Product Code Database
TD Waterhouse Canada Inc. is a Canadian financial services corporation headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Toronto-Dominion Bank. The company does business through several divisions, namely TD Direct Investing, TD Wealth Financial Planning, and TD Wealth Private Investment Advice. The TD Waterhouse brand was also formerly used for TD's American and British brokerages.
In 1996, TD became the first online broker in Canada with the launch of WebBroker. In June 1999, TD spun off 42 million shares or 12.4% of TD Waterhouse in an IPO, with shares priced at $35.28 CAD or US$24 per share, earning US$1.01 billion. In 2001, with the bursting of the dot-com bubble and lower trade volumes that brought down Waterhouse's share price, TD bought back that minority stake at US$9 per share for only US$378 million, earning a tidy profit on the privatization. The acquisition was conditional on TD owning at least 90 percent of Waterhouse's outstanding common shares, and it owned almost 89 percent when the privatization was announced.
In 2003, Toronto–Dominion Bank held talks to merge Waterhouse with E-Trade, which would have created the second-largest discount broker in the United States after Charles Schwab, but the two sides could not come to an agreement over control of the merged entity. Later in 2005, E*TRADE made an unsolicited offer for Ameritrade. However, Ameritrade instead purchased TD Waterhouse USA, with TD Bank holding a 39% stake in the new entity. As part of the deal, Ameritrade sold its Canadian operations to TD Bank who merged them with TD Waterhouse Canada. When TD merged its American brokerage activities with Ameritrade, the newly formed American broker formed the brand TD Ameritrade, but the Canadian division retained the TD Waterhouse brand.
In December 2012, TD replaced the TD Waterhouse Discount Brokerage brand with TD Direct Investing. TD Direct Investing Europe, a discount broking subsidiary in the United Kingdom, with headquarters in Leeds, which also used the TD Waterhouse brand, was sold in 2016 to Interactive Investor in a deal financed by JC Flowers.
In 2022, Charles Schwab purchased TD Ameritrade, and along with it, thinkorswim. At the time, thinkorswim as one of the electronic trading platforms TD Direct Investing customers use to perform trades. In light of this, TD Active Trader was announced in 2023 to serve clients that previously used thinkorswim. TD Waterhouse also began migrating TD Direct Investing clients off of thinkorswim the same year.
|
|
