The Promise of Low Volatility
The relationship between risk and reward is one of the most fundamental in finance: to get higher returns, say the traditional models, you must accept more risk. There’s just one problem with that ide [...]
Virtual Brokers Becomes the ETF Leader
The Globe and Mail announced its annual discount brokerage rankings yesterday and crowned a new winner. Virtual Brokers took top spot for 2012, ending a six-year run by Qtrade. In his article about th [...]
Profitability: Entering a New Dimension?
Investors should always be skeptical about new strategies that promise abnormal returns. As I explained in last week’s post, some of those strategies are dubious to begin with, and even legitimate one [...]
Why Market-Beating Strategies Don’t Last
This past spring I asked why everyone isn’t beating the market when countless strategies have been shown to deliver outsized returns—at least in theory. I put it down to self-destructive behaviour, bu [...]
Don’t Invest in the Rear-View Mirror
Investors face many behavioral biases—that’s just part of being human. Perhaps the most difficult to overcome is recency bias: the tendency to believe what has happened in the immediate past is likely [...]
Should You Buy Stocks For Your Kids?
If you’re a parent, how can you set your child on the road to investing success? One popular way is to buy young kids shares in companies familiar to them—maybe Disney, Apple, or McDonald’s. The idea [...]
Review: Abnormal Returns
Tadas Viskanta's blog, Abnormal Returns, has gained a large and prestigious following during its seven-plus years. His new book of the same name also deserves a wide readership. Abnormal Returns (McGr [...]
Why RESPs Should Be Kept Simple
In the last couple of weeks I’ve received two questions from readers who were trying to figure out the right strategy for their children’s education savings accounts. Both were smart questions that st [...]
Barry Gordon on Building an Index: Part 2
In Monday’s post I shared part one of my interview with Barry Gordon, CEO of First Asset, who explained how his firm worked with Morningstar to create new ETF indexes. In part two the interview, Gordo [...]
Barry Gordon on Building an Index
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, all ETFs tracked well-known third-party indexes like the S&P 500. But it wasn’t long before all of the major benchmarks were spoken for and ETF providers bega [...]
