u/Dragynfyre

Anyone notice IBKR Canada bill payment funding method is super fast now? I used to need to send the payment fairly early in the day to get it by morning of next business day but now I’ve sent it as late as 2AM ET and got the funding by 9AM ET the same day with Wealthsimple and EQ as the sending bank. Maybe it’s a WS and EQ improvement as I haven’t tested sending it that late with BMO yet but it’s been pretty reliably getting funds next biz day morning as well if I send before BMO’s bill payment daily deadline. This basically makes the bill payment method a no brainer for funding CAD into IBKR Canada accounts since it avoids the long holds with EFT

I’m a Canadian and I recently started doing some shorter term trades whereas previously it’s been just buy and hold so I didn’t notice this issue before.

Basically to summarize

1. Portfolio tab defaults to showing position cost using FIFO. You can call in to customer service to change the portfolio tab to show average cost (can't do it yourself online). The change to displaying in FIFO happened 3-4 years ago and applied to all IBKR clients even in countries where FIFO is not used.
2. The T5008 still uses ACB so that's correct for tax purposes (still good to track your ACB yourself though, especially if using multiple brokers).
3. Activity report will always show realized gains and losses in FIFO and there’s no way to change this
4. The trades tab will initially show realized gains and losses based on your portfolio display preferences (ACB or FIFO for example) but will always revert to showing FIFO or whatever default tax lot system you’re using unless you explicitly choose a different tax lot method after a day or two when the trades settles and their system updates overnight. There is no option to choose average cost as a tax lot method

Is this correct? Basically as a Canadian the realized gains and losses shown in the activity report is useless? Why does IBKR not have an option to show everything using average cost when they are clearly computing it for the T5008?

I’m a Canadian and I recently started doing some shorter term trades whereas previously it’s been just buy and hold so I didn’t notice this issue before.

Basically to summarize

1. Portfolio tab defaults to showing position cost using FIFO. You can call in to customer service to change the portfolio tab to show average cost (can't do it yourself online). The change to displaying in FIFO happened 3-4 years ago and applied to all IBKR clients even in countries where FIFO is not used.
2. The T5008 still uses ACB so that's correct for tax purposes (still good to track your ACB yourself though, especially if using multiple brokers).
3. Activity report will always show realized gains and losses in FIFO and there’s no way to change this
4. The trades tab will initially show realized gains and losses based on your portfolio display preferences (ACB or FIFO for example) but will always revert to showing FIFO or whatever default tax lot system you’re using unless you explicitly choose a different tax lot method after a day or two when the trades settles and their system updates overnight. There is no option to choose average cost as a tax lot method

Is this correct? Basically as a Canadian the realized gains and losses shown in the activity report is useless? How are other Canadians dealing with this? I always track my ACB manually but it would be nice if the activity report and trades tab could at least be used to roughly see the gains and losses without doing the full calculation

So in general a loan taken to make taxable investment income is tax deductible and generally it doesn’t need to make net positive investment income (eg most of it can be cap gains). However, what is that still applied if there’s guaranteed to be loss? For example I’m thinking to borrow from my HELOC (not joint) to lend to my spouse for investing. Would the HELOC interest still be tax deductible since the spousal loan is generating taxable income even if the spousal loan interest rate is lower than the HELOC?

So I’ve been using BMO for SM and it’s pretty good. You can create multiple segments and the credit becomes instantly available 1:1. Or at least that’s how it worked in the past. I met with a BMO banker and they showed me that BMO made a policy change in October 2023 so it’s no longer 1:1. They framed this as a change to meet OSFI regulations but I haven’t heard other banks do this.

Basically the change is instead of getting 1:1 readvancement they give less than 1:1 so at the end of your mortgage you’re left with the 65% LTV. But it goes down gradually from 80% LTV to 65% over the entire 25-30 year amortization instead of maintaining 80% LTV until after you’ve paid down the instalment to below 15% LTV. Old Readilines are grandfathered into the latter structure and new ones have to follow the former.

So is this actually an industry wide change or a BMO change?