Investing

Every now and then, I get a note from a reader whose spouse or friend has gotten excited about a stock tip. Usually, it comes with a backstory: someone they know bought a few thousand shares of a penny stock and now claims to be sitting on a massive gain. Naturally, the question that follows…

  A client of mine recently opened up about feeling behind. He’s 32 years old, has yet to contribute to his TFSA, and only just started getting serious about his finances. The good news? He’s motivated. He wants to start saving $2,000 per month. That’s an incredible habit to build at any age, let alone…

I recently made a bold change to de-risk my portfolio, which now consists of just 35% globally equities and 65% short-term bonds. This wasn’t in response to tariffs and global trade wars, or my gut feeling about stock markets crashing in the near term. No, this was a predetermined change in a specific account type…

Global stocks continued the positive momentum from a strong performance in 2023 to deliver another banner year for investment returns in 2024. The gap between the NASDAQ and the rest of the market shrank, but technology stocks once again led the charge, with the tech-heavy NASDAQ gaining 24.10% (XQQ). That mark was nearly equalled by…

I started investing in individual stocks shortly after the Great Financial Crisis ended in 2009. I picked an investing strategy that closely resembled the Dogs of the TSX, buying the 10 highest yielding Canadian dividend stocks. As you can imagine, the share prices of these companies got hammered during the stock market crash so I…

The investing landscape has certainly evolved for the better over the past two decades. Gone are the days when the only way to invest was to work with an expensive broker or mutual fund salesperson. Self-directed investing platforms, robo-advisors, and all-in-one ETFs have democratized investing – making it cheap and accessible for investors to build…

Arguably no one has done more to educate Canadian do-it-yourself investors than the PWL Capital teams of Dan Bortolotti and Justin Bender, and Benjamin Felix and Cameron Passmore. It began more than a decade ago with Dan’s incredibly popular Canadian Couch Potato blog and podcast. Since then, Dan teamed up with PWL’s Justin Bender, who…

Much has been written about optimizing your portfolio(s) for tax efficiency by placing certain investments or asset classes in certain accounts. This tax planning strategy is called asset location. In this article I’m going to explain what asset location is all about, what optimal asset location can achieve, and why you should forget about it…