Hey everyone! Hope you’re all doing amazing. I’m new to the investment world, and I thought I would share my recent experiences in opening a trading account and buying stocks. I’m not a financial advisor, so please take this post as educational and for entertainment purposes only. Also, please note that this is NOT a sponsored post and all opinions are my own.
Anyway, I opened a trading account with my bank a while back and bought some cheap stocks. However, I didn’t really know what I was doing and didn’t trade much. As a result, I didn’t make much money and decided to stop investing. I deposited just under $100 so that I can try it out and left the money in the account for a while without looking back.
A year later, I found out I was incurring monthly fees of $9.95 because I wasn’t trading. I had no idea that this was gonna happen, and I couldn’t believe that I was getting charged for no activity. I was already displeased about getting charged high fees every time I buy or sell stocks, but now I was getting charged for not doing anything. I let the account eventually go to zero and closed it.
Last year, I opened an account with Questrade so I can start investing in stocks again, and it was a great time to buy cheap stocks because of the pandemic. As a beginner, I wasn’t comfortable putting in the minimum $1K required to activate the Questrade account. I wanted to start off with just a few hundred dollars til I can educate myself more on investing, so I put it aside and didn’t bother. I believe it’s a great platform in Canada to trade stocks and options, but I wish they didn’t have the minimum initial deposit.
This year, around the end of February, I started really getting into learning more about stocks again and wanted to expand my knowledge by actually trading. I started looking for alternative options that didn’t require a $1k deposit or had ridiculously high fees like most banks and stumbled on Wealthsimple. I read some reviews and they were mostly positive, it’s a Canadian company and seemed legit. I felt better that they’re a Canadian company and not overseas, so I didn’t have to worry about not being able to reach customer service just in case there were issues.
Wealthsimple is super easy to set up, you provide your ID and take a selfie picture as proof of identity, and a couple of days later you’ll get a response if your identity verification is approved or not.
It’s completely free to sign up, with no minimum deposits, and no high trading fees like banks. The company does make money by taking a percentage of the stock you buy and sell, as well as thru USD currency conversion, still lower than the bank fees in comparison. I’m very happy I found this company.
I first started by depositing $50 and researched penny stocks, some of them that caught my eye were Canadian Cannabis companies and solar stocks. They were under $1 per stock and figured I’ll hold them for a while and see how they turn out in the future.
A couple of weeks later, I started researching again and deposited more into my account so I can invest in some popular Meme stocks. I’m still ‘hodling’ on to these stocks and we’ll see how they turn out months from now.
I’ve become obsessed with watching the Stock Ticker and every day found YouTube channels that gave you some good trading education and technical analysis. Who knew watching people talk about stocks and reading a chart with lines and candles would become something I’d get really into?!
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