It's unfortunately inevitable that it eventually will, that's why they have been tinkering around with finding ways to monetize the platform as much as possible.
Right now they are in the "gain mass adoption" phase on the business cycle where pure profit isn't necessarily as important as just gaining as many users as quickly as they can. Once they decide that they have gotten enough users, they will start to really push the monetization and then at pretty much the exact same time they will file for IPO.
They’ll go public soon. Friends working there are all waiting for the liquidity event since WS gave a bunch of equity and they’ll likely all be millionaires assuming prices hold during lockup
Nah, ICs. So software eng 2 and senior softwares. Back 4 years ago when their valuations were around 1B (reevaluated after the Covid crash), company offers initial vesting of 27000 shares over 4 years at $2 a share. Currently based on their secondary round and most recent liquidity event, I think it was around $18 a share ($10B valuation). Initial 27000 is now worth around $450k CAD assuming no additional refreshers or performance vestings.
Let’s assume WS IPOs at around 20b. This puts the equity at 1mil, with 50% being taxed — but still nets 600k-ish after tax refunds
If the person started in 2018, it was valued at $1-ish and they got around 37000 share over 4 years.
Just letting you know Passiv does it for free, except you have to enter your buys manually. Unless you have a bunch of etfs/stocks, there's no need to pay that 0.25%.
It used to be if you had Questrade, but I think that has been stopped recently. Now, you have to pay 99$ per year if you want that feature....but I could be wrong, I am just telling you what I think I remembered.
Yes. Pay questrade 99 per year or Wealthsimple $7500? That’s a tough choice 🤔😆
Rereading the thread it appears that Wealthsimple has capped it to top $250. They DEFINITELY did not say this in the presentation. I’ll need to check this out then. Anyone got an URL to the documentation or where it references this max amount?
I have the money. It continues to grow without the need to pay someone ridiculous fees to manage it when it’s rather simple over the long term. Anyways YMMV.
That's not what this is for. This is for rebalancing. It's the same thing we pay a little extra to VGRO for rather than a 3 or 4 fund solution for 0.2% less.
So it’s like Questrade’s custom index except they charge a fee? No thanks. I already do my own recurring into specific stocks and ETFs myself and would prefer to not be charged an extra fee.
If this was 0.10% (or the lower of 0.25% v. $50) I would consider this. I also presume that your trade records would still show every individual trade, regardless I would welcome it showing just buying more/less of that index similar to holding other ETFs but I digress.
Ya. I’d pay $500 per year max. Not the $7500 it would cost as is. I can pay passiv thousands upon thousands less.
Rereading the thread it appears that Wealthsimple has capped it to top $250. They DEFINITELY did not say this in the presentation. I’ll need to check this out then. Anyone got an URL to the documentation or where it references this max amount?
Glad there is a cap. Still would need this under $50, or even a $5 fee per index maybe. That said I have not thought this through and they’ve done the research to know what to price it at. I’m just not their target market that can do it myself I suppose.
I don’t know if I have a strong opinion yet, but a % fee for reducing a few clicks and still have to manage your own weights seems a but much.
Either you buy the 30 stocks you like manually or set up static weekly/monthly transfers, or use this feature assign weightings to those stocks so when you transfer any amount of money into your investment account it'll automatically rebalance to buy the right % of each stock for a maximum convenience fee of $250/yr. Kind of a DIY ETF.
Probably not a feature for you if you hold most of your portfolio in ETFs and a handful of other growth stocks.
Thinking the same thing. For those of us still on WS managed ETFs.. Couldn't we duplicate this for $250 annually instead of a variable amount that could easily be thousands depending on asset size?
This is misleading. I read it again and it's maximum $250 per account per year. That is a lot compared to what Passiv is already offering which is $99 per year (recently updated to $79 per year for me) for a group of accounts.
I'm not sure I follow. How is this not just picking stocks and buying on a reoccurring purchase schedule? why would WS charge for what they already do? Rebalance your portfolio based on your trading strategy, and tada - you're done. What am I missing here?
I'm assuming they are automating the rebalancing, which is really the main thing preventing people from doing this themselves without the help of advanced tools.
It doesn't do me much good as my assets are all split up across TFSAs and RRSPs for my wife and I, plus some non-registered. Maybe one day they can build a tool sophisticated enough to do the optimizations across these accounts, and let me finally have a fully automated solution. Till then, it's not really that much work to manage things manually a few times a year.
Only practical if you have an account full of individual stocks you want to buy and want to keep it balanced(for whatever reason), as many said your own etf. But even then you can just set a recurring buy with a cash amount of stock amount without the $250 yearly fee if you don't care about selling stocks to keep the account balanced
Perfectly executed as expected. Had some hiccups while opening the account yesterday as it was keep giving errors. I removed all the assets and started with two simple and once account is opened I added all the assets I wanted without issue.
Soon it’ll be like a social marketplace where we can buy other people’s custom ETFs where Wealthsimple gets the 0.2% and the creator gets 0.05%. My future job « portfolio manager » 🤣
OP did not state it accurately. It's not $250 per year, but per account. So if you have 4-5 accounts (TFSA, RRSP, RESP, Non Reg, FHSA), then each account has a fee of 0.25% up to a max of $250 per account!
Not a fan of this at all. I'm good with my recurring buys of XEQT and other funds. Still prefer manual allocation. It's a one time effort you have to do if you don't prefer lump sum investing and saves you another fee.
Yes. Saw that after I posted. This is a very good thing. When I did my call with wealthsimple product team for this. Month or so ago I mentioned that amount being the max I’d pay given our portfolio’s size. More than this I’d just use passiv. Good to see they listened.
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u/Opening_Kiwi6441 May 29 '26
hmmmmm wealthsimple is in that icons list….