Hi y’all,
I have some stocks (registered and unregistered) in Wealthsimple and am looking to move. Partially because their robo-investing sucks balls and partially because I’ve been sketched out by their methods for a few years now. My current use-case is mostly dumping into ETFs every now and then, nothing crazy, but I want to leave.
Where should I move? I’ve heard Questrade and Interactive Brokers (IKBR) are both decent, with Questrade being easier and IKBR being more powerful. Any considerations I should have in regards to which is cheaper / easier to use / easier to move to? Or any other options? Leaning towards Questrade due to being based in Canada and I hear more about them.
Could you explain more about the reasoning to move out of Wealthsimple?
The first and most obvious would I suppose be that their automated investing account has proven useless to me. The positions they chose and the fees resulted in losses the first couple of years and barely scraped back to +10% the last couple. I immediately beat it 3x by just dumping into ETFs, and even beat it with my for-funsies unregistered.
The rest is vibes. Everything they do gives me major “fintech company that will lose my money in a couple of years” e.g Yotta. I have felt a little put off for a while due to things like higher CDIC limit which is achieved via them using other companies.
For chequing account holders, Wealthsimple may spread client funds across one or multiple CDIC members in order to extend the CDIC coverage to up to $1,000,000 for eligible deposits. Source
Pair that with their Cash card being a prepaid credit card and it feels as though they’re pairing some really odd methods together just to get the same % return I can get elsewhere.
A point which I had against them, but is quickly becoming irrelevant as other finance websites including Questrade follow, is the derelection of traditional account linking in favour of an insistence to use Flinks. Giving my bank password to a random third party that should never need to be in the process is insanity to me. Why banks can’t just setup Oauth schemes I don’t know. I guess I’ll be using etransfer more and more for now.
The final nail this week was their emailing me to announce a prediction market (gambling) service. Wealthsimple Predict is the latest in their line of chasing trends and they claim you can “predict” (gamble) things as menial as the weather. I understand stocks have risk and can be seen as a gamble, but “prediction markets” are pretty obviously gambling in a bow-tie. Keep it to the casinos, I’m out.
In summary, I want my financial institutions boring. I don’t want my money to be with a company that is constantly trying to chase the newest fad, find loopholes in the banking system to get an extra 0.5%, and making gambles (literally and figuratively). It gives me constant doubt as to their future.
Thanks for your thoughts. I have to say I’ve been feeling those vibes for a long time now, but due to laziness haven’t done much about them.
Flinks is absolutely insane. I was shocked when I was setting it up and realized it actually needed password and second factor. And I’m also so confused by the necessity of this as almost all banks already provide access delegation to the CRA and other government services.
I’m similarly annoyed by their new gambling venture. I don’t care if people want to gamble, but it makes me uncomfortable that my financial institution has a stake in this industry (although, counter point, the house always wins), and I just wish it were boring and out of the way as it seems to have been some years ago. But is Questrade any better, and if it actually is, is it not likely to enshittify too over the coming few years? I’ll definitely think about that before moving.
If you trade lots of options or international stocks, then IBKR is amazing. However, as you’re just leaving your ETFs in your account, Questrade is more than sufficient.
Questrade may have transfer-in bonus. You may consider to wait for it
Great point on the transfer bonus, I didn’t know they did that.
I would recommend Questrade. It will do everything you need and way way more. Super low fees, good support, based in Canada. I’ve been investing with them for nearly 20 years.
Thank you for the input. :)
