Deals have been updated, see below for more details This month’s deals and promotions from Canadian discount brokerages feature a new promotion by Questrade, as well as an interesting deal/contest by Scotia iTrade announced last month.  Also, Qtrade‘s transfer fee rebate is also back, this time with no apparent time limits.  Before launching into the […]

April’s discount brokerage deals and promotions heralds the return of unlimited trading by an unlikely character in the deals section – HSBC InvestDirect. This deal is in ‘celebration’ of HSBC’s recent award by Dalbar Inc for best customer service at a Canadian discount broker, an award that RBC Direct Investing had won for several years. […]

In part one of this series, we looked at the background of the Globe and Mail discount brokerage rankings as well as how they’re structured and who they’re targeted towards. In this next part, we take a detailed look at what the discount brokerage rankings are actually measuring and some interesting observations we made about […]

How to use the Visual Discount Brokerage Rankings Table We’ve collected the results from the J.D. Power and Associates Investor Satisfaction survey from 2012 (Table 1) as well as historical results from 2009-2012 (Table 2).  To help visualize how the different discount brokerages have performed on the surveys relative to other discount brokerages, we’ve created […]

If you missed the first part of our J.D. Power & Associates Discount Brokerage Rankings series, read it here. The two main objectives of this section are to provide readers with: A look at the overall discount brokerage marketplace to see what, if any trends in investor satisfaction there are that matter to consumers A […]

This week the biggest news for discount brokerages came in the form of the 2012 Globe and Mail Canadian discount brokerage rankings.  Rob Carrick’s annual survey of the Canadian discount brokerage industry looked at 12 firms this year. The top spot went to Virtual Brokers which narrowly edged out the six year champ, Qtrade while […]

Virtual Brokers Takes Top Spot The 2012 Globe and Mail Canadian discount brokerage rankings are out as of today with Virtual Brokers claiming the top spot and displacing the 6 year “reigning champ” of this survey, Qtrade (which came in second), by a razor thin margin. Becoming Globe and Mail’s top ranked brokerage, albeit barely, […]

For most Canadian investors and traders who place their trades online, the details of what happens after they press ‘buy’ or ‘sell’ on their stock trades is largely a trivial matter.  Should one start to think about it, however, the process of matching up millions of orders, confirming trades and documenting what went to whom […]

Even though discount brokerages haven’t traditionally portrayed the most “fun and friendly” image, more and more of them are starting to become visible on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. While you (hopefully) won’t find those embarrassing pictures of a drunken night gone wild or an angry rant about a horrible boss, plugging […]