An RBC sign is seen in the financial district on Bay St in Toronto.Mark Blinch/The Globe and Mail
Clients of Canada's two largest online discount trading platforms have been frustrated by glitches that stopped them from buying and selling securities over the past few days.
Both Toronto-Dominion Bank and Royal Bank of Canada acknowledged intermittent outages on their direct investing platforms, and the on-and-off disruptions extended to RBC's main online banking website. Whereas TD said the primary issue was "capacity" on its systems, RBC blamed "heavy trading volumes."
TD WebBroker experienced disruptions on Dec. 29, Jan. 2 and again on Wednesday, drawing complaints from users through social media. The outages at RBC Direct Investing first surfaced mid-morning on Wednesday. These issues raise questions about the banks' ability to withstand surges in trading activity.
Customers' expectations for online banking are constantly rising, as they choose to do more day-to-day transactions digitally, and banks are under pressure to keep pace. The margin for error is increasingly slim, as even brief outages can burn precious goodwill with clients. For traders in particular, the costs of being unable to buy or sell when the market moves can add up fast.
Take cannabis stocks, for example. Investors in the nascent sector are already on edge because share prices are rising and falling so rapidly. Sudden and lengthy glitches at retail brokerages, such as the ones experienced over the past week, add a whole other level of stress.
Traders locked out of their TD accounts found themselves stuck in a sell-off they could have avoided, or denied the chance to get in before another rally.
Paul Pereira, 51, of Fort St. John, B.C., has been actively trading Canadian marijuana stocks for about two months. He jumps in and out of the same shares several times a day, hoping to ride the wave pushing these equities higher.
Having quick access to his TD account is critical if he needs to offload a position that's going sour.
But last Friday, Mr. Pereira says he was up about $7,000 on his trades when his TD WebBroker account was hit with an hours-long outage. By the time the website started to work again, he says his gains had been erased amid a mass sell-off that triggered trading halts.
Luckily, the sector rebounded and his $1,000 loss turned into a gain of a few grand on the day. But it could have been a lot worse.
"You're just looking at it going, 'I hope to God I don't get massacred today,'" he said. "You're just watching it go down. There is nothing you can do."
On Tuesday, when his TD trading account was down again, he was at the mercy of the market once more.
"Pot didn't take a tumble, but it was still frustrating not to be able to do anything except hope that things didn't crash," Mr. Pereira said.
Stock trading volumes tend to taper off over the holiday period, as news dries up and traders take vacation. But it can be a busy time for retail investors, who are also off work and have free time to pay closer attention to their portfolios and trade more actively.
TD clients took to social media to complain they were not able to access their trading accounts and encountered lengthy waiting times when they called TD's help line. Some clients said TD has been offering modest account credits as compensation. Still, some users were agitated enough to threaten to switch brokers.
On Tuesday, TD spokesman Paolo Pasquini said the "main item causing client impact has been capacity" and that the bank was "adding more to WebBroker overnight to help solve" the problem. But some TD users still received error messages when they tried to trade early on Wednesday.
AJ Goodman, a spokesman for RBC, said the bank experienced a spike in direct investing activity on Wednesday morning "across all areas of our business, including trading and the opening and funding of accounts." As many clients access their direct investing accounts through RBC's main online-banking portal, there were ripple effects on regular users who had intermittent difficulties trying to log in.
"Some clients are experiencing delays when attempting to log on to our Online Banking and RBC Direct Investing platforms due to heavy trading volumes," he added.
A spokesperson for TMX Group Ltd., which operates the Toronto Stock Exchange and TSX Venture Exchange, said equities trading showed nothing out of the ordinary on Wednesday.