Called thier Chief Compliance Officer, IIROC, BBB and Ombudsmen. Basically, unless they’re insolvent no one will help retrieve your funds. Despicable.

In fact, someone glancing at the page might easily mistake the minus sign for a hyphen and conclude Questrade is actually paying them a generous 2.5% interest , much more than their bank savings account does – encouraging themn to keep as much cash with Questrade as possible! In reality, Questrade’s happy to hold large amounts of your cash, but refuses to pay a cent in interest on it!

I suspect Questrade is deliberately misleading people, trying to keep as many clients as possible ignorant of the fact they are getting ripped off, and receiving an unjustifiable 0% interest paid on their hard earned cash.
The rep I spoke with claimed rates change all the time, so they can’t post the specific rate! Yeah, right. They can update the value of my account balances daily, but not their interest rates? Sure.

By contrast, my other broker, Interactive Brokers, not only pays me interest on my cash ( 0.5%), but posts the figure plainly as 0.5% , as well as showing how they derive it: It’s the current LIBOR bank rate minus 0.5%. IB says the LIBOR is currently 1%. I suspect the “overnight bank rate” the Questrade rep. mentioned and LIBOR are one and the same. I also think she was guessingb (incorrectly) that that bank rate was 2%.

I’ve also come to despise Questrade and all other Canadian brokers and the TSX for the comparatively sky high commission fees charged on Canadian listed stocks, and usually on US listeds too.

When I buy US listeds via Interactive Brokers (a US Broker with a Canadian branch) , I typically pay a mere $1 US per trade! IB’s fees are higher on low priced stocks, as it’s based on the number of shares, but I can buy $10,000 US worth of a $35/share stock for $1!

I now like to daytrade, which entails multiple round-trip trades per day, and at $1 a pop commissions, daytrading US stocks via IB is very feasible. It is NOT feasible to daytrade TSX stocks though , because at $5, $10, $20 per buy or sell trade, the commissions mount up fast, and will soon wipe out any profits!

The TSX and Canadian brokers continue to gouge and insult customers by continuing charging high fees, and by paying 0% interest on your cash while obscuring this ugly fact.

Questrade is also less than candid about the extra “exchange fees” that apply
above their advertised $4.95 or $9.95. You only get the base rate if you “add liquidity”. Whenever you oplace a market order, or place a limit order but hit the current bid or ask price, you are removing liquidity, and you get penalized for doing so by being charged “exchange fees”.
Only if you place a bid lower than the current “best bid” or place an ask price higher than the current “best offer” price do you avoid these extra fees.
Again, sneaky Questrade is not very up front in their ads or on their site about this stuff. I had to go to another broker’s site to find an explanation of removing and adding liquidity. But check your trading slips, and you’ll see lots of those extra fees, unless you know about them and place your orders in such a way as to avoid them.

Online stock transactions are not much more complicated technologically than are ABM bank machine transactions. There’s no reason why commission fees need to be more than $1 per trade. Anything more is indefensible gouging of customers by greedy exchanges and brokers.

Beware of hidden fees. That’s all I have to say. Unlike other online brokers, I couldn’t for the life of me, find a section where they document the history of all the transactions. ( I was either too dumb or too impatient to find them). In any case, I hope the same thing that happened to me won’t happen to you.

Questrade’s Incompetence

causes

financial loss for investor

Late June 26 2008 I funded a Questrade account after extensively familiarizing myself with the Questrader Pro demo as well as consulting with ‘new customer service’ when questions arose.
Starting to trade on July 1.08, using the Life Questrade Pro Platform, I executed more than 100 trades as a day trader / swing trader to date.

In absence of a comprehensive Questrade manual showing rules and regulations pertaining to its policies and trading platform, calls to customer service were needed to clarify discrepancies inherent in the life versus the demo platform.

Unfortunately, I received as many contradicting information as there were agents I spoke with; requiring additional calls asking for verification from a supervisor. Andrew has to be mentioned as most professional, helpful, willing, competent and customer service oriented .

Nonetheless, reaching the “life” customer service department involved extensive waiting periods and when finally connected the respective, presumably knowledgeable ‘life account holder agent’ often needed to consult someone else to get an answer to the question; i.e. clarifying after hours trading to execute an order set off many contradicting instructions by Wes, Wen, Wendy, Ricki and Karan Mahotra whereby the latter fortunately does chose to get help instead of spouting unqualified misinformation which fails when followed.

Some of the issues are the number of decimals allowed to enter, excessively long time lapses to fill market orders despite direct access, limit orders do rarely appear on level 2 queue view, commission amounts charged are shown at 2x the amount incurred, etc.

Aside from these shortcomings, one is hopeful will iron itself out after learning Questrade’s intricacies in the most inefficient manner, Questrade’s ineptitude and lack of concern for the client does also prompt a heavy monetary loss to the user of Questrade as shown below:

On July 22.08 I closed one of several same symbol long positions which were accumulated over several days. The trading platform however, closed a position other than the one selected by me which had shown a gain when closed out at that time. Instead a significant loss occurred when the system chose a different position of the same symbol acquired at a different price than the one I had selected.

I called Questrade immediately following the incident. After 15 minutes on hold, I was informed by Ilia?, / Elia? that Questrade’s policy does not allow for account holder selection of positions to be closed out of multiple same symbol positions, but the system selects automatically the first in first out position if several positions have been accumulated over several days.

Conversely, if all of several same symbol positions are accumulated during the same day , the last position acquired is the first one out upon closing/covering one of the positions held.

I accepted that information as a lesson learned, after confirming that I had not overlooked that crucial information in Questrade’s 70 page info/disclaimer material. Instead I was advised by Ilia/Elia? that it was my responsibility to call in for obtaining such information prior to doing the trade because Questrade is a discount broker.

With this information in mind, on July 29, 2008 at 14.08 hours, I covered that day’s last acquired position held as one of several same symbol positions acquired during the morning of July 29.08. That particular position showed a gain of $148.73 .

This gain, added to a $557.23 gain closed earlier that morning in other symbols’ positions, would result in a total gain of $705.96 before commissions.

Instead, the arbitrary Questrade system selection presented me with a loss of $254.11 because the trading platform system covered a different position which was not the last position opened and thus had a different price and therefore was creating a loss. Consequently, my gain for the day to 14:09:36 hours was reduced from the earlier gained $557.23 to $303.12.

In addition, my unsuccessful attempts to resolve the issue in several phone calls to customer service resulted in repeated disconnections, more than 13 minutes waiting periods on hold and refusal by agent Ilia to connect me to a supervisor.

Instead, rude, rushed and unfriendly, he tried to convince me that only a paper, but no real loss had occurred.

He assured me he had now adjusted the account to eliminate the loss occurred. When I asked him how the result is shown so that I can see it in my trading account, he answered that he is not an IT programmer and thus, does not know how the computer did it.
I was/am unable to detect any changes made, my losses remain the same as prior to my call to Questrade and are reflected at closing of the markets.

Brad, agent at the trade desk, and later agent Karan, assured me the account would be adjusted at end of the trading day because current attempts made by them failed for technical reasons unbeknownst to them.

During my 1 and ¾ hours occupied with the phone ordeal and frustration, my other positions could not be closed out at 14:15 hours which would have resulted in a small gain; instead, an additional loss of $ 1120.57 occurred for a total loss of a minimum of $1374.68 at the end of the trading day.

Furthermore, the unresolved issue prevented me from re-acting to market performance during the remaining 1 ½ hours of trading, disabling the opportunity to re-gain some of the previous weeks’ losses.

Questade’s agents remarked they are very sorry about what happened. I requested several times to be connected to a manager or supervisor and asked for a call back, I AM STILL WAITING TO BE CONTACTED.

Related documentation is available.