By: Larry MacDonald
The top online discount broker in Canada is Credential Direct, according to a Fall 2008 survey conducted by rating firm Surviscor. This was Credential Direct’s fifth consecutive first-place finish in the “overall” and “investor” categories. Qtrade and BMO InvestorLine placed second and third in these categories in the Fall 2008 survey.
For traders, the top online discount broker was Disnat, part of the Desjardins Group. It was followed by E*Trade and TD Waterhouse.
“The Surviscor online brokerage analysis focuses on online features and functionality offered by firms in Canada using seven categories,” notes Surviscor. The seven categories are: 1) Getting Started – Public Site Review, 2) Design and Help Features, 3) Customer Interaction, 4) Market Intelligence, 5) Trading, 6) Tools and Education, and 7) Commission and Fees.
3 Responses to “ Top online brokers ”
Credential’s site seems good but has some problems, notably that you can’t place trailing stop orders (which save a lot of work) and you can’t do strategy option trades (you must enter each component trade separately, which can be dangerous in some situations). Their demo is interesting, but too brief.
By Vlad on Dec 4, 2008
Thier ‘log in’ page is the same as the public site, this slows down the process of log in.
You will quickly find this very annoying since you will be logging in many times a day on account of thier servers logging you out constantly. Surviscor does not look at how the site pages are written and could not tell you that the credential public site has 117 html errors and 3 warnings, another reason for a slow loading log in page. Thier cookies are some times poorly written and will not overwrite the old one and again you will find
yourself having to manually delete the old one for things to work properly. Since the implementation of the discontinuation of ‘all or none’, Credential Direct
has had a error on one of thier pages that has not been resolved. Repeated emails and a telephone call, although answered promptly, did not result in
a repair of this problem. A new trader will find it very hard to reach the target for the 9.95 fee with what they have to offer since thier tools and education
are sometimes inferior to what can be found for free on the internet. As for commissions, a company would only have to slash the cost by mere pennies
to beat out other competitors. If this is the best online broker Canada has to offer than us investor/trader’s are beat before we start.
By justme on Apr 7, 2009
I have used a couple of different online brokers and decided in the end that for me the best is Questrade. Take a look at why I think this to be so at http://www.investingincanada.info/2009/08/best-online-broker-in-canada-2009-2010.html
Tell me what you think? Cost was my biggest issue.
By Smac20 on Aug 27, 2009