Our pension managers are among the best in the world

You may have heard last month about a series of cyber-attacks on the Canadian Revenue Agency. They were just the latest in a long list of similar incidents that have left many people feeling vulnerable to having their identity stolen by fraudsters.

When it comes to your financial life, you can have endless conversations about asset allocation but we often neglect the impact of communication and asking difficult questions. Today we speak with Chief Financial Commentator and awarded media personality, Pattie Lovett-Reid.

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

To say the least, 2020 has been a challenging year for most of us. First, there’s the heightened uncertainty (to put it mildly) about our daily lives, our health.

Welcome back to our series on currency-hedged equity ETFs. In our last post, BlackRock’s Steven Leong and I described how and why these securities work, and touched on when they might appeal to an investor.

Few Canadian investors question the benefits of diversifying their foreign stock portfolios. The ETF market now offers investors the opportunity to invest in baskets of U.S. and international equity securities at practically paltry management fees.

The hype to invest in high-cap tech companies is deafening. In this episode, we share what you need to know before buying FANG company stocks. Although FANG is the popular term, our analysis includes Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Tesla, and Microsoft — so it’s closer to the less slick-sounding FAAATM.

A favourite topic for the financial media is when to take the Canada Pension Plan (CPP). Some advocate taking it at 65, others advocate delaying until age 70. Different viewpoints arise because of how the problem is framed and the assumptions that follow.

Michael weighs in on three approaches to variable spending, why people can do what they love and still retire well, and his research on the ‘rising equity glidepath’. He also speaks about why it’s normal to start saving after you hit forty, and why withdrawal policy statements can help you have a better idea of when your portfolio is in the red.

What if you ONLY want exposure to foreign stock markets, without the potentially damaging currency exposure of unhedged ETFs? This is where currency-hedged ETFs can be useful. If you could eliminate your foreign currency exposure, you would no longer need to be concerned with its fluctuations, right?