Investing

This post is sponsored by RBC InvestEase Inc. All views and opinions expressed represent my own and are based on my own research of the subject matter. Responsible investing is something on the minds of many investors today. They’re concerned about the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) aspects of economic activities. Once considered a fringe movement, retail…

Investors could have done a lot worse over the past 30 years than investing in the Mawer Balanced Fund. Mawer, which epitomizes the art of boring investing, has been nothing short of consistently brilliant – with annual returns of 8.5 percent since the fund’s inception in 1988. Investment giant Vanguard doesn’t have the same longevity…

The research firm DALBAR has been studying the behaviour of mutual fund investors for 25 years. Each year the firm reports how poorly investors fared relative to their benchmark index over time. What the data repeatedly shows is a ‘behaviour gap‘ that leads to significant investor underperformance. It suggests that investors lack the patience to…

It’s hard to find a direct flight from Calgary to Dublin. WestJet offers one that leaves Calgary at 8pm and arrives in Dublin the next morning at 11am – a total flight time of eight hours. The problem was cost. A round-trip flight for our family of four was nearly $5,000. I decided to try…

With Robb on vacation, I am honoured to have the opportunity to guest post on Boomer and Echo and meet some new readers! For readers here who don’t know me, I’m the blogger behind MillionDollarJourney.com. In the early days (the blog started in 2006), I wrote quite a bit on the Smith Manoeuvre and continue…

Despite the odd blip over the last decade, Canadian and U.S. stocks continue to reach all-time highs. Investors are understandably worried about the next correction or crash. In particular, investors who are sitting on large amounts of cash are nervous about deploying their capital at today’s frothy valuations. Research has shown that, since stocks are…

A client asked me to send step-by-step instructions on how to transfer your RRSP to Wealthsimple. He’s moving his $145,000 portfolio from Primerica over to Wealthsimple’s robo-advisor platform to save on fees. My client’s existing “Asset Builder Fund” charges a management expense ratio (MER) of 2.30 percent – costing him $3,335 in fees each year.…

Canadian investors tend to suffer from home bias – a preference to hold more domestic stocks over foreign equities. This is actually true of investors in most countries, but it’s particularly troubling in Canada where our stock markets are highly concentrated in the financial and energy sectors. The federal government could be partially to blame…

Robo-advisors have been around for several years now offering affordable online investing services with an element of human advice. In general, investors who use a robo-advisor get assigned to a pre-packaged portfolio of low-cost exchange-traded funds (ETFs) based on their risk tolerance. Portfolios are regularly monitored and re-balanced whenever a client’s asset allocation drifts away…