Royal Bank of Canada offers free practice trading account for anyone who wants to practice stock trading in US or Canada markets. This practice account is designed to make people build confidence in stock trading, but this does not seem fulfilling the purpose.
RBC practice account seems to have a lot of technical glitches that might make a prospective investor lose confidence in trading. I am sharing the issues I faced with this account.
On Nov 02, 2021, I bought an option call of 50 contracts of AMD at strike of 128 for expiry of Nov 05, 2021. In technical terms, I got 50 contracts of AMD CE 128 Nov 05, 2021 at a price of $0.99.
The unit price jumped to $9.65 today on Nov 04, 2021. I tried to sell the contracts but the order was being rejected by the system. I called RBC Investment Account support but they could not help me. They stated that being a practice account, they cannot see the transaction at their end.
They could not investigate the issue at their leaving me with anything but let the contracts expire with no information on how to sell them.
This was not the first time I faced such issues with RBC practice trading account. I saw the same issue earlier this week with other orders as well. Moreover, I was unable to see many of my purchased stocks in my current holdings.
Although this was just a practice account, but this kind of issue demotivates potential investors instead of building their confidence. I hope RBC can fiz this technical glitch in future.
My portfolio started with USD $80,000 of practice money two weeks ago. Today, if I am able to sell my holdings, it would be more than USD $125,000.