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 [...]
