Nordnet vs Wealthsimple Trade — which broker is better?

Pros

• Commission from 0.25% with a SEK 1 minimum on Nordic orders up to SEK 15,600 — small monthly share purchases are genuinely viable
• New customers start in the 'Kom igång' class with commission-free Nasdaq Stockholm trading (up to 500 share transactions a year) and fund fees refunded
• Nordnet Bank AB holds a Swedish banking licence under Finansinspektionen, and parent Nordnet AB (publ) is listed on Nasdaq Stockholm as SAVE
• Two separate protection layers: the Swedish deposit guarantee on cash and the Swedish investor compensation scheme on securities
• Broad for a domestic broker — shares, ETFs, mutual funds with no dealing charge, options, futures, warrants, certificates and bonds
• No custody fee, no platform fee, no inactivity fee and no minimum deposit
• Nordnet reports to the Nordic tax authorities and the ISK wrapper removes per-trade capital gains declarations entirely
• Scale that is easy to verify: 2.5 million customers, SEK 1,374 billion of savings capital and 17.6 million trades in a single quarter

Cons

• Residents of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland only — there is no route in from Germany, Austria, Switzerland or the rest of the EU
• Automatic currency exchange costs 0.25%, and the 0.075% route needs a free currency account — open to everyone only on an ordinary aktie- och fonddepå, restricted to private banking and active trading clients on an ISK or KF, and never available on fund orders
• Commission classes step by order size, and the Nordic minimum jumps from SEK 1 to SEK 39 at SEK 15,600 — though a SEK 15,000 order already costs SEK 37.50 at 0.25%, so the real step at the boundary is small
• Support is weekday office hours only, in Nordic languages plus English; there is no 24/5 desk and Trustpilot sentiment is markedly weaker than app-store sentiment
• The Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Finnish price lists have different structures and different numbers, which makes cross-border comparison genuinely confusing
• No fractional shares on ordinary orders, no demo account, no spot forex and no CFDs — active traders will find the toolkit thinner than a specialist platform

Pros

• CAD 0 commission on Canadian and US stocks and ETFs, plus USD 0 per equity and ETF options contract on every tier, including free assignment
• Futures at USD 1 per contract with free real-time futures market data — no Canadian competitor matches that combination
• CAD 0 to transfer your account out, where Questrade, Qtrade and the banks all charge CAD 150
• Best-rated broker app in Canada at 4.6 on the App Store across roughly 130,000 ratings, with real-time streaming quotes free to everyone
• 24/5 trading on eligible US stocks and ETFs and 24/7 on gold and crypto — the longest trading hours available in Canada
• Margin at prime + 0.5% on Core and prime − 0.5% on Generation, well under the big banks
• CIRO-regulated with CIPF coverage of CAD 1,000,000 per account category, backed by Power Corporation of Canada with a 52.4% stake
• Interest on chequing balances of 1.25% to 2.25% by tier, against effectively 0% on idle cash at most brokers

Cons

• The 1.5% CAD/USD conversion is the same as Questrade's. A USD account (CAD 10 a month on Core, free on Premium from CAD 100,000) removes it on the US trades themselves but not on the CAD you convert into it, which still costs 1.5% per transaction under CAD 10,000 and falls to 0% only from CAD 100,000; journalling at CAD 9.95 is the other way round it
• Crypto costs 2.0% per trade at the Core tier — a round trip is 4% — and the advertised 0.05% requires CAD 10 million of 30-day volume; staking takes 30% of rewards before validator fees
• No bonds, no GICs and no mutual funds anywhere in the self-directed account, so a fixed-income allocation has to be built entirely from ETFs
• No desktop platform, no Level 2 depth, no API and no paper-trading account; the research stack is news and basic charts rather than screeners and analyst coverage
• The crypto assets themselves sit outside CIPF protection and are held in trust instead — only the cash balance in a crypto account is covered, and the cold-storage insurance cited is USD 75 million per custodial partner, not per client
• Meaningful benefits are gated behind CAD 100,000 and CAD 500,000 balances, so the sticker price a small account actually pays is the least attractive version of the offer