Canadian Portfolio Manager: Introducing the “Ridiculous” ETF Portfolios

There seems to be confusion, among the public in general but also among professionals, about what smart beta (or “factor”) funds really are. Are they passive? Are they active?

When a private company decides to offer equity ownership shares to the public, this is called an Initial Public Offering, or IPO. It is an exciting time for the company and its original private shareholders. The public often gets excited too, especially when it’s a well-known company.

On today’s episode, we have Dr. Daniel Crosby joining us for an insightful discussion about the psychology behind investing behaviour. Dr. Crosby is a behavioural finance expert and asset manager who applies his study of market psychology to help people better understand the financial decisions they make and to shed some new light on our ability to be rational.

In Episode 2, Justin gets into the weeds of tax-loss selling with ETFs. You’ll learn the core rules to follow, common pitfalls to avoid, and the best “portfolio-tested” ETFs for implementing this tax-efficient strategy.

We are proud to say that last week’s show received our highest amount of downloads yet, with 10 000 in its first week, so a big thank you to our listeners for that. We begin our discussion this week with some takeaways from the Playing With FIRE documentary about doing affordable things that feel good as a way of cutting costs.

In today’s episode, we are joined by an exciting guest, The Loonie Doctor, of The Loonie Doctor blog to talk about his work not only on physician finance but also on holistic wealth. A physician by training, The Loonie Doctor has scaled back his practice to put more work into the blog and financial education.

We are pleased to announce that Susan Daley, Portfolio Manager, is the winner of the Young Gun of The Year category from the Women in Wealth Management Awards!

Global diversification is one of the keys to a well-constructed portfolio. We have known this for a long time – and investors have been largely ignoring it for just as long.

In their 1991 paper, Investor Diversification and International Equity Markets, Ken French and James Poterba documented investors’ preference for owning stocks from their home country, commonly known as home country bias. They found investors preferred domestic stocks because they expected higher returns in their own equity market compared to other countries’ markets.

The article, Passive vs. Active: Nothing to fear but fear itself, debunked the idea that the huge and growing popularity of passive investing is making markets less efficient and creating the conditions for a crash.

Today on The Rational Reminder Podcast, we talk about the relationship between asset allocation and outcome, the ins and outs of reverse mortgages, and finally, life insurance (or lack thereof) in Canada. However, we begin by sharing some interesting points covered in a recent Barry Ritholtz interview with Eugene Fama and David Booth for his Masters in Business show.