In a recent column in The Globe and Mail, Rob Carrick wrote about a financial adviser who says he is investing based on a new fangled strategy called “the risk barbell”. A barbell is an asset allocation strategy that provides exposure to asset classes at the two extreme ends of the risk spectrum. The adviser [...]
Aggressive Pension Return Assumptions: The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zweig points out that many private pension plans have unrealistic expectations of double digit returns from stocks. On the other hand, Berkshire Hathaway, whose pension plan is overseen by Warren Buffett, expects stock returns to range between 8% and 9%. Pricey Dividend Payers: This column in [...]
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s speech in Davos last week set off a mini firestorm when he briefly touched upon the need to make social programs sustainable as the population ages rapidly: We have already taken steps to limit the growth of our health care spending over that period. We must do the same for our [...]
Recently, BlackRock which offers 48 ETFs in Canada under the iShares label announced that it will be acquiring Claymore Canada, a vendor of 34 exchange-traded funds. The press release accompanying the announcement said that the transaction enhances BlackRock’s ability to “deliver excellence in innovation, quality and choice”. According to the Canadian ETF Association, iShares is [...]
[Note: The following is a guest post by Norm Klatt, Senior Vice-President at Concentra Financial, which made a winning bid of $5,000 in the Bloggers for Charity initiative. I thank them for the generous donation to charity.] In today’s uncertain economic times, there’s value in taking a closer look at a group of reliable financial [...]
In the past couple of updates on the performance of currency-neutral funds, we found that these funds do not quite live up to the expectation of removing the effects of currency fluctuations for a modest cost. Instead the currency-neutral funds show a performance lag ranging from 2.33% for the iShares S&P 500 CAD-Hedged ETF (TSX: [...]
[Note: This post was originally published on January 6, 2010. I've updated it with the data for the past two years on the performance of the iShares MSCI EAFE CAD-Hedged Index Fund (TSX: XIN) relative to MSCI EAFE local currency returns. Bottom line: Though the performance lag of the past two years was slight, the [...]
[Note: The following post was originally published on Jan 3, 2010. I've now updated it with the latest returns for XSP and IVV. The bottom line is that the performance of currency-hedged funds still lags that of the local currency fund by a significant margin.] Many investors would like to have exposure to US stocks [...]
Background: I started the Sleepy Portfolio in 2005 to benchmark my personal portfolio, which at that time was mostly invested in individual stocks. The portfolio started off with an initial outlay of $100,000 but no new money has been added since. This is not a model portfolio; it reflects investment returs that can be obtained [...]
Like the year before it, 2011 was a modest year for asset classes except that the signs were mostly negative. Despite the pronounced volatility, stocks finished modestly negative for the year. In a negative year for stocks, bonds did their job of providing ballast to a portfolio and finished in the positive column. REITs once [...]
