Using WealthSimple as a beginner Investor

My experience using Wealthsimple to enter the world of trading

Photo by Tech Daily on Unsplash

As someone who lives in Canada, whenever I watch YouTube video, it felt like nine times out of ten, there was an advertisement to start investing using Wealthsimple (I swear the song would get stuck in my head. If you know, you know). I noticed a lot of these ads last year, just as we entered the pandemic and I needed to look for some new ways to start making some money. Everyone always says start investing (since the market took a massive toll back in March), so I decided to look into Wealthsimple, downloaded the App, and started by Investing journey at the age of 19.

For those who are unfamiliar with WealthSimple, it is a relatively new app and company that allows people to buy and sell stocks, with the selling point of having a $0 commission fee. So, its always about your money, and what you own, and WealthSimple does not take any cut of whatever money you make through your investments. What is great about WealthSimple is that, while it is a Canadian company, as a user, I am able to buy and sell stocks in the United States as well. They also provide other services, such as the ability to now buy Cryptocurrency as well as savings accounts, but I have been using WealthSimple simply for buying and selling my stocks.

To open a WealthSimple account, it was too easy and only took me about 10 minutes max. Just make an account, select the type of account you want (savings, TFSA, etc.), add money to the account by connecting it with your bank and you are ready to go! The deposit from my main bank account into the WealthSimple account took a couple of business days. After that, I was buying stocks!

It was perfect timing for me since Apple had just split their stocks, so I was able to acquire five shares of Apple at the time. When buying the stocks, since I was a Canadian buying stocks of a US company, Wealthsimple makes it extremely clear and easy to understand the conversion, and how much I am actually spending, and showing what was remaining. From there, I bought a few more penny stocks, playing around with it a little because this was all so new to me. Since I started investing only a year ago, I have made some mistakes and bad calls with some of my investments, loosing a little…