In the last two years, Canadian ETF providers have finally launched US and international equity ETFs that do away with currency hedging. Yet the strategy remains hugely popular: the hedged versions of [...]
Before being bought by BlackRock early in 2012, Claymore Investments pioneered many new services and unconventional products. One of these was its so-called Advantaged ETFs, which used a complicated s [...]
Back in the fall of 2012, I wrote a pair of blog posts about the impact of foreign withholding taxes in US and international equity funds. The first explained the general idea of this tax on foreign d [...]
Q: I’m new to passive investing and am deciding how to allocate between the asset classes. The best split between Canadian equity, international equity, etc. should be determinable based on studies of [...]
Bonds are one of the least tax-friendly asset classes: most of their return comes from interest payments, which are taxed at the highest rate. They're even less tax-efficient when their market price i [...]
Every investor who's fired a bad advisor and become a do-it-yourselfer has probably had mixed feelings. On one hand, it’s liberating to get away from a costly strategy that was performing poorly. But [...]
After the financial crisis of 2008–09, financial commentators loved to take shots at “old school” investment strategies. First came the declarations that diversification no longer works, because durin [...]
The investment industry never misses an opportunity to take credit for outstanding performance. In fact, many mutual fund providers crow about their returns even when they're mediocre or downright bad [...]
On January 9, I published the 2013 returns of my model portfolios. The equity markets performed spectacularly last year, but most investors are likely to be far more interested in the performance of t [...]
My last post explained that Canadian investors are exposed to currency risk any time they hold US equities, even if their holding is an ETF or mutual fund that trades in Canadian dollars. In my exampl [...]
A blog designed for Canadians who want to learn more about investing using index mutual funds and exchange-traded funds.
