While storms were raging across stock markets this past week, it was definitely calmer waters in terms of discount brokerage news and chatter.  In this week’s roundup, we look at the actions that landed another Canadian discount broker in the IIROC penalty box, a report by TD on Canadian investors as well as a review […]

This past week was a fairly quiet one for Canadian discount brokerages, so this roundup will focus on some of the interesting events that took place in the discount brokerage space more generally. The most popular story in the discount brokerage space continues to be the supposed return of retail investors to equity markets.  Digging […]

This week’s discount brokerage update features the newly announced deal by BMO InvestorLine, a couple of great forum post on the Financial Webring Forum on Qtrade vs. RBC Direct Investing  as well as another article from The Globe and Mail about Canada’s best discount broker. Deals Getting Some Air Unlike a lot of deals that […]

This year’s Vancouver World MoneyShow turned out to be a little different than most others. The exhibiting space felt a bit smaller than usual, the lineups took a bit longer and the schedule a bit less punctual.  As it turned out, this year’s MoneyShow would be the one in which this franchise would announce its […]

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 […]

Introduction As part of our continued look at Canadian discount brokerage rankings, we review the longest running comparison and ranking of Canadian discount brokerages: The Globe and Mail’s annual ranking of online brokers, which had its start back in 1999. In part one of this series, we go through how we conducted the review, who […]

Interactive Brokers made the news this week as it released its trading metrics for the month of November.  While not a perfect proxy for the rest of the investment market, Interactive Brokers’ transaction volumes, known as Daily Average Revenue Trades (DARTs) help to provide an indirect measure of the ‘health’ of the stock market participants […]

Discount Brokerage Weekly Roundup From the Canadian discount brokerages, this past week saw the launch of a new contest by Questrade  called “Ring the bell with Questrade”.  Winners of the contest will get to ring the opening bell at the NASDAQ MarketSite and round trip airfare to New York City, three nights’ accommodation and $500 […]

Discount Brokerage Weekly Roundup: As we roll into October, the Canadian discount brokerage industry continues to show signs of competitive evolution.   First, the huge news released earlier this week that Questrade will transition into clearing its own trades via an in-house clearing division (currently pending regulatory approval).  By replacing their current clearing agent (Penson Financial […]

As a follow up to the article on the “vanishing trader”, we decided to look at the “invisible hand” of the market.  We took a brief look at the recent trading volume data (you can access this data here) published by one of the largest discount brokerage firms in the US, Interactive Brokers (ticker symbol […]

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 […]

Below is a list of “on demand” educational seminars and webinars from a variety of Canadian discount brokerages on a variety of investing-related topics.  To access them, simply click on the video links.  As this list will be constantly reviewed and updated, check back for more links/videos. Title Category Length Company Host url Description Registration […]

Options Education Day is an annual series of events organized and hosted by the Montreal Exchange (part of the TMX Group) as part of their goal to better educate retail investors about options and derivatives products.  While options and derivative products are more complex than your average stock, there has been an enormous growth in […]

One of the largest publicly traded discount brokers, Interactive Brokers Group Inc. (better known as Interactive Brokers or ‘IB’) published their monthly trading data for March 2012.  Many industry commentators and trader’s alike have observed a decrease in the trading volumes over the past several months.  An interesting data point that confirms that observation comes […]

With so many people talking about technical analysis and using stock charts to help make trading and investing decisions, here are some good tutorials to get your feet wet with some of the key concepts and terms used in technical approaches. Top marks go to the folks at Interactive Brokers for preparing this handy introduction […]

Ever wondered how shorting a stock works? A couple of handy tutorials help explain this often misunderstood approach to trading: The first is a bit of a technical explanation prepared by Interactive Brokers on how a short sale works: http://www.interactivebrokers.com/images/flash/shortsale/index.html   A simpler version prepared by the Khan Academy can be found here: