I am an active Canadian Trader, investing over $200k in long positions primarily. I don't use margin, short selling or options. Lately, I have been having a lot of problems with TD Advanced Dashboard, especially during the first 30 minutes of the trading day. I realize that this is typically the busiest time, but I still should be able to execute orders without having the platform freeze up. I am finding that the platform lags quite a bit, often taking at least 5-10 minutes to confirm trades. Makes things very difficult. Being a canadian day trader, I am in the process of evaluating Quest Trade and Interactive Brokers. Any recommendations for a broker service that has fast executions even at the busiest of times?
TD will not fix any problems. Schwab bought them and their priority is now to merge their accounts and use the ThinkorSwim platform (sometime this year). You should move to Schwab as I did.
Does Schwab support Canadian Accounts? I know there’s a very few brokers I have to choose from being Canadian.
They bought the US TD. Not the Canadian TD which, I believe, the poster is referring to. As for the delays on TD's end. Get used to it. They are very slow upgrading their back end server side. IB Canada is a much more reliable option
Call TD and ask to speak to a trader to review your trades. Your orders sound like they're getting flagged for manual review (which add a 5-10 delay to every purchase). This could be due to a number of (stupid) reasons... (purchase price too close to cash balance, etc...). IB is the by far the best option in Canada. Don't listen to what anybody says... lack of support, outdated, Java... is all irrelevant. What matters is order execution which IB excels at. However, for larger orders... like 200k+ shares TD is the next best thing. As you'll always get a nice flat fee whereas at IB you're paying a per share price...
Unfortunately TD has not been responsive to phone calls which adds to the aggravation . I was on hold for 53 minutes and eventually just hung up. I don’t believe orders are getting flagged, since I don’t have issues after 10am. Seems to me it’s a performance thing, server side issues makes sense.
Seeing this thread late, but TD is a trainwreck. Dangerous, even. Like you, I've observed horrendous performance in the first hour of the trading day. It's their back end that's the problem, not Advanced Dashboard (you'll have the same issues via their web-based WebBroker). I've talked to a half dozen reps there who have confided in me that it's an open secret internally that their servers are built on 30+ year old IBM architecture that management knows are awful but won't do anything about because they "work" but make any bug squashing or feature adding pretty much impossible. You can give their ThinkOrSwim platform a try; it's supposed to be good software, but they don't offer Canadian options (though I think they do have stocks, which it sounds like is what you trade.) Though knowing that it's their back end that's the problem, you'll probably have the same issues. IB and Questrade are your only real alternatives in Canada. As another poster said, for large numbers of shares, TD's fee structure is preferable to IB's because of the flat fee. For options, IB really the only game in town.
This sounds like the company I used to work for. They also never bothered to upgrade from DEC VAX until it was too late. We also used to use the old IBM AIX servers they sold back in the '90s. Its amazing TD Ameritrade US still has problems in the first hour on volatile days. The weirdest thing is if you try to buy options when their servers are busy it tries to execute all orders as market orders.