Canadian Capitalist

Now that the federal budget has survived a vote in the parliament, I need to look into what changes can be made in our retirement accounts to take advantage of the elimination of foreign property restrictions. The first place to look is clone funds that use derivatives to qualify as Canadian content. In our portfolios, we have two such funds: the iUnits S&P 500 Index fund (TSX: XSP) and iUnits MSCI fund (TSX: XIN).
XSP has a MER of 0.30%, whereas the equivalent iShares S&P 500 Index fund (AMEX: IVV) has a MER of .09%, an annual difference of 21 basis points. Going forward, I plan to liquidate XSP and invest the proceeds and new money in the IVV index fund.
XIN has a MER of 0.35%, the same as the iShares MSCI EAFE fund. So, I’ll just hang on to them. Fortunately, I don’t have any expensive clone mutual funds in our portfolios.

Bookmark:   del.icio.us Digg StumbleUpon

Related Posts:

• Foreign Investments for Canadians
• Switching from Index Mutual Funds to ETFs
• The Sleepy Portfolio Building Blocks III
• Index ETFs: iUnits or iShares
• A Mutual Fund Investor