- Comments (2)
- Text Size: Down Up
moneysense.ca, 26/07/12
This and That: Bernstein Interview, League REIT and more…
In an interview with the IndexUniverse website, Bill Bernstein, among other things, takes a dig at Peter Schiff and explains the importance of cash as an asset class.
In this thread, Canadian Money Forum members discuss League, a private REIT, that recently suspended their distributions to investors. Ironically, the Internet is littered with League ads still promising 8 percent returns.
An op-ed piece in The New York Times argues that voluntary, self-directed and commercially run retirement plans such as our RRSPs are doomed to failure.
Jason Zweig highlights some recent research that blames an area of the brain just behind the forehead for investors falling prey to recency bias — the tendency to extrapolate recent returns into the future.
In the US, the average expense ratio and bid-ask spreads of exchange-traded funds are going up. But if you look at asset weighted costs instead, ETFs remain a very low cost investment product, says Vanguard.
Investors are flocking to covered-call ETFs. Dan Hallett warns that investors who are loading up might be giving away too much future upside in exchange for current income.
Tom Bradley explored some of the similarities that a game of golf has with investing.
Jon Chevreau weighed in on how both “cash is trash” and “cash is king” can be true depending on the context.
Investors don’t seem to have much appetite for stocks these days but this article suggests that stocks are likely to significantly outperform bonds over the next decade. It would have been nice if some compelling arguments had been presented in support of this thesis.
moneysense.ca, 26/07/12









Reading the Bill Bernstein interview: how would a canadian do the equivalent of having their “bond” allocation in cash. I’m thinking longterm money and a sizeable amount of money – over 50,000. And please make it clear if it is necessary to head over to the US and buy their short term T-bills or not. Can we assume that short gov’t T-Bills (ours or theirs) will always beat inflation? Assume I know nothing – I think there are at least two different questions here.
@Flagen: Canada has T-bills too. T-bills are short-term investments that mature within a year. You can purchase them at a discount broker in multiples of $5,000. There are no guarantees that T-bills will always beat inflation. Currently, these bills yield less than 0.5% when inflation is running at about 1.5%.