Questrade founder and CEO Edward Kholodenko in Toronto on Wednesday. Questrade is rolling out 14 new investment tools.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Questrade Financial Group Inc., one of Canada’s longest-standing challengers to the Big Six banks, is launching a suite of new trading products tailored to a growing wave of sophisticated retail traders amid stiff competition from banks and other independent trading platforms.
Founded in 1999, Questrade was one of Canada’s first online trading platforms for retail investors. Now, retail traders have a plethora of platforms to choose from – including from the Big Six banks, with TD Direct Investing and RBC Direct Investing leading the pack in Canada – and its trading sophistication is also growing.
To adapt to this new environment, Questrade is rolling out 14 new investment tools. The new tools include custom indexing (which allows investors to use fractional shares to replicate ETFs and investment funds from their favourite portfolio managers), as well as a feature that will automatically rebalance a portfolio as markets shift.
Questrade also secured final regulatory approval for a Canadian bank licence earlier this month as it evolves into a full-service financial services company.
Carrick: Questrade revives the zero-commission trend in DIY investing
The privately owned company manages about $85-billion in assets – up from just $9-billion in 2019 – and chief executive officer Edward Kholodenko told The Globe and Mail that Questrade can focus on long-term sustainable growth that benefits clients, rather than having to answer to shareholders or private equity backers.
“We want long-term relationships that are healthy,” Mr. Kholodenko said in an interview. “We’re not focused on short-term results.”
Questrade’s surge in assets has followed explosive growth in the number of Canadian investors looking to manage their own savings and retirement planning. With the rise of social-media financial influencers, a younger demographic interested in investing and booming stock markets, more than 2.9 million Canadians opened trading accounts in the 12 months ended June, 2025, according to Investor Economics.
The trend is also prevalent in the United States, fuelled by events such as the meme-stock rally during the COVID-19 pandemic. New platforms from companies including Robinhood Markets Inc. and Polymarket have melded sports betting and investing, increasingly hooking younger investors.
To evolve in this new era, Questrade switched to zero-commission pricing for online trades of Canadian and U.S.-listed equities and ETFs earlier this year and added real-time fractional-share trading for investors.
Among the other new investing features Questrade unveiled at a launch event on Bay Street Wednesday are a set of advanced online research and charting tools available on its new Questrade Pro trading platform. Other features include access to physical gold and cash-secured puts – an options strategy used to potentially buy stocks at a lower price. It plans to launch private-market investments next year.
It also includes a financial education section for those new to investing.
“So much of the Canadian advertising around this industry tells you it‘s too hard, so let us do it for you,” Questrade president Rob Galaski said in an interview. “We asked, ‘How do we help investors build a bridge into helping them be able to do this for themselves?’ ”
Questrade has supported this mission for years, and in 2014, it was among the first group of tech companies to launch a “robo-advisor,” an algorithm that calculates risk profiles and rebalances portfolios for do-it-yourself investors.
Questrade made a splash through a series of television advertisements that featured people firing their financial advisers so that they can invest at a lower cost. The ads took direct aim at Canada’s mutual fund industry, which often charged up to 2.5 per cent in management expense fees for certain funds.
In 2019, around the same time it began the arduous process of obtaining a bank licence, it began to diversify with the purchase of Mississauga-based lending and deposit-taking business Community Trust Co.
In the years since, Questrade has diversified its portfolio of assets by acquiring buy-now-pay-later company Flexiti Financial Inc., which targets subprime clients who have less favourable credit histories, and Zolo Canada, an independent real estate marketplace that offers listings and analysis.
Now that Questrade has obtained its bank licence, the company plans to start operating under the name Questbank in the first half of 2026.
Despite the array of holdings, Questrade is staying true to its original name. “Our investing business sits at the centre of that,” Mr. Galaski said, adding, “It’s incredibly important to how we see ourselves growing and evolving.”