Q: Recently the bond market—and 40% of my Global Couch Potato portfolio—has dipped significantly. I understand swings like this occur from time to time, but with interest rates moving higher would it [...]
Is there difference between a diversified portfolio and a collection of investments? That’s an insightful question Chris Turnbull asks in his new book Your Portfolio is Broken: Who’s to Blame and How [...]
Just shy of two years ago—in October 2011—I wrote a post that laid out the year-to-date returns for the Complete Couch Potato portfolio. If you can remember that far back, the third quarter of 2011 wa [...]
There are many reasons why relatively few Canadian investors use ETFs compared with actively managed mutual funds. There’s about $900 billion in mutual funds in this country, while ETF assets total ab [...]
The comments following my recent post about new ETFs from Vanguard were another reminder of just how often investors get overly focused on products. I accept part of the blame here, since I write a lo [...]
Vanguard Canada launched some new ETFs this week, and I spoke with managing director Atul Tiwari about the funds. Let’s take a closer look. Cross-Canada coverage The Vanguard FTSE Canada All Cap (VCN) [...]
Last week, Advisor.ca published a debate under the heading “Faceoff: Index, friend or foe?” The arguments against passive investing should be helpful to mutual fund salespeople trying desperately to d [...]
When the yield on 10-year federal bonds spiked earlier this year—from 1.88% on May 16 all the way to 2.55% on July 5—the value of broad-based bond ETFs plummeted sharply. But I’ll wager that many inve [...]
Rick Ferri and Alex Benke recently collaborated on an interesting white paper called A Case for Index Fund Portfolios, which I introduced in my previous post. They compared index portfolios to thousan [...]
It’s well known that the majority of actively managed mutual funds underperform comparable index funds over any period longer than a few years. In fact, that statement has become so uncontroversial th [...]
A blog designed for Canadians who want to learn more about investing using index mutual funds and exchange-traded funds.
