Canadian Online Brokerage Review – Scotia iTrade

[vahid hesmi]

I have an stock account and the service they provide is so poor and bad , especially the credit deportment person is so rude and angry , so funny they made a lot of interest money out of my account and they are angry , so disappointing and unacceptable , I recommend everyone stay away from scotia I trade because they make you to loose money.

[Oliver]

Worst in the business for Itrade customer service.
I called for 3 days twice hung up after 15-20 minutes of wait.
Once got through after 17 minutes.

Will be moving to a different brokerage

[Sultan]

Don’t really care for their commission structure and the requirement that if your portfolio goes under 50k, commission rates go up from 9.99 to 24.99 .. Discourages any one to trade and try to build it back up..

I have an account stuck there in that situation.. Needless to say, my trading there has stopped for now.. I may just move my account back to my other broker.. Any request for temporary adjustment, say for 6 months + or so is denied.. In other words, they don’t particularly care whether you stay with them or not..

As far as I know, 50k threshold for 9.99 commission is only at Scotia.. None of the other Bank Brokers have that.. Mind you, I may be wrong since I have not checked lately..

[Michael]

I was with TradeFreedom which transitioned to Scotia iTrade after it was bought by Scotia Bank. Commissions increased from $10 to $20 then $25 over a few short years (I don’t have enough assets or make enough trades to qualify for the discounted rate). That was more than annoying, but I carried on. A few years ago Scotia iTrade also introduced “low activity fees”. Basically, if you don’t make a trade every quarter you get charged $25. I didn’t (and still don’t) trade very quarter. I wasn’t happy with that policy. At that point I called Scotia iTrade to look at my options. They suggested I move everything under a TSFA umbrella (transferring to an outside financial institution costs $150). As advised, I moved everything to a TSFA account. I forgot about this account because I didn’t want to pay their high interest rates by trading using their platform through them. Fast forward about a year and a half later when I try to log into my account and couldn’t. The website wouldn’t allow me to automatically reset my password. I kept putting off calling their customer service or hung up after getting frustrated with waiting to get through to someone (on average it takes more than 45 minutes to speak to a person). Finally, after about 2 years since last logging in, I reached through to customer service and got them to reset my password. It turns out that my account was frozen because they sent me a letter that bounced back to them. After accessing my account I realized that $60 per quarter had been withdrawn for “Low Activity Account/Unclaimed”. I was dumbstruck. To make things worse they twice sold shares to pay off the negative balance that had accrued as a result of the $60 inactivity fee. Each time they sold shares they charged me $85 in additional fees (~$60 for a broker to evaluate the sale and $25 for their trading fees). In total, I lost ~$600 because of their lack of attempts to reach me and their poor customer service. I had to call 3 times (each time waiting 45+ minutes to talk to a human and then being put on hold multiple times) before I could finally reach a manager who was willing to hear my case. They refused to reimburse me at first, but reluctantly gave me a pitiful fraction of the money I had lost after some tense arguing. It gets better (i.e., worse), after I filed a request with Questrade to transfer shares out of Scotia iTrade (because there was no way I was going to keep even a cent with them), Scotia iTrade blocked my request. The reason? My Scotia iTrade account had yet to be fully re-instated/claimed (their mistake again). They finally corrected the problem and I had to make a new request to have the funds transferred. More delays, more time wasted. My experience with Scotia iTrade was an absolute nightmare.
There is no question that I will not deal with Scotia iTrade ever again, but this experience has left me so bitter that I will never, ever do business with ScotiaBank as well.

[Robert Massey]

Tried all day to subscribe to the flight desk with no success..not much help from customer service although they acknowledge a problem and they have escalated the matter to another support group whoever they are..not much hope for a quick response

[Constantin]

The trailing stop losses are not working properly.
Don’t know for how long.
The price went up and down several times through stop for MTUM etf, and nothing.
First customer service rep. told me I don’t know how a trailing stop works.
After re-reading their Stop loss pdf, called again.
The second C.S.Rep. told me they have stop-loss issues with some ETFs.
I suspected several trades before but…they were small positions.
today I had a single 100.000 cad position
it was like strait into my face.
I had to cancel the stop and sell at the market.

[Gary McLean]

I have an iTrade account. I wanted to speak to someone today about my account. I have been waiting ON HOLD FOR OVER AN HOUR. And I’m still waiting.
Take your money and go elsewhere. Their so-called “customer service” is disgusting.

[Alexei Polkhanov]

Absolutely worth service in entire world! They will NEVER answer your phone.

[Anna]

RBC has the lowest commission out of all the banks. $9.95 per trade without any minimums. $25/trade is ridiculous!

[Luc Charpentier]

Absolutely dreadful phone support. I have been trying to contact them for a couple of days. Gave up yesterday after an hour…and today once more I have been on hold for over 50 minutes… and this transaction cannot be done online. I wonder if there is any staff in their customer service centre.

[Author]

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