Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) can be a great tool for individual investors. Unfortunately we can’t say that they categorically are good for investors because ETFs now come is so many varieties, shapes and sizes. This is a minefield of risk for the do-it-yourself investor. ETFs can provide very low cost access to a broadly and […]
Welcome to the Chalten Investment Review for Q1 2016. If you’re just checking your portfolio now for the first time since the beginning of the year, I’m sorry; you’ve missed all the fun! A few days ago the headline across many financial media outlets read, “Biggest quarterly comeback for the Dow since 1933”. No doubt […]
“Not to fear, we have found a manager based in our very own Canada that is able to consistently beat the pack” S&P has done a brilliant job over the last few years of shining the light on the fund management industry by publishing it’s SPIVA Scorecards which report on the performance of actively managed mutual funds […]
What does the data tell us about how to invest successfully? If you scour the world of peer reviewed academic studies over the last few decades (don’t worry you don’t have to because we and many others have) you’ll learn that the evidence clearly points to keeping costs low and keeping holdings very diversified. Unfortunately […]
Believe it or not, financial forecasts from the analyst community and media are not designed to help you trade better or invest more wisely. They are designed to encourage you to trade more and invest more actively. Banks make more money when their clients trade more, not better. Financial media outlets make more money when […]
Index investing means taking an automated or rules-based approach to constructing and managing a portfolio compared to active investing which relies on a portfolio manager’s judgement to manage the portfolio. There are many ways to implement an index approach. Most index funds follow a commercially published index like the S&P/TSX 60 in Canada or the S&P500 in the US. The […]
It seems these days that every time the Federal Market Open Committee (the branch of the Federal Reserve in the US the sets monetary policy) meets, the entire world sits waiting on the edge of their seat. It’s almost like we’ve come to believe that monetary policy is the only thing left driving stock returns […]
In Friday’s Morningstar article “Sequoia Fund Symbolizes What Was, But No Longer Is”, John Rekenthaler chronicles the recent woes of the legendary Sequoia Fund and suggests it may symbolize the end of an investing era – things have changed since the time Sequoia launched forty years ago: Index funds are more prevalent and fewer managers can demonstrate exception […]
Or as Lisa Abramowica and Rani Molla put it in their April 5 Bloomberg Gadfly piece, “Dude, Where’s My Yield?” The picture tells the story – 10 year government bond yields are lower than 2% in many developed countries that have half-decent sovereign credit ratings. Japan and Switzerland’s 10-year bonds have negative yield! To search for […]
There’s a lot of furor in the US right now over the Department of Labor’s proposed legislation to make all those providing retirement advice in the US actually act in the best interest of their clients (I know, a crazy concept). Regulators in Canada are also pondering the issue and no doubt we’ll eventually see […]