What Is the Advisor’s Role?
John Lawrence Reynolds' newest book, The Skeptical Investor, argues that Canadians were badly served by their advisors during the crash of 2008–09. The book has all the wit and outrage of his previous [...]
Does This Thing Work?
This week I received an email from a reader of MoneySense magazine, where I write regularly about the Couch Potato strategy. Kate was concerned that index investing wasn’t delivering on its promises. [...]
Another Reason to Distrust the Fund Industry
I recently had a chance to interview Ken Kivenko, who runs Canadian Fund Watch and is allied with the Small Investor Protection Association. Ken is a tireless advocate for investors who have been ripp [...]
Review: The Gone Fishin’ Portfolio
Alexander Green retired at age 43 after having made his fortune as an investment adviser, market analyst and portfolio manager. He thinks the efficient markets hypothesis—one of the fundamental ideas [...]
Review: Lifecycle Investing
Most investors understand that you should have more exposure to stocks when you’re young and gradually allocate more to bonds and cash as you approach retirement. In their new book, Lifecycle Investin [...]
Should You Use Index Funds or ETFs?
[Note: A more up-to-date discussion of this idea, including a spreadsheet to help you with the math, can be found here.] This week I got an email from a reader who is in the process of firing her advi [...]
Not All Indexes Are Created Equal
The recently launched BMO Equal Weight REITs (ZRE), which invests in Canadian real estate investment trusts, will go head-to-head with the iShares S&P/TSX Capped REIT (XRE), which until now had n [...]
Build Your Own Pension-Fund Portfolio
It’s always interesting to know what the smart money is doing. And I’m not talking about the investment managers who appear on BNN to “talk their book” — like the guy who runs the precious metals fund [...]
Tips for Trading ETFs
I happened to have Google Finance open on my computer last week when the “flash crash” happened. While the market's whipsaw on May 6 affected almost all stocks, it seems that ETFs were particularly ha [...]
Indexing’s Dirty Little Secret
“Most actively managed mutual funds underperform the market.” Couch Potato investors sing this refrain all the time in defense of ETFs and index funds. I’ve done it many times myself — a bit smugly, I [...]
