The LSE Directory / Retail brokers
Questrade is a Toronto based online brokerage and wealth management firm, founded in 1999 by Edward Kholodenko, who remains the company's CEO. Its core product is a self directed trading platform for Canadian and US listed stocks, ETFs and options, alongside Questwealth Portfolios, an ETF based robo advisor service. As of February 2025, Questrade eliminated trading commissions on Canadian and US listed stocks and ETFs, and in April 2025 it added real time fractional share trading starting at one dollar, a feature it describes as a first for a Canadian brokerage. Questrade markets itself as Canada's largest independent discount broker, meaning it is not owned by one of the country's large banks, and it uses that positioning against both bank owned brokerages and newer fintech entrants such as Wealthsimple. It supports a wide range of registered account types (RRSP, TFSA, FHSA, RESP and others) and offers extended overnight trading hours from 8pm to 2am ET, a window not matched by other Canadian brokers at the time these profiles were checked. Rather than growing through partnerships, which is the route Wealthsimple has taken into banking, Questrade has built its own regulatory infrastructure, including a trust company subsidiary and, as of late 2025, its own federally chartered bank. Questrade is regulated by the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) and is a member of the Canadian Investor Protection Fund (CIPF). In April 2019 it acquired Community Trust Company, a Mississauga based trust and mortgage lender operating since 1975 with roughly $1.2 billion in assets, its first acquisition since founding. Questrade first applied for a Schedule I banking licence in 2019, and after a six year approval process the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions issued letters patent for the new entity, Questbank, in March 2025 and granted final approval on November 3, 2025. By November 2025 Questrade reported more than $85 billion in assets under administration and about 2,000 employees, up from over $50 billion in assets under administration when it moved to zero commissions that February. Questbank is expected to begin rolling out specific deposit and lending products to Canadians in the first half of 2026, which would put Questrade in more direct competition with the major banks on everyday banking as well as investing, extending a strategy that started with the 2019 Community Trust deal and the earlier QuestMortgage digital lending platform.
