Thanks for the kind comments. Interesting info you posted too.

The books/Publications I found interesting :

I have a subscription to Money sense Magazine, it’s easy to read and they cover a wide variety of topics.

The warren buffet way
The lies about money
How to pay less and keep more for yourself. Rob Carrick- who seems to get a lot of bad comments on the internet. But I liked his book very much. One of my favorites. Agrees about the poor returns of many mutual funds and the crazy fees. Backs it up with numbers. I like his approach.
Lazy persons guide to investing (book about many different strategy’s) – first book i read about couch potato portfolio’s.
The Lazy investor
Live for today plan for tomorrow. Written by a local person not far from where i live. Approaches investing combined with life decisions. Very different read.
Start late finish rich
100 best stocks you can buy in 2009
Plus a lot of sit down time at Chapters, just going through anything interesting. I read most of a recent book i think it was called “Enough” by the founder of Vanguard Funds there. A very interesting read.

The Investopedia.com website with a cool stock simulator is quite informative as well.

I would like to find a free & simple Mutual/Index fund Simulator website if there is one out there I would appreciate someone sending me a link.

One other source depending on your view of use of the internet is like music and movies if you look around you can download a multitude of e-books and magazines from the internet from bit torrent sites. I know I’m a pirate I’m bad! Sorry! You will be very surprised to see what is there particularly at Demonoid.

I read just about anything related to business, including the newspaper business section every day i can and Google Finance news and tools.

Oh yes I just purchased a copy of the investors “bible” – The intelligent investor. That’s my next read. the new edition i got has comments on each chapter to help explain them.

This is a really nice site too – I found it by accident.

Here is the trailing commission schedule of a bank’ mutual fund line up:

index funds: .25% (MER: 1%)
fixed income funds: .50% (MER: 1 to 1.25%)
balanced funds: .75% (MER: 1.5%)
equity funds: 1.25% (MER: 2.5%)

According to RedFlagDeal forum post, financial planner (mutual fund sales person) gets 65% to 85% of the trailing commission. Equity funds’ trailing commission is 5 times higher than index funds.

According to my understanding, corporate funds have lower MERs, because they do not pay trailing commission.

I feel you need to Time it a little even if you lose a little on the way up and down. With my little knowledge I rebalanced my portfolio about 16 months ago. I also spread it out into as many different products offered as i could. I kept hearing 2008 was going to be bad for equities from so many sources that I felt I had to do something. I have a decent little portfolio with work where i can shuffle funds from one class/type to the other for no cost when i want. So that makes it easy for me.

I have only lost 14% of my portfolio’s value over that period. I consider that pretty fortunate, other employees in the same group plan have lost up to 60% in aggressive portfolios.

There are 4-5 funds available to me in our group plan that have lost 50% of their value, I’m going to buy some of those up at this new low value (transfer over) as soon as see some signs we are climbing back out of this. Even if i miss out on 10% of gain to be sure things are going forward I intend to ride those back up to to their previous levels. I won’t be greedy and will re balance once the funds get back to the level they were at or there are signs of possible other moves to protect or to make a better return.

To me a lot of these mutual funds are simply dogs. They just give you enough to beat interest bearing investments. The Mer’s on a lot of them are ridiculous. The only people truly making money are the fund managers and brokerage companies. They prey on the lack of investor knowledge and do very little for the individual. I mean why would they? If you work for London life for example who are you really trying to make money for? Yourself and your bosses first of course.

Even now the strategy is still the same, keep buying, stick with the plan because the unit values are low, “sorry sir yes i know, your million dollars is now $500,000″, no big deal, stick with the plan.

Please someone tell me how this strategy really works? Why are so many financial planners unwilling to just tweak peoples plans? I’m not saying trade it like a stock but is it so bad to re balance to be a little defensive for a time and aggressive when times are better?

Let me use a conundrum I’m currently facing re: TFSA’s. I’m going to transfer assets in-kind, so no real gains/losses. However if I transfer assets on day 1, I might get 100 units in. If I transfer on day 2, I might get 90 or 110 units in depending on the particular swing in the market that day.

So… in essence, I am trying to time the market, but I’ll maintain the holding. Now I just wish I knew something about timing the market…

I wonder if the last sentence in your post was bait for me!

The mistakes made by these folks does not provide proof-positive that market timing doesn’t work. Their efforts in this particular case did not work. That’s it.

Market timing isn’t for everyone. Even when you have a timer that works well, the psychological side of timing is challenging.

My US timer told me to get out the market on June 11 and my Canadian timer told me to get of the market on June 12. We all know what has happened since!

I should add that it is easier take full advantage of market timing when you are managing a personal portfolio as compared to a mutual fund.

Fred