I transferred some money over to my non-registered margin account on Questrade today from my non-registered BMO investorline account. It took me a few days of procrastination, one day of trying to figure out why I couldn’t do a USD bill payment from my BMO bank account, and finally another day figuring out that in order to transfer USD, you need to do a pre-authorized deposit.
I actually searched my own blog on how to transfer USD and couldn’t find anything (I’m not narcissistic I swear! I just remembered that I posted about how long a USD transfer took back in January). I finally figured it out today (after wasting about a total of 45 minutes of my life that I will never see again). I thought I would actually post it and help you save 45 minutes of your precious time… and if I have a memory lapse again, I can search my blog with “great success”, as Borat would say.
The reason why you might do a USD transfer is because you won’t have to exchange your Canadian dollars into US dollars when the exchange rate isn’t favourable. I don’t like losing money to currency hits AND conversion charges. It’s a win-win situation.
So here is the low-down on how to transfer your USD to Questrade from your USD account, step by step:
Log into My Questrade- Click on “My Funds”
- Click on “Fund Your Account”
- As you can see, only Online Banking and Pre-authorized Deposits are free of charge; Online Banking doesn’t do US dollar transfers, so the only free option is a Pre-authorized Deposit
- Before you get freaked out by the word “pre-authroized deposit” like I initially did, you can do a pre-authorized deposit only once- it doesn’t have to be recurring (yes, you can be non-commital like me)
- Follow the instructions- they’ll ask for your US dollar bank account number and will verify your bank account with e-signatures
- Once you’ve set up that account link, you can transfer USD any time with ease (no need to fill out a form/ paper work each time)
- I set up the Pre-authorized deposit back in January (and forgot about it, of course), and it still worked for me today (it will work for you forever as long as you don’t change your US dollar account number)
- After setting this up, this time, it only took one day to transfer to Questrade from my USD account. Awesome. =)
Happy trading US equities! As Miley Cyrus would say, party in the USA!
Hi,
Great site! I just wanted to ask you whether you would be required to have a USD denominated bank account from which to transfer the funds to Questrade (i.e. can I set up a USD Questrade account by funding from a CAD bank account)?
Thanks in advance for your reply.
Cheers,
Graham
@Graham- Thanks Graham! Yes, you would, otherwise you would be transferring CAD money to a USD account which would pretty much be using their currency exchange. A USD account is really easy to set up (you get a better exchange rate too). I often just exchange money when the CAD dollar is really good from my CAD to USD account at my bank. If you want even better rates, you could go to a currency exchange place and exchange your CAD dollars and deposit the USD into the USD bank account. Hope that helps and thx for reading!
Hi,
I did exactly the same thing as what you did, however Questrade asks for a void cheque. Do I have to order us cheque? since I rarely use it. thanks.
@steven= Thanks for visiting. Hmm maybe they don’t have a bank associated with your account yet? It could be that they can’t do the online-verification with your USD account… Do you have a USD account? Maybe that’s it?