Can You Be Too Diversified? Investing is a bit like walking a tightrope between risk and reward. Investors try to find the sweet spot that maximizes their returns while minimizing their risks. But sometimes, in their quest for a balanced portfolio, they end up making mistakes....
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The Scenario When your child was born, you and your spouse vowed to assist with his post-secondary education costs. In the year he was born, you contributed $1,250 to his Registered Education Savings Plan) RESP, which attracted a Canadian Education Savings Grant (CESG) of $250 (equal...
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“Them’s fightin’ words!” Or so a character might say if I was writing a script for a 1950s Western. Nevertheless, some in the stock picker’s camp might take offence at the assertion in the title of this blog post. This seems to suggest that there...
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On July 4, 2022, I posted my 154th blog, on the topic of bonds and GICs. Coming off a long-term situation when the returns from these fixed-income products left many investors with little interest in buying something other than equities (individual stocks, equity mutual funds...
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Being Cautious With Your Money For years your friends have been telling you to invest in the stock market. You resisted, insisting that High-Interest Savings Accounts (HISAs) and Guaranteed Investment Certificates (GICs) were all you needed. Besides, you already had some money in the stock market...
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Can You Be an Anti-Capitalist Investor? Investing, as we conventionally understand the word, is a deeply capitalist enterprise. So, if you find capitalism to be a deeply flawed economic and social system, is there a way to save, invest, and build wealth in a manner that...
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Ten percent per year! That’s a nice round number and what many investors think is a realistic annual investment return. At that rate, following the “Rule of 72,” you will double your account value in 7.2 years – without adding an extra dollar! Let’s imagine that...
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Your financial advisor isn’t dishonest; he’s just incompetent. That is the TL:DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) conclusion of a 2016 academic paper, “The Misguided Beliefs of Financial Advisors,” by Juhani T. Linnainmaa, Brian T. Melzer, and Alessandro Previtero. For many years, the common view of...
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Two years ago, when I last wrote about the table of returns across asset categories, I observed, “the consistently steady performance of the US stock market.” It appears that things have not changed despite the poor performance of American stocks last year. As I did in...
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I have been approached a couple of times to offer a second opinion on a person’s investments. I know what I do, but I wondered how “second opinion” is presented by financial institutions and their investment advisors. A quick search yielded several results, including an...
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