Peter Guay

What the Ontario government is trying to do to the investment industry is shameful. We like to think regulations are there to protect us, but the current Ontario government and the Canadian Securities Administrator are doing anything but that. The last few months have been incredibly frustrating to watch as regulatory proposals come out that are clearly not in investor’s best interests.

The investment industry regulators aren’t willing to stand up and require the same for your relationship with your financial advisor. That’s a problem.

The Myth: Everyone is piling into ETFs, and that makes stock markets less efficient. The argument: The more people invest through indexes and ETFs, the fewer people there are scrutinizing the fundamentals of stock prices to figure out if individual stocks are cheap or expensive. That must make it easier to pick stocks, right?

I’ve talked about what Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing is, how to build portfolios with ESG factors, and how companies are rated. Now let’s talk about how ESG investing affects investment performance.

One of the biggest myths about passive investing is that ETFs and indexing will cause stock market bubbles. The thinking is simplistic: since index funds have to buy all companies in the stock market, they have to blindly buy stocks whose prices have gone up, right? This makes stock market bubbles worse, right?

In my previous blog post, I talked about Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing, why investors are interested and the different ways to implement it in your portfolio. This naturally raises the next question: how rigorous is the ESG research and does it actually differentiate and reward good from bad behavior?

There are some serious misconceptions about active management and index investing which I’d like to walk through with you today. I’m going to hit you with two really staggering numbers about the US stock market, then explain what each of these data points imply for active and passive investors.

Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) has gained attention thanks, in part, to the bad behavior of several multinational companies and the desire for investors to align their portfolios with their personal values.

Many of the reflexes that we innately have were very helpful when we were faced with predators in the stone age like saber-toothed tigers. But it turns out that evolution hasn’t prepared us well for facing the market economy.

The question on everyone’s mind is: are you able to pick funds that will beat the market in the next year or two and make a profit? Short answer? No.