Dicount Broker

[Crowtservo]

This has been discussed a bit in the Stock Market thread but I wanted to get your guys' opinions on online discount brokers. I'm planning to open a TFSA at one of them with $10k to invest. I'll be trading reasonably actively over the summer (5-10 a month) then likely go to less risky long-term investments in the fall when I go back to school (bonds and mutual funds). The ones I've been primarily looking at are Scotia iTrade and Questrade.

I likely won't be qualifying for the lowest pricing tier on iTrade so the commissions on Questrade are certainly lower. This can be a pretty big deal with a small account like mine (easily 1-2% of a trade).

Neither have any fees aside from commissions as far as I can tell. Are the ECN fees the same for all discount brokers or do these vary?

Mutual funds have $0 up front commission on iTrade. $9.95 on Questrade but you keep the trailer (usually 1%) so if you hold for a year or two this would again be cheaper.

So far Questrade seems like the better option but are there any factors I'm not considering? How do the research tools compare? Does one have better access to certain funds and markets?

Thanks in advance. I hope this can serve as a good resource for others in the same situation.

[hirevtuner]

another option: https://www.thinkorswim.ca

[willcls]

http://finviz.com/store/stock-brokers.ashx

go knock yourself out
think or swim isnt accepting new accounts right now for canadians.
of the big four td waterhouse will get you the best fills the fastest.
everytime a discount broker gets successful in canada one of the big four just buys them out and later jacks up commision damn canadian banks have a monopoly here

[Crowtservo]

ThinkOrSwim looks great except it doesn't offer TFSAs and accounts can hold only USD which doesn't work for what I need it to do. Also as willcls mentioned it hasn't been open for registration in about 8 months. It will be interesting to see what it's like once TD gets it started up again (currently all my banking is done at TD so it would be convinient).

As for TD Waterhouse the commission rate is too high for it to be a viable option right now. If I had $100k+ to invest I could get the $9.99 rate and would go there for sure.

Anyone else have suggestions/comments on the deep-discount brokers ($5-$10 per trade)?

[ehhhwik]

I've always used RBC Direct Investing since Day 1, all my other accounts are with RBC, so that was my major deciding factor, pretty easy to use platform and since I do more than 30 trades per quater, i only pay $9.99/trade

A couple of my buddies have used TD's platform before and have been pretty happy, they've spent millions in the last couple years to update their trading platform, it was such a piece of crap not too many years ago...