Behavioural Finance

We’re launching Capital Topics, a new bi-weekly podcast about passive asset management and wealth building for the long term featuring PWL Capital’s James Parkyn, François Doyon La Rochelle and Raymond Kerzérho.

Our focus for this episode of the Rational Reminder is split into two sections; first, we cycle through our regular features, looking at a number of studies and articles of interest, the market during the pandemic, and our bad advice segment, and then Benjamin is joined by Tim Nash to talk about ethical investing and comment on Wealthsimple’s new sustainable portfolio.

Every day you can find predictions from stock analysts, professional investors and economists about what’s going to happen in the markets.

Welcome to another episode of the Rational Reminder Podcast! Today’s main topic is how to pick an actively managed fund to invest in despite funds of this type producing lower returns than passive ones!

Who better to have on the 100th episode of the Rational Reminder Podcast than Professor Ken French? Ken has been a massive inspiration to us and has remained a guiding light for sensible, evidence-based investors over the last few decades! His work with Eugene Fama stands as the seminal work on the subject of passive investment portfolios and we are so delighted to have him on the show today as we talk through some of his thoughts on a variety of subjects.

In a recent blog we discussed how a fall in market prices today leads to an expectation of higher returns tomorrow. We explore this in more detail by considering the impact of the fall in portfolio values at the end of March and the revised expected returns on investors in different stage of their lives.

No one credible ever said that investing was a simple endeavour. It might have some simple guidelines, that if followed are more likely to yield positive results, but the ins and outs of the markets, decisions and their impacts, movements and crashes are never straightforward one-dimensional cases.

The current bear market is unique. The global coronavirus pandemic has brought large segments of the world economy to a halt. Some economists are forecasting a 25% decline of the U.S. GDP (annualized) for the second quarter.

In our second special release episode during the 2020 COVID-19 bear market we discussed a broad history of US bear markets from 1900 to 2020, the recent volatility in the bond market, bond ETF NAV spreads, a nuance in the legislation on tax-loss harvesting, and some of the tax-related changes that Canada has rolled out in light of the current situation.

The sudden ratcheting up of the coronavirus crisis has made for an anxious couple of weeks on every front—health, family, work and finances—and there’s more uncertainty to come.