Buying an ETF at BMO InvestorLine

You can open an account from BMO's InvestorLine page; a TFSA, RRSP, or FHSA fits most goals. Once it's open and funded, pick your fund from the asset allocation guide.

Placing the order

1. Sign in to InvestorLine and confirm your fund's ticker with the symbol lookup, making sure you have the Canadian listing (the same symbol can exist on a US market).
2. Hover over Trading and select Stocks & ETFs to open the order entry screen.
3. Set the action to Buy.
4. Fill in the rest of the ticket: the ticker, your quantity, and your price type (market buys right away at the current price; limit sets the most you'll pay).
5. Submit the order. An order confirmation appears with the details.

For the order type, use a limit order and set your limit a few cents above the current price. It fills right away, the way a market order would, but it caps what you pay if the price jumps while your order goes through. I do this on every buy, whatever the amount.

BMO's public how-to guides are lighter on field-by-field detail than the other banks, so if a screen looks different, the trading tutorial inside InvestorLine (under Education, then Getting Started) has the current version.

What it costs

BMO charges $9.95 per online trade, but ZEQT, ZGRO, ZBAL, and ZCON are all on InvestorLine's commission-free ETF list, so buying BMO's own one-ticket funds there costs nothing. The conditions are simple: trade online and hold for at least one business day.