Possibility to buy index funds and individual funds in a Canadian TFSA
"This page from the CRA website details the types of investments you can hold in a TFSA. You can hold individual shares, including ETFs, traded on any ""designated stock exchange"" in addition to the other types of investment you have listed.  Here is a list of designated stock exchanges provided by the Department of Finance.  As you can see, it includes pretty well every major stock exchange in the developed world. If your bank's TFSA only offers ""mutual funds, GICs and saving deposits"" then you need to open a TFSA with a different bank or a stock broking company with an execution only service that offers TFSA accounts.  Almost all of the big banks will do this.  I use Scotia iTrade, HSBC Invest Direct, and TD, though my TFSA's are all with HSBC currently.  You will simply provide them with details of your bank account in order to facilitate money transfers/TFSA contributions. Since purchasing foreign shares involves changing your Canadian dollars into a foreign currency, one thing to watch out for when purchasing foreign shares is the potential for high foreign exchange spreads.  They can be excessive in proportion to the investment being made.  My experience is that HSBC offers by far the best spreads on FX, but you need to exchange a minimum of $10,000 in order to obtain a decent spread (typically between 0.25% and 0.5%).  You may also wish to note that you can buy unhedged ETFs for the US and European markets on the Toronto exchange.  This means you are paying next to nothing on the spread, though you obviously are still carrying the currency risk.  For example, an unhedged S&P500 trades under the code ZSP (BMO unhedged) or XUS (iShares unhedged). In addition, it is important to consider that commissions for trades on foreign markets may be much higher than those on a Canadian exchange.  This is not always the case.  HSBC charge me a flat rate of $6.88 for both Toronto and New York trades, but for London they would charge up to 0.5% depending on the size of the trade.  Some foreign exchanges carry additional trading costs.  For example, London has a 0.5% stamp duty on purchases. EDIT One final thing worth mentioning is that, in my experience,  holding US securities means that you will be required to register with the US tax authorities and with those US exchanges upon which you are trading.  This just means fill out a number of different forms which will be provided by your stock broker. Exchange registrations can be done electronically, however US tax authority registration must be submitted in writing.  Dividends you receive will be net of US withholding taxes.  I am not aware of any capital gains reporting requirements to US authorities."
"For equities, buy direct from the transfer agent. You have to buy one full share at a minimum but after that dividend reinvestment is free.  There are others like share builder and foliofn that let you buy fractional shares. As the other poster said their roster is limited so you cannot buy every ETF out there.  With your example of not wanting to spend $200 I agree with the others that you should invest in a mutual fund. Vanguard will have every index fund you need and can invest as little as $50, as long as you sign up for a systematic investment draft from your bank. Plus vanguard typically has the lowest fees in the industry.  The most important thing is to start investing as soon as possible and as regular as possible. ""Pay yourself first""" You cannot do a 1031 exchange with stocks, bonds, mutual funds, or ETFs.  There really isn't much difference between an ETF and its equivalent index mutual fund. Both will have minimal capital gains distributions. I would not recommend selling an index mutual fund and taking a short-term capital gain just to buy the equivalent ETF. "Usually, the amswer to ""why sell it"" is ""to maintain the specific distribution balance, or to track the index, that this fund was designed to offer."" A ""buy and hold"" fund could only buy when users are actively putting money into it. That limits their ability to follow those approaches.  And I think there would be problems msking withdrawls/redeptions ""fair"", in terms of what shares are sold and how the costs for selling them are distributed, that don't arise for a single buy-and-hold investor. If you're willing to accept the limitations of the former, and can overcome the latter, it's an interesting idea...  But note that one of the places index funds save money is that, since the composition of indexes changes rately, they are already operating mostly in buy-and-hold mode.It's unclear how much your variant would save. Worth exploring in greater depth, though. I think." I think you need a diversified portfolio, and index funds can be a part of that. Make sure that you understand the composition of your funds and that they are in fact invested in different investments. More importantly, index funds are denominated in specific currencies. You can't buy or sell an index, so it can be dimensionless. Anything you actually do to track the index involves real amounts of real money. You better buy an ETF that does the same, because it would be much cheaper than mutual fund (and probably much cheaper than doing it yourself and rebalancing to keep up with the index).  Look at DIA for example. Neither buying the same amount of stocks nor buying for the same amount of money would be tracking the DJIE. The proportions are based on the market valuation of each of the companies in the index. One advantage not pointed out yet is that closed-end funds typically trade on stock exchanges, whereas mutual funds do not.  This makes closed-end funds more accessible to some investors. I'm a Canadian, and this particular distinction matters to me.  With my regular brokerage account, I can buy U.S. closed-end funds that trade on a stock exchange, but I cannot buy U.S. mutual funds, at least not without the added difficulty of somehow opening a brokerage account outside of my country. EFA must be bought and sold in US dollars. XIN allows people to buy and sell EFA in Canadian dollars without exposing their investment to unpredictable swings in the USD/CAD ratio.  This is what's known as a currency-hedged instrument. Now, why the chart sums up to over 100% is anyone's guess.  Presumably it's the result of a couple hundred rounding errors from all the components.  If you view their most recent report, it also sums up to over 100%, but at least the EFA component is (sensibly) under 100%. P.S. I'm not seeing where it says there's only one holding.  There's the primary holding, plus over 100 other cash holdings to effect the currency-hedging. Sure, but as a retail client you'd be incurring transaction fees on entry and exit. Do you have the necessary tools to manage all the corporate actions, too? And index rebalances?   ETF managers add value by taking away the monstrous web of clerical work associated with managing a portfolio of, at times, hundreds of different names. With this comes the value of institutional brokerage commissions, data licenses, etc. I think if you were to work out the actual brokerage cost, as well as the time you'd have to spend doing it yourself, you'd find that just buying the ETF is far cheaper.  Also a bit of a rabbit hole, but how would you (with traditional retail client tools) even coordinate the simultaneous purchase of all 500 components of something like SPY? I would guess that, on average, you're going to have significantly worse slippage to the index than a typical ETF provider. Add that into your calculation too. Cost.  If an investor wanted to diversify his portfolio by investing in the companies that make up the S&P 500, the per-share and commission costs to individually place trades for each and every one of those companies would be prohibitive. I can buy one share of an exchange-traded fund that tracks the S&P 500 for less than the purchase price of a single share in some of the companies that make up the index. There is little difference between buying shares in your broker's index fund and shares of their corresponding ETF.  In many cases the money invested in an ETF gets essentially stuffed right into the index fund (I believe Vanguard does this, for example).  In either case you will be paying a little bit of tax.  In the ETF case it will be on the dividends that are paid out.  In the index fund case it will additionally be on the capital gains that have been realized within the fund, which are very few for an index fund.  Not a ton in either case.  The more important tax consideration is between purchase and sale, which is the same in either case. I'd say stick it wherever the lowest fees are. You probably bought the cross listed WestJet stock.  If you wanted to buy shares on the TSE, I'd suspect you'd have to find a way to open a brokerage account within Canada and then you'd be able to buy the shares.  However, this could get complicated to some extent as there could be requirements of Canadian tax stuff like a Social Insurance Number that may require some paperwork.  In addition, you'd have to review tax law of both countries to determine how to appropriately report to each country your income as there are various rules around that. TD Waterhouse would be the Canadian subsidiary of TD Ameritrade though I haven't tried to create a Canadian brokerage account. See the following information: http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Treasury_Inflation_Protected_Security You can buy individual bonds or you can purchase many of them together as a mutual fund or ETF. These bonds are designed to keep pace with inflation.  Buying individual inflation-protected US government bonds is about as safe as you can get in the investment world. The mutual fund or ETF approach exposes you to interest rate risk - the fund's value can (and sometimes does) drop. Its value can also increase if interest rates fall. "@sdg's answer is spot-on with the advice to avoid repeated conversions, but I'd like to provide some specifics on the fees involved: Each time you round-trip Canadian dollars (CAD) through a U.S.-dollar (USD) priced security at TD Waterhouse and leave your proceeds in CAD, you're paying a total foreign exchange fee – implied in their rate  spread – of about 3%, give or take. That's ~3% per buy & sell combination, or ~1.5% on each end. You can imagine if you trade back & forth frequently, you can quickly lose a lot of money.  Do it back and forth ten times in a year and you're out ~30% on the fees alone! The TD U.S. Money Market Fund (TDB166) that TD Waterhouse is referring to has no direct commission to buy or sell, but it does have a Management Expense Ratio (MER) of 0.20% per year – basically a fee which is deducted from the fund's returns (which, today, are also close to zero.)  Practically speaking, that's a very slim fee to hold some USD in your Canadian dollar TFSA. While 0.20% is cheap, a point to keep in mind is if you maintain a significant USD balance, you are maintaining currency risk:  You can lose money in CAD terms if the CAD appreciates vs. USD. Additional references: Canadian Capitalist describes TD Waterhouse and the use of TDB166 and ""wash trades"" at How to ""Wash"" Your Trade?  He's referring to RRSPs, but the same applies to TFSAs, which came out after the post was written. Canadian Couch Potato has two relevant articles: Are US-listed ETFs Really Cheaper? and Lowering Your Currency Exchange Fees." "In practice, most (maybe all) stock indices are constructed by taking a weighted average of stock prices denominated in a single currency, and so the index implicitly does have that currency - as you suggest, US dollars for the S&P 500. In principle you can buy one ""unit"" of the S&P 500 for $2,132.98 or whatever by buying an appropriate quantity of each of its constituent stocks. Also, in a more realistic scenario where you buy an index via a tracker fund, you would typically need to buy using the underlying currency of the index and your returns will be relative to that currency - if the index goes up by 10%, your original investment in dollars is up by 10%."