Market Research

It may be bad memories from last October coming to the surface, but I’ve been sensing more nervousness about the stock market in recent weeks. You’ll recall the markets went through a bad patch around this time in 2018, with the S&P/TSX Composite down 6.3% in October and another 5.4% in December. South of the border, the S&P 500 plunged 6.8% in October and 9% in December.

Michael Burry’s words reported in a Bloomberg article caused a good deal of commotion and may even have shaken some investors’ confidence in passive funds. In my opinion, the article delivers three negative messages about index funds without offering the slightest proof. Let’s take a closer look.

The growth of passive investing shows no signs of letting up and neither do the warnings about it from people who earn their living actively managing investments.

The endowment style of investing has been widely emulated not only by endowments, but also by other kinds of institutional investors and private wealth managers. This paper explores research on the investment performance of U.S. endowments.

According to this Bloomberg article, Michael Burry (a hedge fund manager and the main character of the novel and movie The Big Short) draws a parallel between Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), whose disastrous flaws were partly responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and concludes that there is potential for a potential similar outcome in this market as well.

Exchange traded funds continue to grow in popularity and that’s making life difficult for Canada’s mutual fund industry. ETFs outsold mutual funds in Canada last year for the first time in a decade and the trend looks set to continue.

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.

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.

At long last, the Ontario government is regulating who can use the titles of financial planner and financial advisor in the province.

Given the meagre interest rates paid by investment-grade bonds and GICs, it is only normal that people are interested in investments with a higher return. That includes advisors, as high-yield bond (HYB) exchange traded funds (ETFs) offered by BMO and iShares alone hold over $2 billion in assets.That’s not chicken feed.