qtrade

Paced accumulation · Questrade

One small ETF buy, on schedule, for as long as it takes.

Questrade Reserve counts executed trades over a rolling twelve months. Reaching that count by hand means remembering to place an order almost every session for a year, which nobody does reliably. This does it instead — small, commission-free ETF purchases, paced across a family of registered accounts.

It only ever buys, only ever from cash already sitting in the matching currency, and never converts FX. It is dry-run by default, and every real order still has to be approved by you in Questrade's own app.

How a session works

The software proposes. The broker asks you. Nothing executes on its own.

1

It reads the plan. Per-account cash floors, per-symbol order sizes, daily and per-session caps — all set by you, all held in config rather than in code.

2

It checks the cash. Only settled cash already held in the right currency counts. If a purchase would breach an account's floor, it does not happen.

3

It proposes the order. Questrade sends a Push Approval to your phone. You look at the symbol, the quantity and the price, and you approve or you do not. The authorisation boundary stays with the broker.

4

It records what happened. Placed, filled, or refused — written to a durable ledger, with a one-way Telegram summary. The channel can report; it cannot be used to make it act.

What it handles

Several accounts at once

RRSP, LIRA, RESP and cash accounts, each with its own floor and its own share of the plan, worked through in one pass.

Catching up

Miss a week to a holiday or an outage and the schedule reflows, rather than quietly falling a week behind for the rest of the year.

The rolling window

Status counts trades over the trailing twelve months, because that is how eligibility is actually assessed — there is no calendar-year finish line.

Commission surprises

If Questrade's own order-impact preview ever returns a non-zero commission estimate, the run says so rather than placing it quietly.

Three things worth knowing first

These changed how I use it, and they are easier to learn here than six months in.

The trade count alone is not enough

Questrade's stated eligibility is at least two of its listed criteria — 250+ executed trades in a self-directed account, or a $250,000+ average total balance, among others. Hitting the trade count only helps if you also clear a second one. Check where your average balance sits before spending months on this.

There is no finish line

The window is a rolling twelve months, assessed monthly. Trades you make today drop out of it in a year, so maintaining status means holding the pace rather than sprinting once and stopping.

Selling is not free

Questrade ETF purchases are commission-free; sales are not. This is buy-only by design, which means the cost of unwinding these positions lands later, all at once. ECN fees can also apply to orders that remove liquidity.

An open question that is yours, not mine

Splitting what would be a single purchase into several small orders to build a trade count is the kind of thing broker terms sometimes address. I could not find anti-abuse language in the public Reserve FAQ either way. It is worth a call to Questrade before running this for months.

Sign in

This is a private control panel for my own accounts, not a service you can sign up for. The code is a personal project; the page behind this one is a dashboard, not a product.

Nothing here is financial or investment advice, and none of it is an endorsement of Questrade Reserve or of any security. Automating orders in a brokerage account carries real risk of real loss. If you build something like this, run it in dry-run for a long time first, and read your broker's terms yourself.