Can You Have Too Much Diversification?
Is it possible for a portfolio to be too diversified? There are certainly a lot of articles making that claim. Investopedia even has one called The Dangers of Over-Diversifying Your Portfolio that con [...]
Vanguard Canada Gets a Six-Month Checkup
It's now been a year since Vanguard set up shop in Canada, and just over six months since their ETFs began trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange. This week I had an opportunity to chat with Atul Tiwar [...]
A Homemade Principal-Protected Note
Given the widespread fear among investors today, it’s not surprising that financial institutions offer a staggering number of structured products that come with guarantees. Both market-linked GICs and [...]
Why Plans Should Come Before Products
When I wrote the MoneySense Guide to the Perfect Portfolio [now out of print], I waited until Chapter 5 before I started discussing specific ETFs and index funds. That was a deliberate decision, becau [...]
Carl Richards on Performance Chasing
A couple of posts ago, I asked why everyone isn’t beating the market when there are a dozen or more strategies that promise long-term outperformance. I argued that the problem wasn’t so much that the [...]
Inside the DFA Global Balanced Fund
Long-time readers will know that I’ve written before about Dimensional Fund Advisors, an innovative investment firm that builds low-cost, widely diversified funds. I enjoy keeping an eye on DFA, becau [...]
Why Isn’t Everyone Beating the Market?
Sometimes I wonder why everyone isn’t getting better returns than a simple Couch Potato portfolio. Spend a little time and you’ll discover all kinds of strategies that beat the market. And I’m not tal [...]
Ask the Spud: Does Home Bias Ever Make Sense?
Q: The Global Couch Potato has one-third of the equity allocation in Canadian stocks, but Canada makes up only about 4% of the world markets. Aren’t you guilty of home country bias? – Jeremy D. I’m ac [...]
Why I Have No Faith in Market Timing
Earlier this week I described the market timing strategy outlined in Mebane Faber’s book The Ivy Portfolio. I chose not to editorialize too much, preferring instead to simply explain the strategy to r [...]
Market Timing Goes to College
In recent years, the so-called Yale Model has been extremely popular with investors. The model is an attempt to mimic the investment strategy used by Ivy League endowment funds, which have an outstand [...]
