Canadian Capitalist

I received our auto and home insurance renewal notice in the mail today. Auto insurance (no accidents, demerits or claims in the last year) is 8.7% cheaper than the previous year but home insurance is 7.7% dearer. Overall, home and auto premiums together are 4% cheaper than last year.
The insurance industry has been making record [...]

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In my previous post, I wrote about a possible housing bubble, signs of which seem to be everywhere. Just last week, I saw an ad for real estate investing in The Ottawa Citizen that started with a Frankin D. Roosevelt quote: “Real estate is about the safest investment in the world”. So, assuming that a [...]

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Fellow blogger Ben Jones writes a blog dedicated to the housing mania sweeping the globe. For Exhibit A, check out this LA Times story and Ben’s comments on it. I can’t believe that someone would cash in their retirement funds to buy a piece of land that produces no income solely based on the “greater [...]

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This blog is mentioned in Seeking Alpha’s Finance Blog Resource Page. I often refer to the detailed work by David Jackson on index investing in the TechUncovered.com website. Thank you for the link, David.

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The Globe and Mail profiles an investor who manages his own money. I find it interesting that this investor worked in the financial services industry and says: “You’re not going to get very much good said by me about the financial services industry.”
It really bothers me that the article quotes him about financial advisers: “Whether [...]

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I am no big fan of Jim Cramer (I think he yells too much), but few can quibble with the investing rules he has been outlining on TheStreet.com. His latest rule is: Expect, Don’t Fear Corrections. Corrections are part of the game. Long-term investors should love corrections when it enables them to buy quality assets [...]

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REITs have been among the best-performing asset classes over the past 5 years and odds are they are going to under perform other asset classes in the future. Still, I am going to invest the other portion of the Sleepy Portfolio in the iUnits TSX Capped REIT Fund (TSX: XRE). The expense ratio for the [...]

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For the equity portion of the Sleepy Portfolio, we will stick to the iShares and iUnits ETFs offered by Barclays Global Investors.
The Canadian portion of the equity allocation can be split between two ETFs: the iUnits i60C (TSX: XIC) and the iUnits iMidCap (TSX: XMD). The expense ratios for these funds are 0.17% and 0.55% [...]

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I’ve never owned bonds before. Our actual portfolio is 100% in stocks and cash. Returns for various asset classes in 2004, shows the error of my ways: bonds returned a healthy 7.15%.
For the bond portion of the Sleepy portfolio, I would like to keep things as simple as possible. Barclay’s Canada recently introduced the iBond [...]

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The four main building blocks of the Sleepy Portfolio are cash (5-10%), bonds (20-25%), equities (55-70%) and other (5-10%), which is a catchall phrase for REITs, Gold and Venture Capital etc.
For the cash portion of the portfolio, we need a T-bill or money market fund with the lowest expenses. The fund should also have low [...]

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