Canadian Portfolio Manager: Introducing the “Ridiculous” ETF Portfolios

Today’s Common Sense Investing post might be more important than anything I have ever covered. In all of my posts and videos, I tell you things that spring from one of the landmark ideas in financial economics: capital market efficiency. As fundamental as market efficiency is to good financial decision-making, it is poorly understood by most investors.

Today we welcome Dave Nadig onto the show, who joins us off the back of a brilliant presentation he gave at the Wealth Stack conference last month in Scottsdale. Dave is the founder of etf.com and has had key positions at FactSet, Barclays Global Investors, and Cerulli previously.

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.

On today’s episode, we cover a variety of topics, such as some tips for DIY investors, highlights from a conference Cameron recently attended, home country investment bias and whether it’s possible to have too much money in your RRSP.

Are you getting what you pay for in your financial advisory relationship? Today, I’m going to show you how often the answer is, unfortunately, no. Many investors are not getting their money’s worth out of the financial advice they receive.

One of the most common perceptions about investing is that it is risky. This is easy to state, but harder to defend when you get into the details. To decide whether or not investing is risky, we first need to think about what “risk” is. Depending on what you are investing in – and what you are investing for – there are different ways to think about and measure risk.

Today we are joined by Wesley Gray who is the CEO of Alpha Architect, a firm in the US that specializes in concentrated factor strategies. Having completed his MBA and PhD at the University of Chicago – the Harvard of the finance world – Wes is an authoritative voice when it comes to quantitative research and factor investing.

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.

Along with reading, writing, and arithmetic, you’d think personal financial literacy would be just as core to our kids’ education. Instead, the subject rarely makes its way into the standard curriculum of grade schools or high schools. I’ve even seen postsecondary business programs pass it by.

Have you ever heard of the SPIVA® Scorecard? Published by the S&P Dow Jones Indices, it’s a report comparing the performance of active vs. index investing. As today’s No Dumb Question, I’ll take a closer look at this important report, so you can see why I want to rename it the “I Told You So” scorecard!