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Is M1 Finance Available in Canada?
No, M1 Finance is not available in Canada.
Is M1 Coming to Canada?
Unfortunately, there have been no announcements from M1 Finance regarding plans to expand to Canada.
M1 Finance Alternatives for Canadians
1. Wealthsimple Invest
Current Offer: $50 Cash Bonus
M1 Finance offers HIGHLY customizable portfolio building, which for a beginner investor can often be overwhelming.
Wealthsimple Invest is an alternative that can help beginner investors ease their way into learning about investing and building a portfolio.
Their robo advisor service allows new investors to select a pre-made portfolio based upon various needs and invest into that portfolio through a user-friendly interface.
Wealthsimple will even reinvest the dividends back into your portfolio for you while you continue to build your understanding of investments.
Eventually you may wish to build your own portfolio and their commission free Wealthsimple Trade platform can help with that.
Learn more at Wealthsimple.com
2. Questwealth Portfolios (Questrade)
Questrade is another well-known brokerage in the Canadian market that offers a wide variety of services for investors with different needs.
With their Questwealth Portfolios offering, a variety of different portfolios designed by experts are ready for you to invest in with real-time re-balancing based on market conditions.
And just like Wealthsimple and their Trade offering, if you’re looking to transition to purchasing and selling individual stocks on your own, you’ll have a robust platform available at your disposal.
Learn more at Questrade.com
3. Passiv
Passiv is a relatively new Canadian platform that you can pair up with your broerkage account to easily maintain a balanced portfolio and build a passive investment strategy.
With Passiv, you can connect your Questrade or Interactive Brokers account and leverage the Passiv toolkit to build your own personalized index, to invest and to rebalance, while seamlessly managing multiple accounts.
Passiv offers a free account as well as an Elite account which is $99 for the year, however Questrade clients get the Elite account for free as well.
For non-Canadians, a number of other integrations such as TD Ameritrade and Kraken are also available.
Learn more at Passiv.com
What’s So Good About M1?
M1 Finance was established in 2015 by Brian Barnes and now has over 250,000 funded accounts with $500 million in client assets.
Their secret to growth lies in a number of popular features.
For one, M1 Finance allows investors to mirror popular portfolios of other brokerage firms and independent advisors.
Users can replicate portfolio programs like the Permanent Portfolio which was created by investment analyst Harry Browne in the 80s (equal allocation of stocks, bonds, gold, and cash).
Or, they can jump on another popular portfolio called the Golden Butterfly Portfolio, which is a modified version of the Permanent Portfolio (20% Total US Stock Market, 20% US Small Cap Value, 20% Long-Term Treasury Bonds, 20% Short-Term Treasury Bonds, and 20% Gold).
This portfolio has seen great results with M1 Finance because of their zero-transaction fees and seamless re-balancing.
Not only does M1 Finance consider your risk tolerance, it also takes into account your finance goals in suggesting portfolio types.
Add in the convenience of a robo-advisor service to help you rebalance your account as you go and you have a great strategy.
Moreover, as long as you invest a minimum of $100, you can take advantage of purchasing fractional shares of assets.
That’s right, you can buy the exact number of shares based on a purchase price of $1,000 or $5,000 for example.
While traditionally stocks have been purchased based on number of shares, allowing users to essentially purchase based on dollar value as well as the ability to access half shares of expensive stocks gives way to new types of investors.
M1 Finance allows you to invest in a variety of sectors including: General investing, Socially responsible investing, Retirement investing, Sector-specific investing, Hedge fund-based investing, Stocks, and Bonds.
In addition, for only a $125/year upgrade, M1 Finance users can also get access to a secondary afternoon trading window (Requires minimum $25,000 balance).
This membership also allows users to take advantage of smart transfers.
These smart transfers allow you to make caps to investing from your account fund through several options:
Spend Overbalance: Transfers excess cash balance from you Spend account into another M1 account.
Spend Underbalance: Refills your Spend account when it falls under a certain balance.
Invest Cash Overbalance: Transfers excess cash balance from you Invest account into another M1 account.
In this way you can actually modify the amount invested into your M1 Finance investment account based upon how it’s performing.
