I don’t watch a lot of TV but was sent a 20 minute clip from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver which was well worth watching – hilarious actually. He takes a satirical poke at the investment industry which is pretty spot on target: Source: YouTube Strip out the wit, metaphors, f-bombs, sarcasm and irony […]
A couple of interesting round number thresholds in the finance world were crossed recently and we thought it worth pointing out! 1) Canadian Exchange Traded Fund aggregate assets under management reach $100 billion in May: ETFs in Canada continue to grow, offering investors an increasing variety of low cost and transparent investment options. According to […]
The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) just released its 2016 CSA Investor Education Study. Some of the findings are encouraging while others are a little bit worrying. There are clearly still key gaps in investor knowledge and behaviour. For example while many investors rely exclusively on advisors for investment information and knowledge very few investors actually check […]
What do you desire? Do you have unmet aspirations? Do you view time as your most valuable resource? These three questions and a few others greet you when you first land on the Chalten website. Of course the answers to “What do you desire?” are as varied as there are people but where people seek their […]
Canadian investors continue to suffer some of the highest mutual fund fees in Canada. It’s not that there aren’t very effective low cost investment fund solutions available. There are plenty covering most asset classes and certainly enough to give any investor a globally diversified low cost portfolio. We figure that for about 20 basis points (one […]
In 1896 Thomas Burke from the USA won the 100 metre Olympic final in a time of 12.0 seconds beating the bronze medal winner by 0.6 seconds. In 1936 in Berlin Jesse Owens slayed the Olympic record and won gold with a time of 10.3 seconds but only managed to beat the Dutch bronze medalist by […]
Stocks are volatile – the chart below shows the return on the S&P/TSX Composite for one year rolling periods each month from March 2016 going back to 1976. Scary stuff right? While there are a lot of good return years, there are a lot of months where you would have lost more than 20% of […]
According to a 2014 Advocis sponsored PwC report there are approximately 100,000 financial advisors in Canada (yes, 1 for every 350 man, woman and child). Of those, 44% are insurance based, 33% non-bank dealer based, 13% bank based and 10% at full service brokers. (The report only lists 450 “fee-only financial planners”). Business models run the […]
An “article” in a leading Canadian financial daily last week urged investors to consider alternative investments such as hedge funds, private debt funds, factoring funds, etc in order to achieve solid investment returns without taking on high risk. Once the privilege of the ultra-rich, such investment opportunities are now becoming increasingly available to a larger swath of the […]
Ever wonder why sometimes it just seems to take forever for the elevator door to close despite how many times you hit the close door button? That’s because the button doesn’t work – at least on the vast majority of elevators and usually if it does, only with a fireman’s key. “Liar!”, you shout! “I […]