Dividend Eligibility

First, it's good to check to ensure you're eligible to receive a dividend from one of your holdings.

The two important dates regarding dividends are the Record Date and the Pay Dates. Almost all orders of stocks or ETFs in North America take two business days to settle regardless if you're buying or selling.

To qualify for a dividend payment, your orders need to be settled on or before the record date, so purchases need to be made two business days before a dividend's record date. If you sell a holding after it's record date but before it's payment date, you are still eligible to receive this dividend.

Dividend Payments

All cash dividends will be paid out on their payment date but there can be some delays between Wealthsimple receiving the proceeds from our clearing broker and when the cash will be deposited into your account's cash balance.

Cash dividends will be paid directly to your cash balance in Canadian Dollars. There are no currency conversion fees that are charged on dividends being paid out by US corporations but there is a 15% non-resident withholding tax that's held back at the source for any dividends received in a TFSA or a Personal account.

At the moment, Wealthsimple Trade doesn't support dividend reinvestment plans but all dividends will be added to your cash balance which you can use however you'd like!