Categories
Announcements

Are You Changing Your Asset Allocation? Contest for $$!

Glenn Cooke, President of InsureCan, is sponsoring a contest on this blog (and a few others listed below) where you can win one of two $50 Chapters gift cards. Here’s how to enter the contest:

In the comments – please answer the following question

“Have you changed (or are you going to change) your asset allocation as a result of the awful equity returns in the past year?   Please indicate any change ie “used to be 100% equities – now I’m zero percent equities”.

Answering this question will give you 1 chance at a gift certificate.  Subscribing to the blog if you don’t already do so, might also help your odds (but not likely) 🙂

Contest will be closed at 8 pm on Thursday, January 22.

Contest is open to Canadian residents only.

Check out similar contests at the Canadian Capitalist and the Financial Blogger.

Categories
Personal Finance

John Bogle: “The stock market is a giant distraction.”

This guest post is written by Mike from the The Oblivious Investor.   This blog has been around for a few months and is very investment oriented (but not too techy) so I would recommend you check it out (I’m a regular reader).

For me, the above quote was enough to make Bogle’s Little Book of Common Sense Investing worth the read.

In just 7 words, Bogle manages to:

•    Provide an insightful piece of investing wisdom.
•    Make you question your assumptions.
•    Offend an entire industry.

So what is Bogle saying here? I think he’s making two distinct points. First, he’s making a statement about intelligent investing. Second, he’s offering a rather pointed criticism of the financial services industry.

Passive investing is a good thing

As to investment strategy, Bogle (as usual) is suggesting a system of passive investing. We can’t predict whether the market is about to go up or about to go down, and attempting to do so will only harm our performance. Similarly, attempting to pick individual stocks is unlikely to prove successful.

So if we stand to gain nothing by timing the market or picking stocks, what’s the point in watching the market? There is no point. All it can do it tempt us toward poor decisions. Better to ignore it.

Financial service is expensive

Bogle’s second point is one about the financial services industry in general, and it’s a bit less obvious. At their most fundamental level, financial markets exist to connect providers of capital (investors) with users of capital (businesses). Without a doubt, this is a valuable service.

However, in recent decades, the financial services industry has convinced us that it performs another service as well: Enhancement of investment returns. This is, however, impossible by definition.

There’s no way that investors—as a group—can earn more than the total earnings of the businesses in which they invest. The total return earned by investors must be equal to the return earned by the businesses in our economy, minus the costs of investing.

We can therefore conclude that, rather than enhancing investor returns, the financial services industry must in fact be reducing investor returns by the sum total of all the fees that they charge us. Sadly, these costs of investing—mutual fund sales loads, fund operating expenses, brokerage fees, etc.—now total in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

Conclusion – ignore the market

I think Bogle’s reference to the stock market as a “giant distraction” is his way of telling the reader precisely how much value he sees in the services offered by most firms in the industry.

Takeaway lessons for us:
1.    Turn off BNN and CNBC, and
2.    Do your best to minimize the investment costs you pay.

About the Author:
Mike writes at The Oblivious Investor, where he regularly reminds readers to ignore the noise of the market. If you like this post, subscribe to his blog to read more.

Categories
Real Estate

Dealing With Real Estate Agents And Other Real Estate Resources

My parents (Hi Mom and Dad!) are planning to buy a new house in the near future after living in their current house for 40 years.  Right now they are in the process of figuring out how to get a real estate agent.  Unfortunately I can’t be of much help to them since I don’t live in the same city but I did offer to share all my writings on real estate agents.  The following is a list of posts we’ve done on real estate and agents with a brief description of each.

The next series of posts were written by a first-time home buyer who explains all the various steps she went through:

That’s it!  Good luck with the house hunting!

Categories
Personal Finance

Happy New Year and Stock Picks For 2009

Happy New Year to all our readers – last year was a tough one in the markets but I can’t complain.  My financial situation is better now than it was last year thanks to some aggressive mortgage paydown.  In other areas of my life – our son is a year older and is healthy, happy (most of the time) and doing very well.  We also celebrated the birth of our daughter in March who is also healthy, happy (most of the time) and progressing quite well.

I also started a new site called ABCs of Investing which deals with very basic investment terms and concepts using 2 short posts per week.  A sample post explains exactly what the top down investing method is.  Alternatively, a bottoms up investing style might be more to your liking.

A special thanks goes out to Mr. Cheap who bought both my son and daughter a share of BMO each and created a DRIP.  A very generous gift and very time consuming as well to set the DRIP up.

So even with the crappy markets – 2008 was a great year!

Stock picks

I entered into a stock picking contest with some other bloggers – who shall rue the day they decided to do battle with Four Pillars!  🙂

Traditionally, the only way to do well with stock picking contests is to swing for the fences and hope for the best.  With that in mind I picked 4 small Canadian oil stocks which have been beaten down quite a bit.  If oil rebounds next year then these stocks should perform quite well.  There are probably better plays on the price of oil but this is the best I could do on 3 minutes of research.  Keep in mind these are pretty much random selections – do not consider this a recommendation or any kind of advice!

BCF.to – Bronco Energy $1.27.  I started watching this stock a few months ago when it was trading at $10 (it’s now less than $1.50).  My Dad saw some analyst recommending it on BNN – great call – down 85%!

HOC.to – Holly Corp  $3.65

TOG.to – TriStar Oil and Gas  $11.41

CLL.to – Connacher Oil Gas  $0.74





The other competitors (click to see their picks)

The Wild Investor stock picks

Zack Stocks stock picks

Dividend Growth Investor stock picks

My Traders Journal stock picks

Where Does All My Money Go stock picks

Intelligent Speculator stock picks

The Financial Blogger stock picks

Million Dollar Journey stock picks


Categories
Investing

Comparing Market Cap ETF vs Dividend ETF – How Much Duplication?

I had a reader question the other day where they mentioned buying both XIU (iShares Cdn Large Cap 60 ETF) and XDV (iShares Cdn Dividend Index Fund ETF) for their portfolio.  I had responded that although I wasn’t sure, I suspected that might be a lot of duplication in the two funds since XIU has all the biggest public Canadian companies – a lot of which are good dividend stocks and would probably also be in XDV.

Duplicate holdings is a common problem in mutual funds – especially in a market like Canada where there are not a lot of different companies to buy for the larger funds.

I decided to do a bit research and find out if there was as much duplication as I suspected in the two funds.  The question I want to answer is if it is worthwhile to own both funds for diversification purposes or will just one do.

Number of companies in common

The first and simplest criteria was how many companies are in both ETFs.  This isn’t necessarily all that meaningful since one ETF might have a lot of XYZ company whereas the other might only have a small holding.

XIU 60 has 61 holdings (can’t they count?), XDV dividend has 31 holdings, there are 15 companies that they have in common.  This seems like quite a bit since it means that half of the companies in the dividend ETF are also in the XIU ETF.

Amount of market cap in common

What I did here is take the companies that are in both ETFs and compare the percentage holdings and add up the smaller number.  For example if CIBC was 9% of the dividend fund and 5% of the XIU then I counted that as 5% in common (by market cap).   This totalled up to 31%.  This was a smaller number than I expected which means that a good portion of the dividend ETF is not represented in the XIU 60.

Measuring correlation between the ETFs

The next test I did, which should have been the first and only test since it is the only one that has any real meaning is to measure the amount of correlation between the two ETFs.   Correlation is a measure of the relationship between the prices of the two ETFs.

A measure of 1 means that they always move in price exactly the same way, a measure of 0 means they are completely uncorrelated and a measure of -1 means they always move in price in exactly the opposite direction.  One of the main concepts behind building a portfolio is to try to find different assets that are not correlated with each other.

To accomplish this I needed some historical price data which I managed to find at Yahoo Finance.  To figure out the correlation I used the Excel correl function (is there anything Excel can’t do?).  XDV dividend has only been around since the end of 2005 so the data is only for a bit less than 4 years.  Not being a stats guy I’m not sure if this is a long enough period to be meaningful but it’s all I’ve got.  Regardless, the correlation “r” number was 0.72 which implies some benefit for diversification but not a whole lot.

Performance

The last thing I looked at was performance.  Since the time period is fairly short I’m not looking to see which ETF did better but rather to look at the difference in performance.  Ishares.ca website has a handy calculator just for this purpose.  I choose the last 3 years since the next category was 5 years which wouldn’t work for XDV dividend.

3 year total return

  • XIU Large Cap 60 = -12.98%
  • XDV Dividend = -18.19%

From what I’ve read the XDV dividend has a higher ratio of financials than the XIU 60 which is probably one of the reasons for the big performance difference.  The XDV dividend has a higher mer (0.5%) than XIU 60 (0.17%) which would account for about 1% of the 5% difference.

Conclusion

I looked at 4 categories to see how different XIU and XDV are:

  • Similar companies – half of the XDV dividend companies are in XIU.
  • Similar companies by stock market capitalization – 31% of the companies market cap are in both ETFs.
  • Correlation – over the last 4 years the correlation is 0.72.
  • Performance – the two ETFs were about 5% off in terms of total performance over 3 years.

What does it all mean?   Hard to say – there are much better ways to diversify your portfolio – REITs, small cap, foreign holdings would likely all have correlations that are less than 0.72.  I’m also not crazy about the higher mer of the dividend ETF.

I think if you want to have most of your equity in Canada then buying partially overlapping ETFs might be the only way to diversify without getting into individual stocks.  Personally I like to be diversified over the whole world so for me, the XIU Large Cap 60 by itself is good enough – in my case adding XDV would not increase my diversification enough to make the higher mer worthwhile.  XIC (TSX 300) is also a good choice.

Categories
Personal Finance

Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA)

The Canadian government recently announced a new type of tax-free savings account (TFSA) available to Canadians which is similar to the Roth IRA account available to Americans. Here are some of the details:

What is the TFSA?

A type of account where you make contributions but don’t get any income tax refund. While the money is in the account there are no taxes applied to any kind of earnings such as interest, dividends, capitals gains. Any withdrawals from the account are not taxable and won’t count against any government programs ie GIS, OAS.

How does the TFSA work?

  • You can contribute $5000 per year to this account for the years 2009 to 2012 and $5,500 for year 2013 and beyond.
  • The contribution room is carried forward.
  • No taxes on any earnings.
  • No taxes on any withdrawals.
  • When you withdraw money from the account, the contribution room available gets increased by the amount of the withdrawal – please note that this new contribution room is not available until the following calendar year.

When can I open up a TFSA account?

January 2, 2009 was the first day you could deposit funds into a TFSA.  Most institutions allowed customers to set up accounts prior to this date however.

Why do I want to open a TFSA account?

Any money that you might be saving for emergencies or upcoming large purchases will have a constant tax drag in an non-registered account. With the TFSA, this tax drag no longer exists so you will end up with more money for your purchase or emergency.  Here are some more benefits of the Canadian tax free savings account.

More information on the TFSA

Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA) Basic information for Canadians

TFSA contribution limits

TFSA Over-Contribution Penalty Fix

Tax Free Savings Account refresher for Canada

ING offers TFSA refresher for Canadians

Using the Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA) for Canadians as an emergency fund

Categories
Opinion

Shooting Down Goals

There seems to be a increase of goal-setting in the blogosphere recently. I think this is partly because we are approaching year end and a lot of people like to set goals for the next year. Patrick from CashMoneyLife even started a new carnival about financial goals. I think it’s a neat idea but I’m not really into setting short term financial goals and the long term ones don’t lend themselves all that well to carnivals if you want to enter more than once a decade. I did set a weight loss goal as part of Brip Brap’s public declaration challenge but other than that most of my goals are pretty long term and undefinable ie “save a lot”, “eventually pay off mortgage” etc.
I do have to take issue with some of the financial goals that I have read. In my opinion, a valid goal is when you set a target that you can measure and that you have a lot of control over the outcome. If your goal involves something that you don’t have any or much control over then I would call that more of a “wish” rather than a goal. For example saying that you want the weather to be nice tomorrow is a wish – not a goal.
One of my favourite bloggers, Canadian Dream likes to set goals and I decided to use his goals of examples of what I’m talking about – in no way am I trying to be critical of Tim because he’s a good guy and has a great blog however his goals from 2007 and 2008 provide perfect examples of what I’m talking about here.

Save $10k in 2007 – This is a perfectly valid goal because it’s almost entirely within Tim’s control as to whether he can achieve it or not (he did).

Investigate other streams of income – Another valid goal because again it’s success or failure is entirely determined by Tim.

Increase net worth by $30k in 2008 – The problem with this goal and one of the reasons I ignore net worth is that like a lot of us, a big chunk of Tim’s net worth is in his house. In his case he’s counting on about half of the net worth increase to come from events within his control (like contributions) however he’s also predicting a 4% increase in house value which will provide about 40% of this goal. I have no idea how the value of Tim’s house will change next year but what I do know is that Tim’s efforts won’t have much to do with it (unless he goes berserk and trashes the place 🙂 ). Another part of the net worth increase is to come from investment return which again, is out of Tim’s hands in my opinion.

Conclusion

While I don’t think there is anything wrong with setting goals, I think you have to draw the line between “goal” and “wish”. I wouldn’t say that anyone should rewrite their goals because of this post but they should recognize that some of the goals are out of their control and shouldn’t take too much credit if they are achieved and at the same time, don’t get to down if they fall short.