While getting rid of old magazines recently, I ran into a Fortune magazine story from the turn of the century. Titled, 10 Stocks To Last The Decade, the column claimed that investors should bet on four “sweeping” trends that are sure to make money over the next decade: communications networking, entertainment, financial services and biotech. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
[The top bid in the Bloggers for Charity initiative is $400 by Straight Talk Investing's Dr. Dale Rathgeber. The deadline for sending in your bids is tomorrow, so if you want to outbid Dr. Dale, you may want to hurry and contact me directly.] iShares recently introduced a Floating Rate Note ETF (Factsheet, Prospectus) that [...]
In recent columns, Jon Chevreau took Investors Group to task for the sky-high MERs charged by its mutual funds. He rightly questioned why investors have $12.73 billion parked in the Investors Dividend Mutual Fund with a MER of 2.69% when the iShares Dow Jones Select Dividend ETF (TSX: XDV) has pretty much the same holdings [...]
