I’ve written a guide on the differences between investing in TD e-Series funds through a TD Mutual Fund Account and a TD Direct Investment Account. I’ve also written how to buy and rebalance your e-Series funds through the TD Mutual Fund Account. Now let’s look at how to buy TD e-Series Index Funds through TD Direct Investment accounts.
Before you start
Before you can start trading using TD Direct Investment, you’ll need to setup some accounts. This can be done online or in person by setting up a meeting with a TD Direct Investment rep from your local bank. If you already have a portfolio within a TD Mutual Fund account, see my guide on switching from TD Mutual Fund to TD Direct Investment.
I suggest opening a Tax-Free Savings account and/or a Self-Directed RSP account for your investments, which are both available in the TD online application.
Logging in
To access the TD Direct Investment portal, you login to your TD EasyWeb account with your access card code, the same as you would for any of your day-to-day banking.
Find your investments
Once logged in, on your main overview page, scroll to your investments section, and click on any of the “WebBroker links. This will take you to the TD Direct Investment portal.
Find your right account
Now click on the account that you want to make TD e-Series purchases in. NOTE: You’ll need to have cash funds in that account to make any purchases.
Purchase your TD e-Series funds
Select the “Buy/Sell” icon at the top of the page
Select the “Mutual Funds” tab of the buy window. You’ll need to make sure you have funds available to trade (shown as Cash in the top right corner of the buy window. You’ll also need to fill in the following fields:
Action
Like in a TD Mutual Fund Account, you can Buy, Sell or Switch. If you are buying funds, select the “Buy” option.
Symbol Name
Search and select the symbol name for the TD e-Series fund that you want to purchase. They should show up as you start to type them in. If you are using the Canadian Couch Potato strategy for your e-Series funds, here are the Symbols:
- TDB900 – TD Canadian Index Fund-e
- TDB902 – TD U.S. Index Fund-e
- TDB909 – TD Canadian Bond Index Fund-e
- TDB911 – TD International Index Fund-e
Quantity type
Allows you to choose to buy in dollars, or in amount of units. I always choose dollars to make sure I know exactly how much I’m buying.
Dividend option
You can select to either have your dividends re-invested, or payed out in cash into the same account. I recommend re-investing the dividends – you can always cash them out later.
Amount (including commission)
You’ll need to check this box. Don’t let the word commission scare you – there are no commissions when purchasing TD e-Series funds.
Trading password
You’ll need to fill in a Trading password (this option can be turned off in your settings). If you didn’t receive one when you opened the accounts (I didn’t), you’ll have to call into the TD Direct Investment phone line and get them to assign you a temporary one.
Select the “Preview Order” button on the bottom right to continue.
Previewing order
Make sure to confirm all of your details in this window. The preview screen also shows that you will be charged $0 for your commission, and provides some additional warnings about minimum holding periods, and long term fees charged by TD Direct Investing – the usual fee’s associated with holding the investment. Select the “Agree & Send Order” button to finalize your purchase.
Buy confirmation
You will now be given a confirmation page that your order was received, with the details and a reference number. Your purchase is now complete.
You’re order will be placed at the end of the current trading day, or at the end of the next trading day if the markets are already closed.
Start your TD e-Series portfolio
You can now repeat that process for all of the funds you want to include in your TD e-Series portfolio. A pretty simple process, but it’s always nice to have it laid out step by step with pictures. Was this article helpful? Let me know in the comments below!
Okay, this might be a dumb question but I’m a beginner.
So when people talk about the % in each mutual fund (like the CCP where it’s 25% in each of the four mutual funds for the aggressive portfolio) does that mean 25% of your cash in each or 25% of the stock amount?
Like if you have $100, does it just go $25 in each fund regardless of price?
Yep, you’ve got it. 25% of your portfolio worth (it’s cash value) should be in each asset. So if you are starting a new portfolio, and have $100, you would buy $25 of each. That way the cash value of each of your assets is 25% of your portfolio. It doesn’t matter what the price of the assets are, as long as the worth of your investment in that asset is 25% of your portfolio.
Hope that makes sense.
Hi there.
Super dumb questions:
1) can I use the TD app to do this?
2) I think there are annual costs associated with having a TD direct investing account… if I go with the e-series instead of buying stocks, can I get out of those banking fees?
No dumb questions here.
1) There is an app that you can access your funds with, and I’m pretty sure you can make trades with as well. The problem is the app only works if you have an associated TD chequing/savings account. For me, I only have a TD Direct Investment account, no chequing/savings, so the app won’t let me log in. I used to be able to use the app when I did all of my banking with TD.
2) There is an annual cost to use TD Direct Investment, but only if your total portfolio is under $15,000. If your portfolio is under $15,000, I suggest using a TD Mutual Fund account to invest in TD e-Series, because a TD MF account is free no matter how much you are investing.
Hi,
Can I set up a monthly ppp that will buy the same percentage of funds? For example if I buy funds similar to the Canadian Couch Potato portfolio, 40% bonds, 20% can equity, 20% us equity, 20% intl equity, can I set up automatic monthly purchases at the same amounts or %’s every month?
If so, how is this done?
Thank you.
There is a way to set pre-authorized deposits to deposit cash from a chequing account that you have, into a TD Direct Investment account as Cash (using a form found here: https://www.td.com/ca/products-services/investing/td-direct-investing/accounts/forms-applications/index-res.jsp), but in my research, I’ve haven’t found a way to setup pre-authorized purchases of certain funds once that cash is in your TD Direct Investment account. Unfortunately you may have to talk to a bank representative to find out if there is a way to set it up outside of the website.
It would be possible to do if you were investing through a regular TD EasyWeb Mutual Fund account, with the Pre-Authorized Purchase Plans option.
To do it based on percentages would be fairly easy, by just dividing the total amount that you want to buy each month by your percentages, and setup pre-authorized purchases for each of those amounts. For example, if you were setting aside $1000 a month to be invested in your portfolio, based on your example percentages, you would setup a pre-authorized purchase plan for $400 bonds, $200 us equity, $200 canadian equity, and $200 intl equity. You would still need to revisit your portfolio maybe once a year to do a total rebalancing of your whole portfolio.
I don’t really know why but my direct investing accounts (TFSA and a non registered account) both have two accounts each, one Canadian and one US. Do you know why this is? Are US bonds/stocks meant to be invested under the US account? I’d like to follow the Canadian couch potato portfolio, and based on your blog, it didn’t look like you put the Canadian and US index funds into separate accounts…
When I login to TD Direct Investing, I have 4 accounts:
The American accounts are for if you want to purchase and hold assets with American dollars. You can puchase all of your TD e-Series funds (Canadian, US, and International) through your Canadian TFSA and RRSP.
Not quite sure why you were setup with american accounts as well, but I guess some people may prefer to deal with American cash instead of Canadian cash.
Hey, something I think you should note to your readers, when you set up a pre-authorized deposit of say, $200, to your TDDI account in cash from another financial institution, note that you cannot purchase any td e-series amount less than $100. So say if you wanted to split your $200 into a 30/30/30/10 split, you cannot do so since 30% of $200 is $60 which is less than the required purchase amount for any of the e-series funds. This was something I learned when I was starting out. I’ll be so glad if you know of a workaround to this!
That’s a great point. With TD Direct Investing, the minimum buy for a transaction is $100, which can make it tricky to buy funds according to your target percentages. If I am trying to add $300 to my portfolio, according to my percentages I would need to buy:
$69 – CDN
$69 – US
$69 – ITNL
$93 – Bonds
But with TD DI, I won’t be able to buy any of those amounts. Usually what I do is first look at my current re-balancing needs for my portfolio, if certain funds are lagging behind, I’ll focus on those. But overall, I’ll pick 3 to buy, a buy the minimum ($100) of those. Next month when I’m purchasing more funds, I’ll make sure to purchase from the fund that I skipped in the previous month. Your target percentages don’t have to be exact, they are just a general guide to help you determine where to put your money within your portfolio. If you re-balance once or twice a year, you’ll be able to make up for any target percentage inequalities anyways.
Which of the TD eseries fund are good to purchase as of now? Is it advisable to buy ETF’s too?
The general idea of the couch potato e-Series portfolio is that the funds you purchase are long-term holds, and therefore the strategy of which ones to buy doesn’t change over time or depending on how the market is doing. So by that strategy, I stick to only buying the 4 funds that I originally started with (Canadian index, US index, International index, Canadian Bonds index) as they cover the global market with additional focus on domestic. There are Japanese and European e-Series index funds you could add to your portfolio as well, but that may overly diversify it.
If ETF’s are more your thing, I would suggest picking 1 route over the other (ETF’s or TD e-Series). Essentially they are different ways of doing the same thing – investing in low MER global market indexes. But I wouldn’t buy both myself.