Questrade – Recently Closed My Account

I’ve recently closed my Questrade account for a few reasons. The first and most important one is that my big bank now offers me the same commission rates as Questrade in addition to all the other great features that Questrade lacks. Additionally, I’ve been very unimpressed with their customer service. I’ve only called fours times however, each time I felt very rushed by the representative and on one occasion they would not stay on the phone to verify that I could indeed login again and I was told to call back if it didn’t work. That wouldn’t normally bother me except that it took nearly 30mins to talk to a rep in the first place. Additionally, on their website they claim that it’s 1-2 days for an electronic funds transfer from Questrade to your bank account. However, my experience is that it takes approximately a week. After waiting on the phone for about 30mins I was told that it was 1-2 business days after it’s processed at Questrade but there was no guarantee on the processing time. Personally, I wouldn’t even trade through Questrade if there were absolutely no trading fees. After my multiple dealings with them I don’t trust them and don’t have any confidence in their customer services or technology. That being said Questrade might be an option for individuals that don’t qualify for discounted rates at one of the big banks and don’t mind extremely sub-par customer service.

I would like to note that this is only my opinion and it could be that my experiences are not typical of other Questrade customers. I know that some Questrade representatives read this blog so please feel free to comment.

Questrade - Review

Well I used my Questrade account yesterday for the first time so…now that I’ve had a little field experience actually using it I think I’m ready to give it a proper review. However, I would just like to point out that there are four different trading platforms available but the only one I’ve used and thus the only one I’ll review is the WebTrader platform.

The WebTrader platform is similar to the online platforms of the big banks however it is not as slick or user friendly.

POSITIVES:
-has decent charting tools for those of you interesting in technical analysis
-CHEAP TRADES. I can’t really over emphasize this. This is the real positive of Questrade. When you sign up you can chose from 2 different accounts:

1. $0.01 a share (minimum fee of $4.95)
2. a flat fee of $9.95 a trade (unlimited shares)

I chose option 1. However, if you were a real day trader into penny stocks option #2 would save you a huge amount of money compared to the fees charged by the big banks.

NEGATIVES:
-No online help
-No research reports
-No online information on the fundamentals. Ie- P/E, P/B, revenue growth, earnings estimates etc...
-Screen layout is not as user friendly as the big banks
-Functionality is lacking compared to the big banks. ie- If you click on “positions” it shows you the securities that you own but you can’t click on them to get a quote, or click on them to sell them. The WebTrader does of course let you get real time quotes and sell securities but you can’t simply click on your positions. Instead you have to select “stocks” and then enter the information for the stock that you want to sell.
-Unlike the big banks you can’t just select “CDN” or “U.S” when buying securities you have to put in a period and the short form of the exchange that the security is listed on ie- Toronto = .TO Venture = .VN. I don’t really have a problem with this except that there is no online help outlining what the short forms are for the exchanges. However, if you do a symbol lookup it will display the security in the proper form ie-ZED.VN
-WebTrader does not catch errors on the fly. For example, when I put in my buy order for ZED I put in just "ZED" however, I should have put ZED.VN. I didn’t know my order wasn’t valid until I looked in my account history and beside my order status it said “rejected”
-Cannot built portfolios of stocks to create a watch list.

Despite all of the negatives I’ve mentioned above overall I’d say my Questrade WebTrader account is O.K but not great. What I would suggest to anyone thinking of switching over is don’t close your account at the big bank as Questrade literally offers no research or reports. I plan on using this account to buy securities that I don’t plan to hold forever (ie- any cyclicals) and will continue to use my big bank trading account to purchase securities that I plan on holding forever. In my mind $30 is a reasonable amount to pay for the features and security I get from trading with one of the big 5.

Questrade Process

I now have a working Questrade account.

Setting up my Questrade account was relatively easy and trouble free. There are basically 3 easy steps:

1. Fill in the online forms and print the acceptance agreement afterwards.

2. Send the following item to Questrade
-Signed acceptance agreements
-$5 personal cheque (deposited to your account once it’s approved)
-Photocopy of both sides of your drivers license

3. Fund your account. You need to deposit at least $2500 before your account can be activated (I did bill payment from my bank account – it took about 2 business days to get from big bank to Questrade)

After all 3 steps have been completed they will send you your trading account username which works with the password you setup in step 1. I haven’t used it yet but I can now trade for $0.01 a share.

Questrade

I currently do all my trading online with one of the big banks and have been quite satisfied with the services, research reports and functionality of their systems. However, I recently sent in an application to open a Questrade account. I plan on using this account to buy securities that I don’t plan to hold forever ie- any cyclicals.

For those of you that are looking into a discount DISCOUNT broker Questrade has the following 2 account options available.

1. $4.95 Plan – this plan charges $0.01 a share (minimum charge of $4.95 a trade).
2. $9.95 Plan – this plan charges $9.95 a trade for an unlimited amount of shares.

Personally I went with the $4.95 plan because I don’t really dabble in penny stocks and would rarely be buying over 500 or 1000 shares in one shot.

I’ll let you know what I think about the account once it’s setup.