Mutual Funds Often Have a Cost Disadvantage In my previous post, I wrote about several advantages of investing with mutual funds. That post invited a few comments about the costs of mutual funds outweighing the behavioural advantages. Although there are a relatively few mutual funds that...
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Mutual funds do not get a lot of love, even though they hold the lion’s share of retail investors’ assets in Canada. If you are like me and often peruse personal finance pages of the major Canadian newspapers (or more accurately, their websites), you will...
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One of the insights from behavioural finance is that we all benefit from systematizing and automating our financial behaviour. Set up your bill payments to come out of your bank account automatically, and you will never worry about missing your payments again. Sign up for...
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On February 4, 2021, Rob Carrick, the well-known personal finance columnist at The Globe and Mail, published an article entitled, “Why Canadian investors should stop buying U.S.-listed ETFs.” I tend to agree with Carrick on this point, but his argument is boiled down to two...
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You are careful with your money. You have made it a general rule to avoid debt – except for the mortgage on your home – in order to force yourself to live within your means. Well, you do use a credit card, but you have...
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Norman Rothery’s Heated-Up Version of the Couch Potato Portfolio The Original Couch Potato Portfolio The original Couch Potato Portfolio came from a 1991 article by Scott Burns, then a writer at the Dallas Morning News. He advocated for a simple two-fund portfolio using index mutual funds. One...
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Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Investing My introduction to Socially Responsible Investing began at church. Michael Jantzi, who was raised in the church where I was then a pastor in London, Ontario, and where his parents were still members at that time, came one Sunday from...
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More Choice Is Not Always Better In liberal societies, the usual understanding is that the more choice we have the better. Freedom is about having the ability to choose. Instead, however, what we often find is what is termed “analysis paralysis.” We are given so many...
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Using a Screener Mutual funds play a dominant role in Canadians’ investing lives. Even for the self-directed investor, that is, someone who does not have an investment advisor recommending particular investments and who could therefore choose to invest in individual stocks, mutual funds continue to be...
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An Introduction to Insurance and Risk Management – Part 6 Doesn’t this Post Belong Under Investment Planning? While segregated funds are investment products, the fact that they have certain insurance features and can only be bought through someone who is life-insurance-licensed, I have placed this topic under...
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