Advanced Investing

We have joining us Dr. David Blitzer who is the Managing Director and Chairman of the S&P Dow Jones index committee. He has been there from the time when indexes were barely even being traded and the first time S&P Futures began trading, and since then, indexing has turned into the massive phenomenon we all know today.

Live in the studio with us today is Preet Banerjee, renowned speaker, personal finance expert, consultant and author of Stop Overthinking Your Money.

If you’ve got a fair amount of common sense – and you must, if you’re following my Common Sense Investing series – you probably already know that perfection is hard to find. In other words, in the search for solid answers to life’s greatest questions, you’ll usually find a lot more shades of gray, than pure-black or all-white.

Today we’re diving into the recent CPPIB report that portrays actively managed funds in the most optimistic light. But before you trade in your index funds, we look at the methodologies and calculations employed by the report and show why there are a number of issues with their findings.

In many walks of life, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. What about in your portfolio? Every so often, I hear someone argue that investing in index funds can leave you over-diversified. The logic goes something like this: Instead of buying all of the companies in an index, you could buy a subset of only the “good” ones, to potentially outperform the index as a whole.

Andrew Hallam wrote a post in 2018 assessing the performance of Dimensional Fund Advisors funds against what he proposed as comparable Vanguard funds. Hallam is not the first person to attempt this analysis.

The usual rule of thumb that people use to plan how to fund their retirement is to withdraw 4% a year from their pool of savings.

Welcome back to the Rational Reminder Podcast! We’re nearing our one-year anniversary, and we are still getting more listeners every episode and we have some incredible guests lined up for you!

Star Trek may have introduced the expression, “to boldly go where no man has gone before,” but we’re the ones who actually get to do it in today’s post. To my knowledge, nobody has ever compared the before- and after-tax returns of Guaranteed Investment Certificate (GIC) ladders versus bond ETFs. At least I’ve not found an unbiased, historical comparison anyplace online.

Admit it. You’ve been reading about “low-volatility” or “low-beta” ETFs, and have wondered what all the fuss is about. Are you missing out on the next big thing?