Personal Finance

Seeking advice for DIY Investing

  • Last Updated:
  • Feb 9th, 2013 11:42 pm
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Jr. Member
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Sep 27, 2007
110 posts
2 upvotes

Seeking advice for DIY Investing

Hi,

I currently bank with RBC and have about 250K in managed investment (RRSP, TFSA and other). I'd like to move to DIY investing to reduce the ever growing MERs and potentially hidden fees that I estimate about 5K/year.

More a saver than a day trader, I would typically be a passive investor and contribute to TFSA about once a year, "outside RRSP" about 4-5 times a year and RRSP about once every 5 years.

I'm leaning towards RBC DI (I will open a a practice account) and I'm seeking your advice if there are better alternatives in terms of fees, commissions, ease of use and ETF choices.

I just discovered couch potato and I have much to learn...
Any advice or links would be much appreciated

Thx
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Feb 15, 2008
26318 posts
3242 upvotes
Calgary
I set up a relative with an Interactive Brokers account. Approximately $250k worth of ETFs, $200k account equity. $1 trades, $10/month minimum, support for all foreign currencies and most worldwide exchanges for stocks, bonds, futures, forex, and options. Only 'issue' is they don't support TFSA's or RRSPs, and they won't hold your hand.

She's basically a trading neophyte and this literally was her first online brokerage account. She uses a spreadsheet to purchase ETFs and rebalance them that I set up. She enters her own trades. Between being able to use low-cost ETFs, and the low trading fees and low margin expense, there was simply no alternative that could touch them. Just the forex on the ~$130k of her account that's denominated in USD$ would have cost ~10 years worth of minimum monthly expense. The traditional Canadian bank-brokers really rip people off on Forex.
TodayHello wrote: ...The Banks are smarter than you - they have floors full of people whose job it is to read Mark77 posts...

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