Sometimes I wonder why everyone isn’t getting better returns than a simple Couch Potato portfolio. Spend a little time and you’ll discover all kinds of strategies that beat the market. And I’m not tal [...]
Q: The Global Couch Potato has one-third of the equity allocation in Canadian stocks, but Canada makes up only about 4% of the world markets. Aren’t you guilty of home country bias? – Jeremy D. I’m ac [...]
Earlier this week I described the market timing strategy outlined in Mebane Faber’s book The Ivy Portfolio. I chose not to editorialize too much, preferring instead to simply explain the strategy to r [...]
In recent years, the so-called Yale Model has been extremely popular with investors. The model is an attempt to mimic the investment strategy used by Ivy League endowment funds, which have an outstand [...]
If your portfolio loses 1% today and gains 1% tomorrow, are you back to even? Not quite, but you’re awfully close. You actually need a gain of 1.01% to get back to where you started. While that differ [...]
When we consider the risk in investing, we’re often thinking about volatility: that is, the sometimes dramatic movements in equity prices. But as Alan Fustey explains in his book, Risk, Financial Mark [...]
If you’ve researched the theoretical foundations of index investing, you’ve no doubt come across Modern Portfolio Theory and the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. And if you read the commentaries of activ [...]
I once went to an investment seminar at my local library. It was attended by a handful of folks who had little or no experience with investing and were looking for someone to put them on the right tra [...]
As loyal readers will know, I’ve been critical of the zeal with which some investors approach dividends. Based on countless blog posts, emails and conversations, I feel that many investors’ preference [...]
Tracking error—the difference between the performance of a fund and that of its benchmark—is the best way to measure an index fund’s true cost. While many investors focus on MERs, a low fee means litt [...]
A blog designed for Canadians who want to learn more about investing using index mutual funds and exchange-traded funds.
