Investing online doesn’t mean you should be investing alone, so make sure your online broker gives you the tools and support you will need to succeed.
Jason Storsley, president and CEO of RBC Direct Investing, says while online brokers are often cheaper to use than traditional brokers, they should still offer a robust support system to help you invest confidently and easily. Consumers still deserve the best possible level of service from their broker, regardless of whether they proceed online.
“When you look to an online broker, you want to know how they are going to add ease and confidence to your investment process. We’ve structured our website to make sure it’s easy to understand and use, and to find those topics and areas you’re looking for,” Storsley said.
While online investors obviously want to take command of their investment decisions, a good online broker needs to do much more than just give you a pat on the back and send you into the fire.
Online brokers have to provide the right tools and resources to ensure you can make decisions that fit your needs. Your online broker shouldn’t just be a gatekeeper for your online investing journey, but a helpful partner as well — a relationship Storsley says RBC Direct Investing treats as fundamental to good investing.
“We see investing really as a partnership between our investors and ourselves. While self-directed investors are making their own decisions, they’re never really left completely on their own — we educate them to make the right decisions for themselves,” Storsley said.
For people who like direct instruction, a wealth of helpful “Show-Me” videos can be accessed at the RBC Direct Investing site that explain all parts of the investment process with clear visuals and voice-over narrations.
For investors wanting more information about specific types of investments, a series of learning modules in RBC’s Guidance and Planning section let you create a personalized learning plan tailored to your investing needs.
If you like to tinker with different investment strategies or test out new ones, an RBC Direct Investing Practice Account can be the best way to play the market in creative ways without risking any real money.
Any RBC Direct Investing or Online Banking client can open a Practice Account and use all the same tools that a real money account would use, but with pretend money instead. It’s a powerful way to gain experience trying out things you would never consider otherwise because of the risk involved, or your own lack of experience.
One of the key things a good online broker needs to do is to give you the confidence to take control of your investment decision process and RBC offers some great tools to make that happen.
RBC’s innovative Asset Mix Calculator takes stock of your financial goals and personal risk tolerance to suggest a professionally vetted asset mix already diversified to your needs.
Professionally designed Model Portfolios take the guesswork out of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds by offering an easy way to build or further diversify your portfolio with fund mixes that have been carefully picked by RBC experts to offer strong investment potential.
For self-directed investors who want to delve even deeper into their own investment process, RBC offers a wealth of advanced and innovative Screeners let you sift quickly through thousands of potential stocks and funds down to a short list based on specific criteria you’ve picked. It’s like having the power to pick only the cream of the crop from dozens of different harvests, all of them chosen by you.
If you like staying as up-to-date as possible about your investments, set up an alert to monitor and contact you if your stocks fall or rise to a certain price, if it starts being traded in an unusually high volume, or even if there’s some breaking news about it.
