Passiv + Questrade in 2026: the Integration Ended — Here's What Replaced It

For years, Passiv was the unofficial rebalancing department for Questrade's DIY investors: connect your accounts, set target weights, and bring the portfolio back in line with one click. Then Questrade told customers the integration was changing — and in June 2026 it launched its own native replacement. Here is the full timeline, what each option costs, and what it all means for a halal investor who has to do their own Shariah screening either way.

Updated October 2026 · 11-minute read · Reviewed by the Canadian Halal Investor team

What Passiv did for Questrade investors

Passiv is a portfolio management tool built by a Canadian fintech founded in 2017 and headquartered in New Brunswick, according to Questrade's own 2019 announcement. Its pitch was simple: DIY investing is easy to start and tedious to maintain. Every payday you would otherwise open a spreadsheet, work out which holdings had drifted below their target weights, log in to your brokerage, and place each trade by hand. Passiv automated the arithmetic.

In May 2019, Questrade announced an exclusive partnership with Passiv. The tool was made complimentary for Questrade customers, with an optional paid upgrade — Passiv Elite — that unlocked the headline feature: one-click trade execution. Instead of just calculating the trades needed to rebalance, Elite would place them in your Questrade account for you. The standard setup worked like this:

• Connect: link your Questrade accounts to Passiv through Questrade's official API — no handing over your brokerage password, and your money never leaves Questrade.
• Set targets: define a model portfolio — say, 60% in a US total-market ETF, 30% in an international ETF, 10% in a Canadian ETF.
• Get nudged: Passiv sent alerts when new cash landed, when dividends were paid, or when holdings drifted away from their targets.
• Rebalance: review the calculated trades and either place them yourself (free tier) or fire them off with one click (Elite).

One underrated strength was the unified dashboard: Passiv could show multiple accounts — yours and, with authorisation, a spouse's — as a single portfolio. For households running several TFSAs and RRSPs toward one allocation, that alone was worth the setup. Passiv Elite was listed at $99/year, which made it dramatically cheaper than any robo-advisor or all-in-one ETF's management fee for larger portfolios.

For halal investors, the value proposition was always about discipline, not screening. Passiv never screened a single stock for Shariah compliance — it rebalanced whatever you told it to hold. The screening remained entirely your job (our workflow uses Zoya for that), and Passiv simply kept your screened portfolio on target. That distinction matters more than ever now, as you'll see.

What changed: the 2025 announcement and the January 2026 cutoff

In October 2025, Questrade customers received an email with the subject line "Your Passiv integration will be changing soon." The details were reported by The Money Engineer, a Questrade customer, and the substance was this: Questrade was building its own Passiv-like "Portfolio Monitoring and Rebalancing Tools", expected to launch in 2026. As a result, the bundled annual access to Passiv Elite for Questrade customers would end at the end of each customer's current renewal date, or on 30 January 2026 — whichever was later.

Questrade confirmed the direction publicly the following month. In its November 2025 "Dawn of Investing" announcement, the company said a Portfolio Rebalancing Tool would arrive "beginning in 2026": investors would set a desired portfolio breakdown (the example given was 60% stocks, 40% bonds) and rebalance to those targets with a single order. The same announcement said Custom Indexing — a tool for building personalised ETF-like portfolios — was "coming early 2026."

The practical upshot: the era in which Passiv Elite came bundled with a Questrade relationship is over. Passiv itself continues as an independent product, but Questrade's roadmap now points inward — and the first native replacement has already shipped.

What replaced it: Questrade Custom Indexing (launched 2 June 2026)

On 2 June 2026, Questrade officially launched Custom Indexing, which it describes as Canada's first personalised index investing product with no management fees. The concept sits between buying ETFs and picking stocks: you start from a template index, adjust the stocks or sectors, and own the underlying shares directly — through fractional shares — instead of owning units of a fund.

The features that matter for a Passiv graduate:

• One-click rebalancing back to your index's target weights, with drift alerts when holdings move away from target — the two Passiv features people actually used.
• Fractional shares, so a small contribution can still buy into every position in your index proportionally.
• No management fees, no MERs, and no commissions on Custom Index Account trades or rebalances, per Questrade's launch announcement.
• Stock-level control: remove or adjust individual holdings and sector exposures — you are not stuck with an index provider's definition of the market.

And the constraints, which are significant:

• US securities only at launch — Canadian fractional shares are expected later, but there is no confirmed date we could verify.
• Everything is held in US dollars — foreign exchange fees apply on contributions, which is a real cost for CAD earners funding the account regularly.
• It requires a dedicated Custom Indexing account (TFSA, RRSP, FHSA, or Cash) — the index lives separately from your other holdings.

The halal check: a tool that can't screen

Here is how the halal workflow actually lands on each tool:

• Screen first, automate second. The order never changes: run candidates through a screener like Zoya before they enter any model portfolio or custom index. A rebalancing tool will happily keep a non-compliant holding perfectly weighted — it has no concept of halal. Our halal investing in Canada guide walks through the full screening workflow.
• Custom Indexing's exclusion feature is the standout. Start from a broad-market template, remove the banks, alcohol, gambling, and other non-compliant constituents your screening rules out, and you have effectively built a personal halal index — with one-click rebalancing on top. No Canadian ETF currently offers that level of customisation; the closest off-the-shelf options are the screened US ETFs in our halal ETF comparison (SPUS, HLAL, WSHR).
• Direct ownership means direct dividends — and purification. Unlike an ETF, where purification math is done at the fund level, a custom index pays you each company's dividend directly. That makes our purification calculator more important, not less: you will want to purify annually. Dividends also feed zakat calculations on the holdings.
• Watch the edges, not the core. The tools themselves are neutral rails, but the accounts around them are not automatically safe: do not connect or open margin accounts (interest-bearing leverage fails our guardrails outright), and keep idle cash out of any interest-bearing cash promo. Currency conversion spreads are a cost, not riba — but they are a cost worth minimising with our Norbert's gambit guide where the account structure allows it.
• The dedicated account is a feature, not a bug, for halal investors. Custom Indexing forces the index into its own account, separate from your other holdings. That separation makes it easier to keep screened and unscreened activity apart — and to calculate zakat and purification cleanly at year end.

One more honest note: Custom Indexing is US-securities-only at launch, which rules out Canadian-listed halal options for now — including the TSX names covered by our stock screeners. If your strategy leans Canadian, this tool is not ready for you yet.

Fees: what each option actually costs

• Passiv Elite: $99/year (listed). That bought one-click trade execution on top of the calculations, alerts, and multi-account dashboard. Basic access was complimentary for Questrade customers under the old partnership. Whether that bundling survives in any form is now a question for your Questrade account page — the announced cutoff was 30 January 2026 or your renewal date, whichever was later.
• Custom Indexing: no management fees, no MERs, no commissions on trades and rebalances inside the Custom Index Account, per Questrade's launch announcement. The real cost is currency conversion: every index is held in USD, so CAD contributions pay FX spreads on the way in (and on the way out). For a monthly contributor, that recurring spread can easily exceed what Passiv Elite's flat $99/year cost — run the maths on your own contribution pattern.
• The brokerage underneath is still $0 per trade. Questrade charges no commission on stocks and ETFs (see our Questrade review), so the rebalancing trades themselves — whether fired by Passiv or by Custom Indexing — do not carry ticket charges. The comparison is purely Passiv's subscription versus Custom Indexing's FX drag.
• What neither charges you for: holding the account, receiving drift alerts, or calculating the trades. If all you want is the maths, a spreadsheet — or Passiv's free tier, where still offered — costs nothing.

Pros & cons: Custom Indexing for halal investors

What to do if you still use Passiv with Questrade

If Passiv is already wired into your Questrade accounts, do not panic — but do verify. Log in to both dashboards and check what your account actually shows: whether one-click execution still works, what tier you are on, and what you are being billed. The announced end of bundled Elite access (30 January 2026 or your renewal date, whichever was later) has passed, so assume nothing carries over until you see it.

Your options from here:

• Migrate the workflow to Custom Indexing if your strategy is US-listed and you are comfortable with USD-denominated holdings. Rebuild your model portfolio as a custom index — applying your Shariah exclusions as you go — and let the native drift alerts and one-click rebalance take over.
• Keep Passiv for the maths, trade manually. If your strategy leans Canadian (where Custom Indexing cannot go yet), Passiv's calculations and multi-account dashboard may still earn their keep — you just place the trades yourself in Questrade, which costs $0 commission anyway.
• Reconsider whether you need the tool at all. A two- or three-ETF halal portfolio (see our ETF comparison) rebalanced once or twice a year does not need software. The investors who genuinely benefited from Passiv were the ones with many holdings across many accounts — everyone else was paying for convenience they barely used.

Whatever you choose, the halal workflow does not change: screen every holding before it enters the portfolio, keep margin and interest-bearing products out, and purify dividends annually. The tool changed; the rules did not.

When to skip both

Passiv and Custom Indexing are both DIY instruments — neither does the Shariah work for you. If you would rather have the screening handled, Wealthsimple's managed halal portfolios (Halal Growth/Balanced/Conservative) remain the only done-for-you halal option among Canadian brokerages; our Questrade vs Wealthsimple comparison covers that trade-off. If fractional shares on high-priced compliant stocks matter and you want to stay manual, Wealthsimple's self-directed Trade side offers them (see our Wealthsimple Trade guide). And if your portfolio is a handful of screened ETFs, skip the tooling entirely and follow the pillar guide — a calendar reminder beats a subscription you never open.