Blog
Browse hundreds of posts from Dan’s award-winning blog for information about all aspects of Couch Potato investing.
Ask the Spud: Do I Have Enough for a DRIP?
Q: I’m planning to use my 2013 TFSA room to purchase a bond ETF. How can I make sure I’m investing enough to benefit from a dividend reinvestment plan [...]
What Investors Can Learn From Weather Forecasts
I’ve never made a secret of my opinion that acting on market forecasts is destructive to investors. Nate Silver’s fascinating new book, The Signal and [...]
A Market Forecaster’s Report Card
As 2011 came to a close, the usual army of market gurus began making predictions for 2012. I’ve often criticized market forecasters for their embarras [...]
How Much Are You Paying For US Dollars?
Currency conversion remains one of the biggest rip-offs in banking and investing. It's made worse by the lack of transparency: if you call your discou [...]
Ask the Spud: Adding a New REIT to the Index
Loblaw recently announced it will be creating a new real estate investment trust (REIT). Once it goes public, how would it be added to existing real e [...]
Passive Investing: The Movie
There are countless books laying out the case for index investing, but as far as I know there has never been a film—until now. A UK investment firm ha [...]
Ask the Spud: Combining e-Series Funds and ETFs
I use the Global Couch Potato with e-Series funds in my TD Waterhouse account, but I eventually want to use the Complete Couch Potato. Once my portfol [...]
Inside the iShares Minimum Volatility ETFs
Last week we looked at two low-volatility ETF strategies based on beta and the standard deviation of daily price movements. Now let’s complete our rou [...]
Inside the BMO and PowerShares Low-Vol ETFs
In the last 14 months or so, Canada’s ETF providers have launched several funds based on low-volatility strategies. As we saw in my last post, the res [...]
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 [...]
