For anyone banking at Toronto-Dominion, TD Direct Investing WebBroker must be the first place you look at for a discount broker. It’s the least point of resistance for moving money around and an understandable decision as well. Before you settle on your bank’s discount broker, make sure it satisfies your investing requirements as not all discount brokers are built equal.
With TD, you will first be shown options through TD Direct Investing and you will have to make a decision on choosing a trading platform:
WebBroker
Active Trader
ThinkorSwim
Unless you are an advanced trader, WebBroker will be your platform. Below is a summary of the features with comments from readers on their experience. I polled my readers and got some really good feedback from personal experience that I wanted to share. As it happens, TD Direct Investing WebBroker is most used discount broker by the survey respondent.
TRADING COSTS
This is probably one of the most important criteria for everyone. I like to look at the cost of a transaction to ensure I am satisfied to invest $1,000 minimum at this cost.
The transaction costs are outlined below and are effective as of April 1, 2016 – see TD’s Disclosure of Rates.
$9.99 per trade
Active traders can pay $7.00 if they execute more than 150 trades per quarters
Telephone trades will have a minimum of $35. Be careful if you need to execute the DLR and DRL.U currency exchange on the telephone.
No transaction fees on mutual funds
Trading cost is in line with all the other discount brokers from the big banks except for CIBC Investor Edge where a transaction fee is $6.95.
Comments by Readers
$9.99 trades are not the lowest, but still pretty reasonable.
$9.99 per trade is too expensive.
ACCOUNTS
Unfortunately, there can be maintenance fees on accounts depending on the size of your holdings.
Household accounts with more than $15,000 have no fees
With less than $15,000, you pay $25.00 per quarter. That’s $100 per year for having a discount broker account with TD
Is that worth it? Consider how long you will need to grow your household account to $15,000
You can also get around the $15,000 minimum by having a preauthorized contribution of $100 per month or more.
Transfer fees are $135.00 but you can usually get the other institution to pay if you have a decent amount. Make sure to discuss this point with the other institution and negotiate.
Comments by Readers
CDN and US dollar accounts available
Online history only available if you go paperless
Lack of customized reports
Does not track dividend income well (not very well done in most discount brokers either)
Margin rates are higher than others
USABILITY
Moving around the interface should be easy and not a learning experience every time you want to make a transaction. TD Waterhouse WebBroker has received a face lift recently and while the transition had some ups and downs, the layout and interface has been well received.
Comments by Readers
Excellent web site design. New interface is intuitive and easy to use
Like the news items presented
Easy and quick to make trades
I bank with TD so all accounts under one roof, easy transfers
Transition to the new interface caused usability issues
System is down too often
Slow or unable to logon during extremely high volume days
Sometimes the graphs experience a problem where the most recent information is invisible.
It’s hard to find some of the more advanced tools
No robo-advisor features
Seem to genuinely want to educate the investor
TRANSACTIONS
Moving around the interface should be easy and not a learning experience every time you want to make a transaction. I always make my trade with a limit order so you want to ensure the interface is not prone to mistakes.
Comments by Readers
Orders are promptly executed
An improvement would be price alerts
Mutual fund trade confirmations are slow to reach the investors accounts
Wash trades do not work for dividends
No online GIC purchases
A successful bid is not clearly identified
No free ETF trades (Only ScotiaITrade has no fees within the big banks)
Speed of transactions are sometimes long especially when trying to get out of a stock with high volume trading
Not sure if quotes are real time or delayed a bit
PERFORMANCE MONITORING
In this day and age, you would expect that a discount broker can provide you with the performance of your account. The new user interface provides an at-a-glance view of your portfolio with a trend graph. Each of your holdings will have a coloured gain/loss percentage and dollar value based on your book value.
A great tool is the Rate of Return graph where you can compare your performance to a target of your choosing or an index. You get to see the following rate per account:
Last Month
Last 3 Months
Last 12 Months
Since Inceptions
MOBILE CAPABILITIES
As it happens, I have made trades from my phone and considering everything else we do with our phone, the mobile version of the platform should be good.
Your stock watch list will be synchronized with the mobile app and you are able to execute trades as well. You can find more details on mobile features on the TD site. What is not available is the calendar view and the graphical display of your account holdings.
INVESTMENT RESEARCH
Research is provided from S&P Capital Research with timely insights from TD publications. Research is pretty personal as it depends on what you are looking for and when. You can get access to company insider reports to understand the exposure of the executive team, or a specific stock report.
Comments by Readers
Good research tools
Great market insight information
Daily Bull/Bear technical analysis reports
Decent number of research reports on individual stocks as well as general market & economic commentary
Performance and technical data available
Access to their technical seminars
Poor mutual fund filtering tools
CUSTOMER SERVICE
TD Direct Investing WebBroker has 24/7 customer service through a live person which seems to be outstanding. I personally place my orders outside of work hours and I assume many do the same. TD continues to take into consideration the hours consumers want to reach and interact with them.
Comments by Readers
Live and friendly person available 24/7
They always follow through with what they say
Always helpful and knowledgeable
Conflict resolutions can be slow and cumbersome
Long wait times for service
TD DIRECT INVESTING WEBBROKER
Choosing a discount broker is a personal choice and the discount broker should satisfy your requirements. The competition is fierce and it’s clear from looking at trade fees across all discount brokers that consumers favour having access to their discount broker and banking together. It trumps the lower transaction fees of Questrade (1 cent per share with $4.95 as minimum and $9.95 as maximum). If transaction fees were the most important, the discount brokers would adjust.