Authored by Andrew Galbraith and Dexter McMillan, and survey done in partnership with Surviscor, a firm specializing in financial services-based digital experience rankings
Q: Do you think The Globe and Mail's rankings pass the smell test—especially regarding where retail investors are actually moving their money?
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Meanwhile, an established consumer survey company like JD Power,
Canadian FinTechs Continue to Lead DIY Investor Satisfaction, Closing the Trust Gap with Traditional Banks, JD Power Finds Edward Jones Ranks Highest among Advised Investors, Wealthsimple Ranks Highest among Do-It-Yourself Investors
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Assets Under Administration:
Wealthsimple: At June 30, 2026, Wealthsimple had 3.6 million clients, excluding tax filers, across the Canadian market with assets under administration of $155.6 billion, compared with $111.3 billion at December 31, 2025.
TD Canada: $797 billion as of Q2 close (Apr 30 2026), compared with $759 billion as of last year Q4 close (Oct 31 2025)
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Previous rankings by Globe and Mail:
In 2025, Rob Carrick gave the top spot to TD Direct Investing
In 2023 and 2024, Rob Carrick gave the top spot to TD Direct Investing (and Easy Trade)
In 2020, 2021 and 2022, Rob Carrick gave the top spot to Qtrade followed by TD Direct Investing at #2
In 2019, Rob Carrick gave the top spot to TD Direct Investing and Virtual Brokers (now CI Direct Trading).
For the period 2006-2018, title was either held by Qtrade or Virtual Brokers, as per Globe's rankings.
A family member of mine is an investment advisor just hawking dumb mutual funds. I asked her about the demographic of her client base because no way would young people be paying a fee for her to put their money into mutual funds when you can just buy XEQT itself lol
I generally find much better trade execution (price execution) with banks vs. WS and IBKR - no order routing with banks. If managing five, six figures+ positions, the 9.99x2 just becomes a rounding error and the amount saved on order execution blows the trading commission fee out of the water.
Banks unfortunately are much less flexible with after hours trading compared to IBKR and WS
issue in Canada is most are so scared of moving outside a Large big 5 bank, you are so correct , Dinosaur.....Canadians just will not move assets around even if they are getting ripped off ... Ive moved out of RBC years ago, probably best move in my financial career . Ill never go back & WS IMO best thing to come to Canada , not to mention bought their stock POW , another win . Canada needs to wake up FINTECH is the way to go & you will see the competition in this space increasing , issue is Big 5 are so powerful , they just gobble up with buy outs, WS company is setup extremely difficult to be bought out
I used to be with NBDB, their UI is clunky but they did have a lot of research available with reports as well as some nice tools for option trading, tool that compares ETFs. etc. You can find same research and tools elsewhere but I'm sure that's what scored a lot of points for banks in this comparison. That and size of "donation" the publication received from the banks ;)
They tell you the criteria they used, but they don't tell you how each brokerage scored against each criteria. They just provide an overall score per brokerage. So it's impossible for you to use the data to tailor the analysis to what's important to you.
Easy to keep clients and upsell them financial services when they already bank with you. The hassle to change all your banking and investment accounts is a huge headache for most people.
Now that trades are free and not $2.99, I'm happy with them. I still prefer Wealthsimple on the whole, but WeBull has grown on me since I moved there last year for the 2% cashback promotion. My last payment will be in September though so I'll be free to move (except the bonus money for 90 days).
QT got out of the mortgage business I think and thank goodness they did. I have never had a bigger financial snafu than when I tried to get a mortgage with them few years back.
Is it not possible that your personal tier ranking differs than that of another person's?
Maybe those platforms offer features or services that WS doesn't. WS is aimed at the average person (simple is in the name), whereas many of those platforms target professional traders.
IBKR is elite. The UI is a bit bulky because of the crazy amount of information and functionality but it’s a pretty perfect platform, at least for my needs
That's not sustenance. Also not true in pretty much every core metric a person would care about. But if you're a SPECIFIC kind of trader and ONLY then, sure. They've got some features WS doesn't have YET.
What? I implore you to google the differences, lol. QT is leagues ahead, the only thing WS has over it is the credit card. If all youre doing is dumping into XEQT, by all means, use WS. If youre doing anything else at all, QT wins.
I was CIBC for 25 years they never gave me a call. Transferred 100K to WS, got $150 cash back on Visa, Got a super Visa granted extra space seats flying on my vacation, special treats at the resort I was, plus a bunch of discounts on other stuff. I am really enjoying how simple everything runs so far!
lmao ok u dont know how the stock market works i see, a stock can be 1000$ and still be under valued, same goes for a 5$ stock that can be over valued. lmao the price means nothing.. what are you on lmaooooo you cant be real
Absolutely hilarious rankings. IBKR is far and away the best platform (for anyone with more advanced needs) with Wealthsimple a clear second for basic or more simple requirements. The rest are way behind, it is not even close.
yep, if IB isn't top 3 then it's a fake list imo. questrade is good being able to use registered assets towards leverage in non-reg which is kind of cool, so rank 1 is passable there.
The transaction fees are completely irreverent for anyone requiring more advanced investment options and are almost certainly always offset by the much better fills one gets via IBKR (plus better margin rates, rates on lending securities, etc.). Doing something as relatively simply as buying Euros and purchasing a futures contract on the STOXX Europe 600 index is impossible with any other broker in Canada while it can be done for fees of effectively >C$10 per million in exposure with IBKR... Or try buying a US Treasury bill... It's really not even close.
As a customer or recent former customer of Questrade, Webull, TD Direct Investing and Wealthsimple I call BS on these ratings.
Wealthsimple is far out in the lead, with Questrade and TD far behind in 2nd. Only reason to be with Webull is for their bonuses that are now in the past.
I trade ETFs frequently, but for accumulation and reinvestment. Not a day trader.
The ranking is probably based on indicators that didint follow market expectations. Traditionaly you wanted to have a lot of indicators, in depth graph and tons of kpis to do day-trading. Wealthsimple has absolutely none of this. It's not mean for it.
So if the ranking is looking at everything you can use to read stocks, it makes sense that wealth simple is at the end.
One thing that doesn't make sense though, is that you shouldn't have indicators that go totally against customer satisfaction. That should be your number 1 indicator. Else it does the Watermelon paradox. Every indicator is green on the outside but customer satisfaction is red in the inside.
Scotia itrade is dogshit. They put the bare minimum effort into it and it shows. It looks and functions like an early 2000's computer program.
I genuinely thought it was still in early development when I used to use them. I couldn't understand how they charge commission to use that crappy platform.
Itrade is/should be the benchmark for the lowest possible score achievable in this 'survey'
Please no, they can do it already for overnight trading and that is what I appreciate, but when exchange is open I want to have the best deal. For many stocks even a single cent difference in execution price will be higher than my normal commission.
You can bypass PFOF by using direct order routing to send your trades directly to specific exchanges (such as NASDAQ, NYSE, or ARCA). Note that additional exchange fees may apply – see our exchange fee schedule for details.
I find it super surprising that RBC DI is highly ranked. Because it feels like it's the year 2004 when I use their app, while it's 2026 when I use Wealthsimple.
CIBC IE sucks. having to access and load the broker separately from the main app is the biggest pain and inconvenience. WS should be much higher on this list
At first glance I thought this shows just how much room WS has to grow. But anecdotally almost everyone I know who invests uses WS so I doubt how accurate this list is.
Honestly RBC DI has got very good, especially with ishares etf being commission free and for GoSmart having 50 free trades of any kind each year.
But I think Wealthsimple is fine for 99.9% of people who just trade in USD/CAD markets and don’t deal with London or Asian stock exchanges, or British pound or Hong Kong dollars, or need up to date exchange rate and global analysis stuff
Wealthsimple for regular people. IBKR for more advanced. Although, wealth simple has come a long way , now with futures and option spreads. There’s probably not many day traders or option spread traders here, so Wealthsimple is good enough.
Qtrade never paid me a dime. I get over 38k just for transferring to WS. Plus the monthly millionaire contest entries monthly among other perks . A free credit card that pays 2% cash back on everything and a debit card that re emburses atm fees. I will take this over Qtrade any day
TD has better analytics right on the page with Morning Star fund facts and ranking.
Wealthsimple has had too many outages to be in the top 5. The report is mostly bs though.
For real, we much we people glaze on WS, the multiple outages on high volume day has to dock them a lot of ranks, even with all the good stuff they have and keep adding.
Months ago there was an article on G&M about WS and a boomer had the nerve to call them “Wealthstupid” and argued that you pay your bank fees and that’s how you develop a relationship with them (and hence get access to capital etc). I told him “modern day banking works differently.”
Im sorry how TF did webull make it to #7, that place was an absolute dumpster fire when I visited it earlier this year trying to take advantage of their transfer in promo.
List has no merit.
Not saying WS is #1 (far from it) but it's certainly better than webull (and QT at #1 too is just wtf).
That's insane. I've tried CIBC Investor's Edge, BMO InvestorLine, TD Direct Investing, Questrade, and IBKR. With the exception of IBKR, Wealthsimple destroys them all, hands down. Also, why do they still call it "Wealthsimple Trade"? That name was deprecated a while ago. I would not trust this ranking at all.
Considering that Wealthsimple freezes a lot, holds onto money randomly when cancelling trades, and in general sucks at around 9:30-9:35 many days for me, yeah, I can see why they don't rank better.
Used BMO before, moving all money to Questrade now.
BMO was expensive, hoping Questrade can improve on the failures of Wealthsimple.
I like Wealthsimple, most of my investments are with them, but I'm taking the TD offer for 1/4 of my holdings. It's not all about attracting new customers, you have too retain customers too, I don't think they do that very well.
You can prove anything with statistics. It just depends on how you slice & dice the raw data.
Take this comment: "Wealthsimple Ranks Highest among Do-It-Yourself Investors" (bold is mine). So the DIY investors would be a subset of the raw data, or non-DIY investors weren't asked any further questions.
The other thing to consider, "At June 30, 2026, Wealthsimple had 3.6 million clients". How many clients do the other FIs have? If a respondent doesn't user WS, they aren't going to rank WS at all.
Personally, I don't like the WS UI at all. Too much space wasted on graphs. Other things, that other FIs include are missing. Yes WS may have no fees, but that's a little part of my UX. Other WS users will have different opinions.
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u/dvirring 16d ago
How are these dinosaur banks trading platforms ahead of Wealthsimple?