A deposit estimate is not a brokerage instruction
WealthPie estimates how an amount maps to saved targets; brokerage deposits and account actions remain with your brokerage.
Planning what to buy and actually buying it are two separate acts. WealthPie helps with the first.
What a deposit estimate tells you
A deposit estimate in WealthPie answers one question: if I invest this amount, how would it distribute across my saved pie targets? The answer is expressed as dollar amounts per slice based on the percentage targets you set. A $1,000 planning amount against a pie with a 60% equity slice and a 40% bond slice produces a $600 equity estimate and a $400 bond estimate. This is the plan — what your targets imply about the distribution of the new money.
Why the estimate is not a trade
WealthPie is not connected to your brokerage in a way that places orders. The estimate is an output for your own reference — you carry it into your brokerage platform and use it to guide the actual trades you decide to place. Prices, minimum lot sizes, available share prices, and account-specific rules (like partial share eligibility) all affect whether the estimate translates to exact trades. The estimate is the target; your brokerage execution is the implementation.
The planning layer and the execution layer
Keeping planning separate from execution is a deliberate design choice in WealthPie. Many investors make poor trade decisions because they try to plan and trade simultaneously. When you are looking at order screens, it is easy to make adjustments on the fly that deviate from the original plan. Running the estimate separately — before opening the brokerage app — gives you a reference point to stay anchored to when the trade window is open.
What to do with the estimate at the brokerage
Take the per-slice dollar amounts from the deposit estimate and convert them to share counts using the current market price. This conversion is the last step before placing a trade. For ETFs, it is usually clean — divide the estimated dollar amount by the ETF price to get the share count, adjusting for whole shares if your brokerage does not support fractional purchases. For Canadian ETFs with bid-ask spreads, buying at the ask price gives a conservative share-count estimate.