How annoying. I am on the verge of opening an account with them myself. Must admit it didn't look very easy to open an account if your a UK citizen from reading their FAQ page. Hope you get it sorted. I'll hold off for a while I think.
Thanks for taking the time to post, Questrade. I believe you are here because of an email that I sent. If and when I decide to open an account with Questrade, I will be sure to contact you first with any difficulties, should they arise. Cheers.
So far this is list of requirements for the Id copy that you are required to produce: 1) The Id copy should be notarized by a lawyer 2) Said lawyer should have a Web site 3) Said Web site should be in English 4) Lawyer should be able to speak English, they will call her to verify 5) Lawyer should be listed on your country's Bar Association list 6) Said list should be available online in English language 7) You should put an apostille stamp on your notarized copy 8) You shoud provide a way for Questrade "to get in touch with the Apostile and be convinced that that is indeed a legitimate stamp"
Many thanks to Emil for investing disproportional amount of time into for solving my problem, and to paul_alan for intervening on my behalf. That was probably my fault by choosing a cheap lawyer to do the notarial work, but please remember this is Piker's journal.
So far my profit from trading can be summarized in this table (US$): OpenTick subscription -4 Notarial copy of ID -21 Courier mail to Questrade -21 Wire transfer fee -37 For the total loss of $82 before doing a single trade. I am slowly building the database from OpenTick historical data. In two weeks I was able to download quotes for all NASDAQ stocks for the years 2006 and 2007. Now downloading NYSE stocks. OpenTick quotes look OK, there are few gaps in the data but that's not important for statistical purposes. Volume reported is always lower than Yahoo reported volume, probably they show volume from only one exchange or ECN. But again, I am only interested in relative volume fluctuations, so that is OK too.
First month was negative, though its early to draw any conclusions on only 5 round trades. As I suspected, my fills are worse than in simulation, but I hope to improve that. One day for example, I had to enter a buy order and received an error "Logged out because of inactivity". Wierd feature for a trading application. By the time I logged in again, the price went away from me by 0.6%. BTW I am using the cheapest version of Questrade trading platform, WebTrader. That's basically a web page with bare minimum of text fields and buttons allowing to submit orders. Simple, clean and works fine. Hope they won't charge me platform fees - I made more than 10 trades that month. The lesson is that I should click somewhere within WebTrader every few minutes to keep it from disconnecting. Still downloading historical data from OpenTick. Figured out how to improve download speed - I registered 8 accounts (accounts for historical data are completely free) and I'm downloading 8 streams simultaneously. That completely saturates my 1.5Mbit/sec internet connection. OpenTick told me they are planning to implement a compression scheme to reduce bandwindth consumption considerably. And finally some statistics from my spreadsheet (should I mention its OpenOffice?):
Yes but we require proper ID verification. There are three ways which we can verify your identity. Either in person at our offices; with a cheque drawn on your personal bank account at a Canadian financial institution; or verification by a lawyer or notary in your area. In the case of the latter, the costs of these services, if any will be charged to you. There is also a minimum required deposit of $1000 USD to open an account. Questrade does not open accounts for US residents. you have to be a non us resident to open an account at questrade just in case anybody gets confused, not sure if your canadian living in the us but as a us citizen it can't be done