An Overview of Commission-Free ETFs
Three discount brokerages in Canada now offer a menu of commission-free ETFs. Scotia iTrade pioneered this feature in Canada last September, then Qtrade Investor announced a similar offering about a m [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Claymore’s Final Report Card
Tracking error—the difference between the performance of a fund and that of its benchmark—is the best way to measure an index fund’s true cost. While many investors focus on MERs, a low fee means litt [...]
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 [...]
ETF Risks in Perspective: Securities Lending
This is the final post in a series of three looking at the potential risks that ETFs may pose to the stability of financial markets. The previous two discussed synthetic and leveraged ETFs. Now we’ll [...]
Vanguard Drops the Gloves
It’s not easy to make a splash in the crowded ETF space these days. Many of the new products we’ve seen in the last year or so have been clones of existing ETFs or exotic specialty funds. Any Canadian [...]
ETF Risks in Perspective: Leveraged ETFs
This post is the second of three that will look at the potential risks that ETFs may pose to the stability of financial markets. Last week I discussed synthetic ETFs, which use derivatives called swap [...]
How ETFs Came Under Fire
ETFs are on the hot seat these days. On Wednesday, a US Senate subcommittee held a hearing to consider the idea that ETFs are contributing to volatility and instability in the financial markets. This [...]
Why Staying the Course Isn’t “Doing Nothing”
On Tuesday I linked to a poll of some 200 institutional investors who were asked about their outlook for global equity markets. The smart money seems to be evenly split between buyers, sellers, holder [...]
