Rebalancing With Cash Flows
With stocks continuing to enjoy a roaring bull market, rebalancing is on the minds of many investors—or at least it should be. Disciplined investing starts with choosing long-term targets for the asse [...]
ShareOwner: Canada’s First ETF Robo-Advisor
Back in February I wrote about the rise of robo-advisors, the online services that allow you to build an ETF portfolio that’s maintained by a computer. These services are already operating in the US, [...]
How One Investor Found Inner Peace
Most people who embrace index investing are attracted to the low fees and the proven performance compared with a majority of active strategies. But another advantage sometimes gets overlooked, and tha [...]
Inside the RBC Quant Dividend Leaders ETFs
In January, RBC launched the Quant Dividend Leaders ETFs, a family of dividend-focused funds covering the Canadian, U.S. and international markets. I recently had a chance to speak with Bill Tilford, [...]
Ask the Spud: Is My Pension Like a Bond?
Q: My wife and I have been using the Couch Potato strategy for a few years now, but something has always nagged me. I am fortunate enough to have a defined benefit pension that will pay me $50,000 a y [...]
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 [...]
Will Robo-Advisors Ever Come to Canada?
Every investor who's fired a bad advisor and become a do-it-yourselfer has probably had mixed feelings. On one hand, it’s liberating to get away from a costly strategy that was performing poorly. But [...]
A Periodic Review of Diversification
After the financial crisis of 2008–09, financial commentators loved to take shots at “old school” investment strategies. First came the declarations that diversification no longer works, because durin [...]
A Reality Check for Couch Potatoes
The investment industry never misses an opportunity to take credit for outstanding performance. In fact, many mutual fund providers crow about their returns even when they're mediocre or downright bad [...]
Calculate Your Personal Rate of Return
On January 9, I published the 2013 returns of my model portfolios. The equity markets performed spectacularly last year, but most investors are likely to be far more interested in the performance of t [...]
