Ask the Spud: Should I Hold US Bonds?
Q: One of my coworkers and I recently started our own Couch Potato portfolios and we're wondering if it would be better to have some American bonds in the mix. Wouldn’t that be another way to diversif [...]
A New Way to Sidestep Currency Conversion Costs
One of my biggest frustrations as an ETF investor is that so few online brokerages allow you to hold US dollars in registered accounts. Last year BMO InvestorLine became just the fourth brokerage to a [...]
Scott Burns Interview: Part 2
Here is part two of my interview with Scott Burns, the newspaper columnist and Chief Investment Strategist at AssetBuilder who created the original Couch Potato portfolio more than 20 years ago. You c [...]
An Interview with the Original Couch Potato
"Allow me to introduce the Couch Potato Portfolio, a surefire formula to invest your money, enjoy a return that will put you in the top half of all professional investors, but expend virtually no effo [...]
Inside Morningstar’s New Strategy Indexes
On Monday, I wrote a post about a new Canadian dividend fund from XTF Capital. That fund is one of five new products from the newest ETF provider in the country, all of which are based on indexes prov [...]
Are Active Funds Adding Value?
Just how well are mutual fund investors faring in Canada? That question isn’t as straightforward as it may seem. The Standard & Poor’s Indices Versus Active (SPIVA) reports are useful for determin [...]
Market Forecasts Prove Worthless—Again
I’m confused by a lot of things in investing, but the enduring influence of market forecasts is the one that stumps me the most. Year after year, expert predictions, estimates, forecasts and projectio [...]
Tax-Efficient Investing With ETFs
If you’re investing outside of tax-sheltered accounts like RRSPs and TFSAs, you need to choose your investments carefully—otherwise you risk giving a big slice of your returns to the good people at th [...]
Dividends: Not As Tax-Friendly As You May Think
If your investments include RRSPs, TFSAs and taxable accounts, asset location is an important consideration. The returns of various asset classes—such as bonds, Canadian stocks, and foreign stocks—are [...]
Are ETFs Growing for the Wrong Reasons?
On the day his company announced it was acquiring Claymore, BlackRock’s CEO Bill Chinery called ETFs “electric cars in a world of internal combustion engines.” What he meant was that ETFs, despite the [...]
