a very welcome change because prior to this all trading activity history was provided by a third-party clearinghouse company called Penson Financial Services and you had to use a completely different site and another set of login credentials to get access to this information. Now you can get a list of all your investments (stocks, funds, bonds, etc), current cash balances and positions (in CAD and USD), total equity, buying power, and more all within one location. Trading history is maintained for 36 months while eStatements, generated monthly, are stored for 7 years. Tax slips (e.g. T5) are also available electronically for each year.

Sadly, one consistent nuisance we found while navigating through the assorted activity/history (and other areas of myQuestrade) was that we had to keep selecting our account from the Account # drop down box on each page. So if you have just one account or even multiple accounts expect to keep selecting it for almost every page you visit within myQuestrade, and that includes previously viewed pages. Why Questrade didn’t make the account selection a one-time persistent thing via a client-side cookie, carrying itself across multiple pages, escapes me. It’s possible it is an oversight so I won’t nag too much about that.

For existing Questrade members in search of trading activity prior to February 4th, 2011 you will still need to visit the old Penson site located here. You will also need to know your old 6-character Questrade account #(s) because the Penson site does not know anything about the existing 10-character account # representations. Here is a quick peek at what the Penson trade activity site looks like.

As stated above, this Penson site is only relevant to existing Questrade members who wish to access archived trading activity prior to February 2011. All new members can just ignore what I just said about Penson and skip to the next paragraph. But for those interested in Questrade’s history, as can be seen above trade activity was outsourced and so the first noticeable difference is that the web UI is completely different and very behind in the times. At the time it was very surprising that with the skill set and desire by Questrade to offer a clean and friendly UI experience on their main domain they couldn’t pony up the cash to in-house the account activities nor request web-service APIs from Penson allowing them to skin over the original Penson experience. The details held within were extensive but at times appeared cluttered and confusing. Trade and settle date balances took 24 hours to be reflected in history. The same was true with buying power which updated once, at the start of each day. Most of what was found in this old Penson site is now integrated into Questrade Trading Platforms, discussed later.

Questrade margin accounts (for stocks & options trading) are comprised of two sub-accounts — one for Canadian funds, the other for US funds. This is very convenient since it reduces unnecessary conversion charges when trading US instruments. So, transactions on US equity stays as USD unlike most other brokerage firms which will perform conversions back to CAD right away. For example, with Questrade things like US dividend income from US traded stocks will remain as USD and automatically be deposited into your US sub-account. Funds can be moved between sub-accounts from within myQuestrade’s Exchange Funds category which will involve a conversion based on the spot rate at the close of market in Toronto plus a spread (+1.25% for margin accounts, +0.5% for registered accounts).

By default Questrade issues out eStatements free of charge for all account activity. However, for $3/month you can switch this to paper statements. This setting is adjustable within myQuestrade.

Trading Platform

And so begins a new era in trading platforms for Questrade. For as long as we can remember Questrade has been chugging along with their capable, but aging, platforms: QuestraderWEB, QuestraderELITE, and QuestraderPRO. Although QuestraderWEB had been renovated considerably all three had been in the wild for well over 10 years. They all performed quite well in their own right but had not kept up with the times as was evident with the offerings at other discount brokerage houses. Questrade marked a new chapter with the introduction of the Questrade IQ suite.

Questrade has been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to revamp their investor’s trading experience. When they released a whole new layout for myQuestrade one couldn’t help but scratch their head and wonder why the trading platforms never received the same treatment. Well, the answer can’t be clearer: they were — it just took them a while. They realized that having three separate platforms was confusing and so they have opted to retire all three in favor of a single, more modern trading platform known as Questrade IQ.

Questrade IQ is a suite composed of three flavors: Questrade IQ Web, a fully functional web-based trading platform (for Internet Explorer 8+, Google Chrome 9+, Firefox 5.5+, Safari 5.1.2+ for Mac Users); Questrade IQ Edge, a streamlined desktop-based trading platform (for Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS X 10.6.8+); Questrade IQ Mobile, their first mobile entrant in the field of trading (for iPhone/iPod Touch, Blackberry, and Android OS); and Questrade IQ Essential, their non-install web platform designed for tablets (e.g., iPad 3, BlackBerry Playbook, Android 3+), netbooks, and other systems/devices (e.g., Linux – Ubuntu 12+, Fedora 17+) that may not have the capability (or access) to the specific minimum requirements outlined by the others in this suite. In other words, IQ Essential is the fallback trading platform for everyone else that doesn’t quite fit into the other categories. This entire suite is free for all members and includes live Canadian/U.S. streaming Level 1 data, research tools for fundamental and technical analysis, a charting package, and more. At times market data can be delayed (up to 15 minutes) and when this happen a cute clock icon appears on-screen to let you know of the streaming hangup. And although it is made available for free, Questrade IQ can be upgraded to include one of three data packages or add à la carte feeds.

Questrade IQ Web makes use of Microsoft’s Silverlight multimedia add-on. Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Flash. Flash is by far the most popular of the two browser add-ons but Questrade steered clear of using it when developing IQ Web. Why you ask? Because Flash has been plagued consistently with security and performance issues and they felt for the safety of its traders and to provide a more fluid experience that Silverlight was the better choice. And it was certainly an excellent choice because its responsiveness within all four compatible browsers is significantly faster than if it were to have been done using Flash (CPU usage was also kept to a minimum). If you don’t have Silverlight installed already you can do so when you attempt to use this online trading platform for the first time.

In terms of features and functionality, Questrade IQ Web is an excellent amalgamation of power and usability. It introduces the concept of Gadgets into its platform lexicon. A gadget is an arrangeable (drag-drop, snap-to, resizable), user-customized window of a view into your trading/market details. IQ gadgets include: Activity (a logs viewer), Balances, Message Inbox, Time and Sales (current global activity of a stock), Level 1 Quotes, Level 2 Quotes (if you paid for this addition), Quick Charts, Today’s Orders, Position Summary, and Watch List. Unlike its IQ Edge cousin, Questrade IQ Web can change its theme to be either Dark (default) or Light. There are two layouts available for IQ Web: Standard and Advanced. The default layout is Advanced. The difference between the two is that Standard does not permit any gadgets besides Balances and Level 1 Quotes (located on the right sidebar); windows are not arrangeable nor customizable; and you cannot adjust the route nor sub-route for your orders. Because of these limitations we recommend you remain in the default Advanced layout to have full access to all of IQ Web’s features. The Standard layout would be for those who just want to make quick and simple trades without any care for other details that might be cluttering their screen. Sessions timeout after 15 minutes of inactivity. Any custom changes you make in IQ Web only get saved when you manually log out; so don’t mistakenly think you can just close the browser and assume your changes will be recorded. We also noticed that any and all of your changes are lost permanently if you attempt to switch between the Standard layout and the Advanced layout. So be careful to pick and stick with one, or risk having to customize your gadgets again.

Questrade IQ Edge, although very similar to IQ Web, does carry a few tricks up its sleeve. IQ Edge allows for an unlimited amount of workspaces. A workspace is a screen area allowing one to open and customize a new set of gadgets or windows for a particular purpose that suits a trading environment style. Multiple easily navigatable workspaces is a valuable asset to active traders. The other big difference between IQ Edge and IQ Web is that IQ Edge offers a more advanced plate of options for order entries: AON (All or None), “iceberg” order types (large orders are broken up into smaller executable ones), and the ability to order anonymously. There are a few subtle differences too. IQ Edge allows for extensive gadget customizing which takes them well beyond what is possible in IQ Web. However, most of these customizing features are visual (e.g. float, pin, drag-drop, resize, colorize, blink text); it depends on the gadget. Curiously, gadgets don’t have a snap-to feature in IQ Edge and so they do not auto-arrange when the main application window resizes. It was a bit inconvenient but not a big deal because most people just position their gadgets at a particular spot and maintain the application window at a set size. Interestingly, any gadget customizations you make in IQ Edge does not transfer over to IQ Web, and vice versa. However, ticker symbols and related data inside gadgets are properly maintained and do transfer over between web/desktop environments. IQ Edge also only carries the “Dark” theme (recall that IQ Web carries both a “Dark” and “Light” theme).

One additional allure of IQ Edge is that it gives a trader the sense of comfort knowing their platform’s trading activity will not be delayed or experience hiccups as might be the case if using a web browser. IQ Edge was written from the ground up using optimized C++ code and deployed for Intel/AMD processors ensuring the speediest of responses for the most diehard of active traders. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing there is no 64-bit version of IQ Edge. It will still run normally on 64-bit systems, it just won’t be running as efficiently as it could be. Here’s hoping that in the near future an optimized 64-bit version of IQ Edge will be available.

And then we have Questrade IQ Essential which serves as Questrade’s answer for those who, for one reason or another, may not have access to (or be compatible with) one of their other trading platform offerings. This would be the perfect choice for Linux desktop users or the ever growing presence of tablet carriers. Because IQ Essential is a fully compliant HTML5 browser-based experience, unlike its IQ Web and IQ Mobile siblings, it does not require a download or any third-party add-on (i.e., Microsoft Silverlight plugin) to be fully functional. As such this platform can also serve as an alternative option for Windows and Mac OS X users who for security reasons may prefer not to use Silverlight at all. Technically, IQ Mobile is a free download from Google Play and Apple’s App Store and so smartphones using other operating systems (e.g., BlackBerry, Linux, Windows Phone mobile operating system — Nokia) can still get access to it as an HTML5 web app.

Taking a spin with this platform was an incredibly liberating experience. IQ Essential was surprisingly lightning fast and responsive in every web browser we tested. Memory and CPU footprint usage was astonishingly small despite the depth of options, activity, and functionality it had to offer. It’s very clear IQ Essential preludes Questrade’s bolder steps of one day unifying IQ Mobile, IQ Web, and IQ Essential under one brand offering — a full-featured web-based experience for every device and every system any time, anywhere; a glimpse into the nascent future of stock trading platforms.

Unquestionably, this new trading platform is a giant leap in the right direction for Questrade. It encompasses everything QuestraderWEB, QuestraderPRO, and QuestraderELITE have and some. And it does so in the most intuitive, feature-rich way. By taking the bold step to retire their older platforms by supplanting them with a new next-generation trading environment it is a sign that Questrade cares deeply about providing the best experience for the casual trader and demanding active user.

The long requested single sign-on feature is now available for Questrade members. You now use one user ID and password to access the trading platform, myQuestrade, and the Exchange (Questrade’s community discussion forum). This saves a tremendous amount of time because in the past Questrade had originally required at least three different sign-on credentials to access each of their trading landscapes, and so to no surprise this was a heavily requested feature. We welcome its addition.

To get a better feel of what Questrade IQ has to offer here is a collection of video tutorials overviewing this trading platform’s most common features.

Now, to give you a better sense of who Questrade is and how much they’ve improved here’s a flash from the past with a historical look at their prior trading platforms. If you are not interested in knowing more about their past feel free to skip over this paragraph. Some time back, prior to Questrade IQ, Questrade offered a few other trading platforms for stocks and options: QuestraderWEB, their free trading platform, and QuestraderPRO and QuestraderELITE, desktop applications requiring a monthly subscription fee. For the remainder of this discussion I will only focus on QuestraderWEB. QuestraderWEB was a web-based application (fully compatible with Firefox 3.6+, Internet Explorer 7+, Safari 4+, Chrome 7+, and Opera 8+) with a very pretty and intuitive user interface not dissimilar to the myQuestrade control panel. It was Questrade’s only free platform at the time and although it included unlimited instant quotes these quotes were not updated in real-time unless you refreshed the web page. It took about 10 mins of non-refreshing before quotes were updated. For real-time live streaming quotes you were required to upgrade QuestraderWEB to include QuoteStream, a $19.95/month additional charge. This older platform required the Java plugin within your browser to function correctly.

For a closer look at what QuestraderWEB was like check out the following video tutorial collection. It walks you through and performs common transactions within that older platform. You will get a pretty good idea of how Questrade’s older platform was like prior to their shifting gears and moving in the direction of the more intuitively streamlined Questrade IQ suite.

One of the things I wish was included in the platform was some kind of transaction cost calculator that took into consideration exchange rates (estimated). Other brokerages already do this so I was a bit surprised not to find something similar. The platform’s quotes (level-1) and charts are basic but it is not surprising since it is free.

A little note on exchange and ECN fees: These are the fees Questrade is forced to charge you when you make a transaction that removes liquidity from the market (i.e. buying at the ask or selling at the bid). Although these fees translate to mere pennies for most traders one can avoid paying them altogether by executing transactions as a limit (or stop) order instead of as a market order request. For US stocks you can also send orders to non-direct access ECN networks (LAMP, MNGD, or POST) to avoid these fees.

Most people will sign-up for the standard marginal account which gives you access to borrow funds at an amount more than your current cash balance. This extended buying power ability is very useful and can come in handy when you need to jump on market opportunities. Assuming you’ve bought on margin and haven’t settled your stocks after 3 days of the purchase the margin interest rate is 4% CAD (4.75% USD) which is inline with most brokerages. For more information about stock margins refer to this page.

One of the selling points Questrade likes to bring up is that for mutual funds they will rebate the trailer fees. They call this their Mutual Fund Maximizer. Trailer fees are more like commissions by fund management companies paid to your brokerage house for being the retailer that sold you your fund(s). This commission is an ongoing source of revenue for your brokerage as long as you keep holding onto those fund(s). You don’t see this fee because it is part of the MER of the fund. So Questrade is willing to rebate this fee back to you each quarter. But there’s a catch. You need a minimum of $36,000 in mutual fund holdings to be eligible for this rebate. The reasoning is simple. There is a processing fee of $29.95/month so the rebates will start paying back if your mutual fund holdings is worth more than $36,000 (based on a 1% trailer fee). Here are the details.

Security

When making trades one of the primary concerns held by most people is security. Like banks most discount brokerage companies deploy different protection strategies to secure your account such as randomizing and asking multiple security questions, displaying pre-selected image captchas that only the account holder would know, or even providing digital key devices which in conjunction with your secret password must be pressed to generate the final half of the login passcode each time.

Unfortunately Questrade does not incorporate any advanced security measure to thwart potential intruders. They have improved though from earlier years. For example, upon sign-up for a new account you are required to create a user ID, password, and define a security question. User ID’s are required to be 8-20 characters long while passwords must be at least 8 characters in length and include an uppercase, lowercase, and numerical (or symbolic) character. Although this seems like a standard approach across the web this is actually new and a big improvement for Questrade. They also provide security advice on how to protect yourself such as using anti-virus software to keep your computer clean. Although they don’t have security guarantees against intruders breaching accounts on your end if there is fraudulent activity and it’s proven to be due to the negligence of Questrade they are in a position to cover that. Also note that Questrade is a CIPF member and so Canadian investors are covered up to $1,000,000.

Final Thoughts

Reviews online are overwhelming negative towards Questrade. Prior to writing this review I decided to read many of these complaints so that I could be aware of and keep an eye out for any of these problems. I even took note on exact steps for some of these problems with hopes of recreating them. I had originally planned to share a collection of these complaints but seeing as how many of them might have already been resolved by Questrade I felt the company deserved another look before passing judgment. So after spending a number of days using their entire suite of online tools, making trades, and attempting to recreate customer complaints I can report back and say that I did not experience a single issue. My conclusion is that either Questrade had fixed several of these earlier problems or these complaints were from beginning traders who were not familiar with the platform or with company policies.

Overall my experience with Questrade was a very pleasant one. There “killer app”, so to speak, is that one can execute trades as low as $4.95 with no catch. It doesn’t get any simpler than that! In rare instances I sometimes come across other brokerages offering promotionals at $4.95/trade but when you dig deeper into their fine print it almost unequivocally is for “big fish” traders who must spend upwards of $100,000/month in trading activity to be eligible for the $4.95 offer. Clearly not for the average consumer. This is not the case with Questrade. With Questrade it is as low as $4.95/trade and a max of $9.95/trade. Period.

Questrade’s low commission rate is so good it serves as an enticer to make more trades more often and not have to hesitate waiting for that right moment in the market which will cover your commission costs. I am happy to see Questrade has made many quality enhancements, including a unified single sign-on approach, giving a more consistent milieu. There are areas that can be improved such as providing a more robust security feature to put traders minds at ease but with such dramatic savings found among all their services it seems understandable that one can’t always have everything. So I will give them a pass on that.

Should you join? Yes. Especially for those who are thinking of starting to invest. For someone like me who is a casual trader Questrade fits my needs perfectly. And after getting a better feel of most of what they have to offer I am more than confident they can accommodate me or any other person’s growing needs as an investor.  

Questrade Offer Code (Referral)

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