(Archive link to this story)
Wealthsimple is a fintech company at the forefront of a lot of innovation in Canada’s personal finance sector since the company’s founding in 2014. Notably, Wealthsimple was the first broker in Canada to offer zero-commission trades, back in 2019. In 2020, they started offering the ability to trade crypto. In 2025, they launched zero-commission options trading. This year, the company received regulatory approval to bring prediction trading to Canada.
Unlike in other parts of the world, prediction markets have not flourished in Canada and have been considered basically illegal since a 2017 ruling from Canada’s federal securities regulator. Wealthsimple has been able to get around this ruling by only offering contracts on a narrow set of questions:
Despite a 2017 ruling that largely banned these kinds of short-term, yes-or-no contracts, certain regulated firms that are CIRO members are able to offer certain types of “event contracts,” […] The approval for Ontario-based Wealthsimple permits it only to offer contracts tied to economic indicators, financial markets and climate trends, the company confirmed – not sports or elections, which are among the most popular uses of prediction markets in the United States.
Wealthsimple has driven innovation in the Canadian personal finance sector; however, their new product offerings over the last few years seem to be speedrunning the Robinhood trajectory toward high-risk, high-volatility trading and away from their traditional niche of broad, diversified funds/ETFs for ordinary people to set-and-forget. This pivot can be understood as part of a broader trend toward the casinofication of everything, which took off with crypto and the legalization of online sports betting.