Adjusted Cost Base With US-listed ETFs
Many readers have used our white paper, As Easy as ACB, to learn how to calculate the adjusted cost base of their Canadian ETF holdings. I’ve received several comments and questions from readers who w [...]
Tax Tips for BMO ETF Investors
Last week I offered some tips for investors who are tracking their adjusted cost base with Vanguard ETFs. In this post I’ll offer similar advice for those who use BMO exchange-traded funds. These tips [...]
A Tax Tip for Vanguard ETF Investors
As the tax filing deadline approaches, many investors are busy calculating the adjusted cost base for their ETF holdings. Last year at this time, Justin Bender and I collaborated on a paper called As [...]
The Couch Potato Mutual Fund is Here At Last
[Note: This was an April Fool's joke!] One of the perennial problems with ETFs is they require you to open a discount brokerage account and learn to trade individual securities. That can be intimidati [...]
iShares Cuts Its Fees to the Core
That sound you just heard was the latest shot fired in Canada’s ETF price war. iShares has just slashed the management fees on several popular equity and bond ETFs—and just like that the country’s old [...]
When the Smart Money Does Dumb Things
Investors can a learn a lot from pension funds, particularly when it comes to diversification, risk management and long-term thinking. But it seems professional money managers are not immune from the [...]
How Pension Funds Think About Bonds
With the bond market up about 3% year-to-date, the bears have been growling less than usual. But I still get a steady stream of email from readers who think bonds “make no sense anymore” because they [...]
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 [...]
iShares Advantaged ETFs: Where Are They Now?
Before being bought by BlackRock early in 2012, Claymore Investments pioneered many new services and unconventional products. One of these was its so-called Advantaged ETFs, which used a complicated s [...]
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 [...]
