By Michael Constantino
Canada has long been an expensive place to invest. Commissions ran higher than in the U.S., trading platforms were built for desktops, and for a lot of people, getting into the market meant booking time with an advisor. The investors coming into the market now have little patience for any of that. They manage their banking, shopping and travel from their phones, and they expect investing to work the same way.
From the brokerage side, you can see that shift in who is opening accounts. The 2024 CSA Investor Index found that 45 per cent of Canadian investors now have a self-directed account, and 30 per cent of those investors opened it within the previous two years. Fewer investors reported working with an advisor than in 2020, and the biggest drop came among investors under 45 and those with portfolios under $100,000. Many of these people are starting with modest amounts and want to manage that money directly.
These investors now set the standard for what a Canadian brokerage has to offer. They want fair pricing on small trades, tools that work on their phone whenever the news breaks, and real help learning the market. Brokerages that build around those expectations will bring more Canadians into investing, and the ones that don’t will have a hard time holding on to this generation.
Who is investing now
Younger investors approach the market a little differently. Based on what we see on our platform, they tend to be more comfortable with volatility, although over the past year they have also become more calculated about when they make a move. They get their information differently, too. The same CSA survey found that 82 per cent of investors aged 18 to 24 use social media for investment information.
For these investors, the app is the brokerage. If it is slow, hard to read or missing a tool they need, they notice right away, because they are comparing it with every other app on their phone.
Investing on their schedule
Younger Canadians do not want to sit at a desktop or call someone to place a trade or check a portfolio. Timing matters to them as well. Earnings reports are sometimes released after the 4:00 p.m. close or early in the morning, and investors want to respond when the news comes out instead of waiting for the next session. That is why extended trading hours and round-the-clock market visibility have become so important to them.
They also expect the kind of tools professional traders use, on a phone. When volatility picks up, we see investors lean on real-time data, earnings alerts and portfolio analytics to stay grounded. Being able to see sector weighting and risk concentration in one place helps them make more deliberate decisions. They want range as well, from Canadian and U.S. equities to options, and they want to hold those investments inside TFSAs and RRSPs, where much of their long-term saving happens.
What a small trade costs
Cost is where these investors are least forgiving, and Canada has given them reason to be. Operating a brokerage here has historically come with higher costs and fees than in the U.S., and for years investors felt that in what they paid. A flat fee hits small trades hardest. A $10 commission on a $200 purchase takes 5 per cent off the top before the investment has moved at all. Repeat that across years of regular contributions, and the investor ends up with noticeably less money compounding. Low, clearly stated pricing lets everyday Canadians keep more of what they put in.
Investors also want to see what they are paying before they place an order. If they have to dig through a fee schedule to find out, the pricing is not clear enough.
Helping new investors build confidence
Lower costs bring more people into the market, and many of them are still learning. In a 2025 Ipsos poll, 55 per cent of Canadians aged 18 to 34 said they feel confident investing, compared with 64 per cent of those over 55. With so many young investors getting their information from social media, platforms have to do more of the teaching.
When every dollar counts, people want to understand what is driving markets and how global events tie back to their own portfolios. We see investors using the tools, data and learning resources on our platform more than ever, because they want to feel confident in the decisions they make.
Paper trading helps a lot here. It lets a first-time investor practice placing orders and managing a position with virtual money, so their first real trade is not their first attempt. Clear screens that show risk and cost at the moment of the trade help just as much.
Putting AI to work on research
The newest place many investors go to learn is an AI assistant. The 2026 SIMA and Pollara Survey of Canadian Investors found that four in 10 Canadian investors have used generative AI for investing. Among those users, 42 per cent use it to build general investment knowledge, 32 per cent to research specific investments or funds, and 29 per cent to find new investment ideas.
For investors who are starting out, that changes who gets access to good research. Advanced market research used to take expensive tools or hours of work. Now an investor can ask about their own portfolio in plain language, such as how much of it sits in one sector or what changed in a company’s latest earnings, and get a useful answer quickly.
As AI becomes part of how people invest, platforms need to keep the investor in charge of every decision. An assistant can help with research and analysis, and any trade it suggests should still be reviewed and confirmed by the investor before it goes through.
Keeping the investor in control matters because AI can get things wrong. The Ontario Securities Commission’s research on AI and retail investing found that people followed investment suggestions from an AI tool about as closely as suggestions from a human, and it flagged the risk of AI producing biased, inappropriate or inaccurate advice. AI is most useful as a faster way to understand a company or a market move, with the investor still making the final call.
Investing as a regular habit
For many Canadians, investing has become a regular habit. The higher cost of living has pushed people to reassess what is realistic in the short term, but their long-term goals are still there. Investors are still contributing, sometimes in smaller increments. The mindset we see is, “I’ll keep going, but I’ll be smart about timing and where I allocate.”
Banks and fintechs are both responding to this. J.D. Power’s 2025 Canada Wealth Management Digital Experience Study found that fintechs have set the pace on digital among Canadian wealth firms, and that established brands have made significant improvements to their apps and websites in response. The same study found that investors engage more deeply when firms offer more investing tools, charting and security safeguards, and that firms need to keep the experience consistent across channels as those tools grow.
In my view, that is where Canadian brokerages will compete over the next several years: whether a platform works as well on a phone as it does on a desktop, and whether it keeps improving as investors’ needs change.
For brokerages, the practical test is to build for someone investing $200 at a time from their phone. That person needs a price that doesn’t eat into a small trade, tools that work before the market opens, and a place to learn before real money is at stake. In my view, a platform that gets that experience right will work well for nearly every other investor, too.
Michael Constantino is the Chief Executive Officer of Webull Canada, where he leads the company’s operations and growth strategy. He brings more than two decades of experience across financial services, institutional trading, brokerage operations and international equity markets. Constantino joined Webull in 2018 as Director of Trading and Operations before becoming Managing Director and Head of Trading & Operations in 2022, and CEO of Webull Canada in 2024.
As CEO of Webull Canada, Constantino is focused on expanding access to financial markets and delivering technology-driven investing platform to Canadian investors. Under his leadership, Webull Canada has broadened its product offering to include commission-free trading across Canadian and U.S. equities, TFSA and RRSP accounts, margin and cash accounts, options, cryptocurrency, and innovative trading and market-data capabilities.
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