Few months back, I moved our investment accounts to Questrade, attracted primarily by their ultra-low commissions and good word-of-mouth recommendations. Everything went smoothly for a while – my account was transferred out without a hitch and trades were executed perfectly – until last week. I logged in to my account and discovered that an interest charge was deducted on our USD account. The interest charge was puzzling because I never trade on margin or short stocks. I thought it was no big deal; mistakes happen and it has happened once before at my previous big bank broker and it took a mere phone call to have the charge reversed.
It turned out that at Questrade it is a big deal. I’ve been contacting them for four straight days asking for an explanation and reversing the interest charge but it’s always one excuse after another. The first day the agent said it is taking time to check my account and he would resolve the matter by the end of the day. The next day, a different agent claimed that “the servers are down” and I would be contacted for sure shortly with an explanation. On the third day, I got the same agent again claiming they were still working on resolving the matter. Today, another agent claimed that someone would have to review my records for each trading day to verify my claim that there was no margin balance (though it took me a four minutes to check; not four days). And on and on it went …
Finally, I had to send an e-mail to Emil Vojkollari, Client Acquisitions Supervisor at Questrade requesting his intervention in this simple matter. Sure enough, within a very short time, a Questrade agent finally contacts me with the information that the interest charge was an error and would be taken care of shortly. Well, why did it take so long?
As a client, my bottom line is very simple: if Questrade made a mistake, it is a simple matter of acknowledging it and reversing the charge immediately; not giving me the run around. Perhaps for $4.95 per trade, you do get what you pay for.
