Canadian Portfolio Manager: Introducing the “Ridiculous” ETF Portfolios

Welcome back to the podcast everybody, we have another great round-up episode for you where we field questions that you sent in and cover a bunch of things we think you need to hear!

In the debut episode of the Canadian Portfolio Manager podcast, we kick things off by helping you choose which Vanguard Asset Allocation ETF is right for you.

It has been more than a decade since the last U.S. recession. Prior to that, the longest gap between recessions was exactly a decade. Moreover, when I started drafting this post and its related video, the U.S. yield curve had briefly inverted, which means longer-term bond rates were lower than shorter-term bond rates. Besides this being a bit Alice-in-Wonderland-like, inverted yield curves also have been good predictors of coming U.S. recessions.

From a trader on Wall Street to a financial advisor with her own firm, our guest today, Jill Schlesinger, has accumulated a lifetime of knowledge in the investing and financial world. Today she is a household name and well-known media personality, appearing on a variety of CBS shows and hosting her own podcast called Jill on Money.

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.

If you’ve been following my No Dumb Questions series for a while, you probably already know: I am not a fan of traditional, active investing. Don’t get me wrong. We proactively look after our clients’ needs every day.

The dot.com bubble seems pretty far away, especially given how much has gone on since 9/11, the financial crisis, the election of Donald Trump to name just a few of momentous events. Nevertheless, there is much to learn for today’s investors from the late 90s mania that sent Internet stocks rocketing to the stratosphere.

We kick off today’s episode with a discussion about the gap between investor performance and fund performance, the potential reasons why asset allocation funds produced a positive gap and the role that timing and volatility play in a negative behaviour gap.

A lot of people are worried about how index funds might affect the integrity of the stock market. They’ve been fretting about this for years. At the extreme, some have even compared index funds to the collateralized debt obligations that sent the global financial market into crisis in 2008.

Our guest today on the Rational Reminder Podcast is Dr. Wendall Mascarenhas. Wendall is a listener, DIY investor a medical professional. He actually reached out to us on Twitter and suggested this episode, a listener-centric discussion as well as one comparing the different approaches to evidence from the medical and the financial communities.