The Role of Preferred Shares
Preferred shares are often considered a hybrid security, since they share characteristics of both common stocks and corporate bonds. Like bonds, preferreds typically have a predictable income stream. [...]
After-Tax Returns on Canadian ETFs
When you invest in a non-registered account, you need to be concerned about more than just your funds’ performance: you also need to know how much of your return will be eaten up by taxes. Unfortunate [...]
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. [...]
Why Currency Hedging Doesn’t Work in Canada
In the last two years, Canadian ETF providers have finally launched US and international equity ETFs that do away with currency hedging. Yet the strategy remains hugely popular: the hedged versions of [...]
The True Cost of Foreign Withholding Taxes
Back in the fall of 2012, I wrote a pair of blog posts about the impact of foreign withholding taxes in US and international equity funds. The first explained the general idea of this tax on foreign d [...]
Ask the Spud: Is There an Optimal Portfolio?
Q: I’m new to passive investing and am deciding how to allocate between the asset classes. The best split between Canadian equity, international equity, etc. should be determinable based on studies of [...]
The Failed Promise of Market Timing
I’ve long believed the most difficult part of being a Couch Potato investor is resisting temptation. Index investors are asked to be content with market returns, but they are bombarded daily by fund c [...]
Looking for Value in Canadian Equity ETFs
Monday’s post about factor analysis was, I admit, too technical for most readers’ tastes. At least that’s the conclusion I drew when the two most enthusiastic comments came from a professor of statist [...]
Going on a Factor-Finding Mission
Pick up almost any financial magazine or newspaper and you’ll find full-page ads touting the recent performance of mutual funds and ETFs. What’s the reason for their outperformance? The fund companies [...]
More Power in Passive Portfolios
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 [...]
