Edward Jones: Salary declining for 1 year and yes they are fans of bonds and div stocks, anything else and you will have field supervision on you in seconds. 40% across the board.

Ray James: Not much different than EDJ, at least on the B/D side, keep in mind they have a large independent division. 

Investors Group: My understanding is not much unlike EDJ, once again. Unsure of declining salaries etc, however sink or swim just like EDJ. Difference being you are in a group office, not an independent office as in EDJ. You will not find yourself jobless due to production standards such as EDJ however how long can you survive not meeting some standard of your own or someone else's. 

TD Bank: Salary and you will be MDFA licensed not IIROC. This means no individual stocks and your mutual fund lineup is limited to TD only funds. All no load however, but quite restricting. 

TD Waterhouse: Full service brokerage, you are IIROC and sell the full breadth of products similar to EDJ, RayJames and IG, however waterhouse and dom securities, Mcloud, WoodGundy, ML etc often have what's called a draw. The firm will often give you a salary with a minimum production standard and some commission. Your salary is directly related to your production standard and most definitely related to your employment sustainability. 

Dundee/Assante: Full service sink or swim brokerage, however your best bet getting in these firms would be to join a team etc. They tend to prefer either veteran advisors with transfer assets or someone starting from the bottom with the support of an existing team. 

Indy: The indy route would be referring to the fee based firms, the obvious big ones being Jarislowsky Fraser or Burgundy etc. These firms tend to operate in a slightly different manner utilizing salaried RM's (relationship managers) and separate portfolio managers to actively trade assets. The portfolio managers generally have little to no contact with the clients, however this is not necessarily the best environment to build a book of business for obvious reasons.  

Indy / fee based with commissions: This avenue is more rare however does exist. With all fee based clients the revenue is annuitized (no rat race) however for obvious reasons it can be quite difficult financially to start from scratch without upfront commissions on funds. Your best bet in this route is to find a firm who also offers insurance so you can maintain the upfront compensation from insurance while building your annuitized book of assets under management. I believe this route to be in the best interest for both the client and the advisor hence thus being the setup at my firm. If you are interested in further details on this path you may PM me. The firm is located on Bay St in Toronto. 

Hope this was of some help.

Good post Userfaname, I would have to agree with you.  I am also an indy in Ontario.  How is your search going Drama? 

Hey there,

Just a word of warning about IG:

you basically have to pay rent and you are liscensed only to sell mutual funds. Also, they ask you for a list of a 100 relatives when you join them

AND the funds that they sell are IG funds that have some of the highest MER on the market…(source:former coworker that worked there)

Manulife Securities seems to vary a lot from branch to branch.Basically some of the branches are run like a McDonald(kind of a franchise system) so one might have very strict hiring practice and other not. At one of the branch in my city, you basically are a glorified cold caller and you get a % of what the senior broker makes. So if you get paired with a IA that can’t close, you’re in doo-doo albeit they will never fire you, because you cost them nothing.

No salary for either. They can’t. They would go bankrupt.
Be very careful around these two and don’t drink the kool-aid.

Would be great if anyone else have info on other canadian firm