DIY Investing

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).

I recently received a great question from a reader, and I promised him I would follow up with a detailed blog post. Here it is!

In my recent blog post, Breaking Up With Your Vanguard Asset Allocation ETF, I shared a 5-ETF portfolio you could consider for your RRSP accounts.

Like it or not, many ETF investors are about to get an extra dose of China in their portfolios this year, thanks in part to index provider MSCI. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio is certainly not a fan of their decision. He has recently written to MSCI’s CEO, looking for answers as to why the company has included China A shares in their emerging markets indexes.

“It’s not you, it’s me”. These words have been professed during breakups throughout history, so we all know what they really mean: “I can do better”.

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.

As the reader correctly notes, the tax-inefficiencies in Vanguard’s AA ETFs mainly lie with the underlying bonds (not with the equities) – at least in taxable accounts. You see, many of the bonds in fixed income ETFs are currently trading at what’s called a “premium” to their maturity value.

So, what did you think of the Game of Thrones grand finale??? I don’t want to spoil it for both of you who haven’t watched it yet, so I won’t share my own thoughts here. DM me if you’re interested.