There are two striking things about the returns of investment markets over the last decade or so. One is the consistently steady performance of the US stock market. Although not necessarily the top performing market every year, the US stock market has done very well...
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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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When my wife and I began investing, we did what is probably the most common thing that Canadians do, we went to our local bank branch, sat down with a financial advisor, and invested in a portfolio of mutual funds issued by that bank. We...
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Every once in a while in my earlier career, I was approached by people who were interested in market-linked Guaranteed Investment Certificates (GICs). These are investment products that protect your principal but give you the opportunity to participate in the growth of the stock market....
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Coping with the Uncertainty of Investment Returns Imagine that you have been putting away $10,000 at the beginning of each year from 2002 until 2019. For the sake of this example, taxes and commissions are excluded; you have been investing that money into the Canadian stock...
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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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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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Recapping the Earlier Post Earlier this month (July 2020) I compared the one-year return of the Vanguard Growth ETF Portfolio (VGRO) ending 2020-07-13 using a lump-sum investing approach versus a dollar-cost averaging approach. I invested a $60,000 inheritance in a TFSA in a single lump sum...
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It is the nature of my profession that I read a lot about personal financial matters. One of the most difficult of such matters has to do with retirement. Financial economists will say that retirement planning is difficult because there are so many variables, or...
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