One of Canada’s largest discount brokerages continues to chip away at improving its website for investors. TD Direct Investing has quietly rolled out the long awaited improvements to their investor education seminar section. As far back as August of last year, we mentioned that something was in the works to improve the delivery of investor education resources however it wasn’t until this summer that the roll out officially took place.

This past year has seen a number of significant changes for TD’s discount brokerage division. In December 2012, TD Waterhouse Discount Brokerage changed its name to TD Direct Investing and the website got a substantial overhaul in the process. One of the laggards, however, was the investor education area, specifically the investor education seminars section.  In terms of the new upgrades, the focus appears to have been on improving the user interface and the organization of the content, both of which should enhance the accessibility of this section for self-directed investors.

Improved Content Structure

One of the first noticeable improvements is the structure they’ve provided to their seminar types.  Previously, seminars and special events lacked descriptions as well as information on what investor experience level the events were appropriate for.  Not having this information made it difficult for investors to determine what a particular seminar was about and whether it was worth attending.

In keeping with the categories they rolled out in December, TD Direct Investing has decided to use the following 3 categories when referring to types of self-directed investors:

1. New to Online Investing
2. Experienced Investor
3. Advanced Trader

Sessions have now been grouped around the anticipated needs of each of these categories of investor (see table below).  For example, for those new to online investing, TD Direct Investing has bundled their platform orientation seminars along with their “Introduction to Investing” seminar to allow users to familiarize themselves with the platform.

From a user experience perspective, the combination of the grouping seminars by experience level and providing seminar descriptions will definitely cut down on time spent evaluating and deciding which seminars to attend. As a bonus, it is now also possible to register online for an event as well as see the availability of spots for the session.

New to Online Investing	Experienced Investor	Advanced Trader
Introduction to Investing	Introduction to Options Trading	Active Trader Platform
Introduction to WebBroker	Introduction to Technical Analysis	Advanced Options
WebBroker: Markets & Research	Understanding Margin & Short Selling	Options as an Income Strategy

Making Canada Whole

The way in which events can be found has also drastically improved. Previously, TD Direct Investing provided a link to download .pdf files of events that were listed simply as either Western Canada or Eastern Canada. Of course they didn’t mention where they divided the country up (it turned out that anything including and west of Manitoba was Western Canada) so that was probably the source of much confusion for those somewhere between BC and PEI.  There was also a browser quirk for some Firefox users where .pdf files wouldn’t open unless the user learned to right click the link and open a new window.  Thankfully, these problems are now a thing of the past.

With the new format, users can see all events listed by province and click on the province of interest for detailed event information.  While most people will likely click in their home province and city for information, sometimes traveling folks may want to catch a session wherever they happen to find themselves.

The drop down menus at the top of the seminars page help to filter out specific cities within a province making the task of finding sessions that are close by much, much simpler than rifling through a .pdf file. This is especially the case in Ontario where there are typically over 100 listings in a given month.

Another nice feature is the fact that additional details can be viewed by expanding the event listing. When users click on the big green plus icon they are able to see a description of the event, the speaker presenting, a mini Google map of the location as well as the event location information.

Don’t Get Too Comfortable Yet

While the upgrade to the investor education site has definitely been a step forward, there are still several features that would and could make this a first class tool. For example, having the option for a calendar view, similar to the way in which Scotia iTrade lays out its events would be handy to see how events are distributed across the month.  Given the volume of events at TD, however, this will be a technical challenge to implement correctly (envision cramming a dozen events on a single calendar day) so even though this is a ‘nice to have’, it’s not likely to find its way onto the site anytime soon.   Another area where things could be improved is in the filtering.  TD Direct Investing has designated “special events” but there is no way to filter through the events for just those sessions.  Lastly, there is still significant room to improve on the types of educational materials offered, especially given that the US cousin to TD Direct Investing, TD Ameritrade, has such a mature and structured educational offering.

The Bottom Line

The upgrades to TD Direct Investing’s education seminar section of their website are a drastic improvement over the previous layout.  It appears that the recent changes are in line with a much broader upgrade to the front end experience of dealing with TD as a self-directed investor.

While the changes are welcome for existing and potentially new TD Direct Investing clients, TD’s online brokerage competitors, especially other bank-owned brokerages, are probably not as pleased. Given TD’s market share and geographic presence, other brokerages will likely be challenged to come up with something equally as appealing for self-directed investors or risk learning that while investing with TD might be getting more comfortable, competing with them will be anything but.