MoneyPenny, thanks kindly for sharing that info about Fidelity, I had no idea that they did their Canadian trades this way, and would not have even thought of asking. I happen to have just started the process of opening a Fidelity account to take advantage of their very favorable margin interest rates, and now I will strongly consider also putting my Canadian stuff over there.
Its critical to me that your trades get put directly on the Canadian exchange, with no middleman markup, which sounds like what is happening with Fidelity.
Right now for my Canadian stuff I actually have 3 different accounts. The oldest one, formerly TD Waterhouse and now TD Ameritrade, was set up long ago and puts your trade on the exchange without a markup but the comissions are extremely high. The only reason its still open is I'm too goddam lazy to move it. Then I set up an account at PennTrade, which charges only $30 and puts your trade up on the board but does take out a small markup. Finally, I have an account at IB which puts your trade up also, with no markup as far as I can tell, and with dirt cheap commissions. The problem I have with PennTrade is that Gainskeeper does not support importing from them, and they don't have their own tax lot bookkeeping functionality. With IB, Gainskeeper supports importing from them, but with Canadian stocks you always have to manually override the import to replace the Canadian ticker with the US pink sheet ticker, and change the funds from Canadian $$ to US $, in order to allow for tax lot accounting.
I know Fidelity has this cool built-in tax lot accounting system in its online brokerage accounts, which I presume should be available for Canadian stocks also. If so this would be the best of all worlds as far as I can see. |
