DIY Investing

Welcome back to our Spaceballs-inspired exploration of the Canadian Portfolio Manager’s (CPM’s) latest four model portfolios. Our models now range from our simple (but not simplistic!) Light portfolios, to our bordering-on-insanely complicated Plaid portfolios. Today, we’ll introduce our moderately complicated Ridiculous portfolios.

When I first watched Star Wars, I thought it would be impossible to improve on its perfection. What a blast it was! But that was before I became a huge fan of the Spaceballs spoof of the same. Likewise, as fond as we are of the original Canadian Portfolio Manager (CPM) model ETF portfolios, you may have noticed we’ve made some big changes lately. Most notably, there are now four CPM portfolio levels of complexity to choose from: Light, Ridiculous, Ludicrous, or Plaid.

Gold is often touted as a safe haven to protect you from inflation, market crashes, anarchy, and even the collapse of fiat currencies. It’s often cited as having a negative correlation with stocks and a positive correlation with inflation, making it sound like an excellent diversifying asset to hold in your portfolio.

Today, we’ll cover the same for global equity, global bond, and asset allocation ETFs. Or again, if you’d prefer, you can tune into the full-length podcast version here.

What’s your preference: podcasts or blog posts? Either way, we’ve got you covered in our most recent series on a subject that’s still foreign to many investors: foreign withholding taxes. If you’re a blog reader, just keep reading. Or, you’ll find the podcast version over here.

In this tax-heavy episode, Justin discusses his part-time obsession – foreign withholding taxes. Throughout the show, he explains which specific ETFs are best held in each account type in order to reduce this largely hidden tax drag.

Hey Justin, it’s Robb Engen from the Boomer and Echo blog. My question to you is about the cost savings of using U.S.-listed ETFs. Right now, 100% of my portfolio is in Vanguard’s all-equity fund, VEQT. There’s about $200,000 in my RRSP, and $50,000 in my TFSA. At what point would you say to me, “Robb, look, you’re absolutely crazy not to break up with your one-ticket fund and switch to a portfolio that includes U.S.-listed ETFs.”

Selecting which Vanguard asset allocation ETF to purchase can be intimidating – especially if you ask friends, family, or colleagues what they think you should do. You’ll probably not only receive conflicting recommendations, each one will be sure they’re right, even if it’s a much riskier and aggressive asset mix than you’d select on your own.

I recently received this next question from a blog reader, but I’ve been asked the same thing countless times over the past five years. This is not surprising, since foreign stocks have outperformed Canadian stocks by over 6% each year for the past little while.

In my last post, we reviewed the recent underperformance of the Vanguard U.S. Aggregate Bond Index ETF (CAD-hedged) (VBU) vs. the Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF (BND).