My experience with Questrade is that they have been a very difficult company to do business with over the years. I've had nothing but one frustrating experience after another with them.
Out of curiosity, may I ask why you are dealing with them if you are in Florida? I thought they were only for Canadian residents and you appear to be a US resident.
I'm with you that this makes a huge difference. With limit orders, even if they have a worse spread, you're likely to get filled unless you somehow pick the absolute top or bottom. For example, you have a limit order to buy at $11.50, but even though you see it hit many times on another broker, maybe you could even fill at 11.50 at another broker, with QT, it will have to trade down to 11.49 or 11.48, but even this is just a guess. So what are the chances that it never gets there and you're left without a fill and then you just watch it rocket higher? Its highly unlikely that you will be picking the exact bottom even 20% of the time, and missing the entry because horrible fills that require an extra penny. Maybe with a market order I could see getting worse fills, but limit orders should I think be fine. And as you say, parking extra cash, even if just for a few days to make some spare change is now highly doable. Do you have any favourites? I remember a while back using I think it was PSA.TO. Some of these are interesting in that the price rises every day for a month and then drops down as you get a dividend, whereas others just continue to steadily go up a penny per day.
Much better than lousy is better than nothing I suppose. No free lunch no matter how you go about it.
What was the problem? They didn't want to pay the price or the hassle of moving money from country to country?
In my Canadian accounts I use Global X High Interest Savings ETF (CASH.TO) In my US accounts I use US Treasury 3 Month Bill ETF (TBIL)
The core problem was that they were understaffed and unable to actually do what they said they would do in our initial conversations.