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The latest posts from SparxTrading – in depth views on the world of online investing.

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Discount Brokerage Deals & Promotions – October 2013

Published October 1, 2013
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This October the deal wheels keep on turning.    Overall, it looks like competition at Canadian discount brokerages is heating up with 6 discount brokerages currently offering some kind of promotion. To help make sense of the deals, this month we’re rolling out Deal Analytics (explained below) which will help provide support to individuals trying to […]

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RBC Direct Investing (re)Launches Investor Education Seminars

Published September 25, 2013
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After a long vacancy on the RBC Direct Investing website, the free educational seminars section looks like it has finally come back to life. For quite some time, the investor education seminars section has been more or less dormant and was pointing visitors to set up one-on-one sessions with its reps at investor centres. Recently, […]

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Discount Brokerage Weekly Roundup – September 13, 2013

Published September 13, 2013
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Welcome to the Friday the 13th edition of the discount broker weekly roundup.  It’s been an exciting week in the markets as news of the widely anticipated Twitter IPO became official.  This week, I’ll provide some highlights of fee drops and deal announcements that took place, followed up by a couple of interesting forum on […]

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Discount Brokerage Deals & Promotions – September 2013

Published September 1, 2013
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Updated Sept. 20/13 September is here, and with it comes a number of deal extensions from Canadian discount brokerages.  Going into the home stretch of the calendar year, several factors might be at play that explain why there are more ‘extensions’ of deals than new deals appearing just yet. First, a number of financial firms […]

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Special Series: Dalbar Canada’s Direct Brokerage Service Award – Part 2

Published June 14, 2013
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In part 1 of this series, we took a brief look at how self-directed investors typically access information about discount brokerage customer service and introduced Dalbar Canada’s research in this area.  Specifically, Dalbar’s Direct Brokerage Sales Effectiveness (DBSE) program measures the performance of client service teams at discount brokerages. In this part of our series, […]

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Discount Brokerage Weekly Roundup – June 7th 2013

Published June 8, 2013
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This week’s discount brokerage update features the newly announced deal by BMO InvestorLine, a couple of great forum post on the Financial Webring Forum on Qtrade vs. RBC Direct Investing  as well as another article from The Globe and Mail about Canada’s best discount broker. Deals Getting Some Air Unlike a lot of deals that […]

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Special Series: Dalbar Canada’s Direct Brokerage Service Award – Part 1

Published June 7, 2013
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When searching for the right discount brokerage, a lot of information can be obtained online about the pricing of discount brokerage accounts, commissions and services.  Some features, such as customer service, require more work to learn about. After knowing what it costs to be a client of a discount brokerage many self-directed investors value knowing […]

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Discount Brokerage Deals & Promotions – April 2013

Published April 1, 2013
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April’s discount brokerage deals and promotions heralds the return of unlimited trading by an unlikely character in the deals section – HSBC InvestDirect. This deal is in ‘celebration’ of HSBC’s recent award by Dalbar Inc for best customer service at a Canadian discount broker, an award that RBC Direct Investing had won for several years. […]

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Discount Brokerage Weekly Roundup – Oct. 26th 2012

Published October 26, 2012
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Discount Brokerage Weekly Roundup This week provided an interesting lesson in activity fees handed out to one RBC Direct Investing client, covered via Global News here.  If you’ve got an account open that you’ve forgotten about, you may want to look closely at what you’re being charged by keeping the account open (you can check […]

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Brokerages Gone Social

Published September 17, 2012
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Even though discount brokerages haven’t traditionally portrayed the most “fun and friendly” image, more and more of them are starting to become visible on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. While you (hopefully) won’t find those embarrassing pictures of a drunken night gone wild or an angry rant about a horrible boss, plugging […]

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How to Choose an Online Discount Broker – Part 4 – Commission Pricing I

Published March 14, 2012
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One of the first places that retail investors look to when thinking about choosing a discount brokerage firm is commission pricing. Pricing, however, isn’t as straight forward as the lowest price commission per trade.  When thinking about pricing, value is really what you as a potential or existing client are seeking.  After all, if you […]

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