Tax Loss Harvesting Revisited
No one likes to see their investments plummet in value, but it’s going to happen many times over your lifetime. If you’ve got a strategy for tax loss selling, you can make the best of the situation by [...]
An Interview With Wealthsimple: Part 1
Wealthsimple is one of several online investment firms that have launched in Canada this year. They’ve often been referred to as robo-advisors, though they reject that name, and with good reason. Whil [...]
How to Estimate Stock and Bond Returns
Even the simplest financial plan requires assumptions about how your investments will perform. We know these assumptions can never be perfectly accurate, but they need to be thoughtful and reasonable. [...]
Ask the Spud: Is My Pension Like a Bond?
Q: My wife and I have been using the Couch Potato strategy for a few years now, but something has always nagged me. I am fortunate enough to have a defined benefit pension that will pay me $50,000 a y [...]
Will Robo-Advisors Ever Come to Canada?
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 [...]
Calculate Your Personal Rate of Return
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 [...]
Pulling Off the Bandage Quickly
Deferred sales charges (DSCs) may have been the mutual fund industry’s greatest marketing innovation. Back in the 1980s, it wasn’t unusual for funds to be sold with front-end loads of 5% or more. Then [...]
More DIY Investing Challenges
In my last post, I looked at some of the biggest challenges faced by DIY investors. I came up with the list after working with clients of PWL Capital’s DIY Investor Service. The theory behind indexing [...]
Is Your Portfolio Just a Pile of Parts?
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 [...]
It’s Time to Ban Advisor Commissions
Should financial advisors be banned from collecting commissions on mutual funds? That’s been hotly debated for years, and in December the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) issued a discussion p [...]
