FPAC Pro Bono Planning I am a member of the Financial Planning Association of Canada™ (FPAC). Our mission is to build the practice of financial planning into a principled and client-centred profession. Among FPAC’s activities, such as advocacy before governments and regulators (I am a member...
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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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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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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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In my student days, I remember an ethics professor saying something to the effect of, “That which is not prohibited is permitted.” Of course, one pithy sentence does not exactly provide the full range of nuance that was elaborated on over the semesters that I...
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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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Gender and Investing Writing on gender is almost guaranteed to get the author in hot water. What value is there in discerning differences between men and women? From the point of view of the investment advisor, it seems like another justification for stereotyping the client rather...
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Finance is Scary Financial matters tend to scare a lot of people away: “Finance is all about money and numbers. I don’t have enough of the former and I don’t understand the latter.” At least that is a common impression. The financial advice industry exists in...
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An Introduction to Investment Planning – Part 8 Over the course of this series on investing, I have written about bonds and stocks and the ways they may be purchased, that is, individually or via funds, whether those are mutual funds or Exchange-Traded Funds. For now,...
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