No. We don't charge anything for withdrawals, transferring out, or leaving your account open with a zero balance.

You sure can! Here at Wealthsimple, we bring it back to the fundamentals. Let's break down our approach:

1. Diversification: Each of our portfolios is fully diversified across asset classes to help investors achieve a higher rate of return while taking less risk. To do this, we build our portfolios through the purchase of broad based Exchange Traded Funds(ETFs). So not only are you diversified within an asset, you are also diversified across assets.
2. Don't pick stocks: "Smart" people spend a lot of time cooking up foolproof strategies to deliver above average market returns. However, the vast majority of these strategies fail to beat the market. Over the past 100 years, the markets have survived depressions, world wars, tech bubbles, and real estate collapses. Guess what strategy most investors would have been best off going with? You guessed it - the boring old passive strategy of buy and hold.
3. It's about you and your goals: We build you a personalized portfolio designed to meet your financial goals.. When you join Wealthsimple, you tell us a little about your investment experience, financial circumstances and what you're saving for, so we can customize your portfolio.

Simple, right? But if you still have questions, we're here to help. Please send us an email or give us a call.

When you invest with Wealthsimple, your assets are actually held by Apex Clearing Corporation, an independent clearing services firm. Apex is a member of the Securities Investor Protection Corp (SIPC), which is the non-profit organization that protects the customers of brokers or dealers from loss in case of financial failure of the broker or dealer.

SIPC insurance covers up to $500,000 in securities for each type of account you hold with Wealthsimple and up to $250,000 in cash. Above and beyond this, Apex has secured excess SIPC insurance that provides an additional $150 million of coverage across all its clients.

In the extremely unlikely event that Wealthsimple were to go out of business, your account would remain safe and be largely unaffected. All securities are registered in your name, and if we were to close, you could choose to keep your money with Apex, or transfer it to a new advisor or your bank account.

Expected returns are impossible to predict and out of your (and our) control. We prefer to focus on things we can control: fees, diversification and emotions. The stock market will take care of returns over the long term. The key is to stay disciplined and stick to your strategy in order to build wealth. You can read more about our investment strategy here.

At Wealthsimple, we calculate your progress in three ways and each measure serves a different purpose. At the end of this FAQ, we'll use an example to illustrate how each type of performance is calculated.

Simple (Naive) Return Simple return is easy to understand but may not accurately reflect your true performance. Simple Return is a basic calculation of your Net Earnings / Net Deposits. It is the easiest calculation to understand, but may not correctly reflect what has actually gone on in your account over time. This calculation takes all of your deposits and assumes they were added to your account on the first day the account was funded. The calculation can also appear incorrect if you've earned positive returns and withdraw more funds than you have deposited.

Time-Weighted Return (TWR) TWR measures the impact of the market and skill of your portfolio manager. TWR is a common way to check in on how your portfolio has performed over time and is a good reflection of how your portfolio manager or advisor has performed since the first day your account was funded. It ignores your deposit and withdrawal activity and only looks at how your portfolio has actually performed. It does this by carving the time since you first funded your account into different slices (a new slice starts each time funds are added or withdrawn from the account) and these are linked to show you your overall performance.

Money-Weighted Return (MWR) MWR measures the impact of the market, the skill of your portfolio manager and the influence of your deposit/withdrawal activity on the value of your portfolio. MWR determines how you got to the current value of your portfolio assuming that all of your deposits earned the exact same rate of return. This type of return is influenced heavily by the timing and amount of money moving in and out of your account. If you make a large deposit and the market goes up, it will influence your MWR upwards (and vice-versa).