- Home
- Competitive Intelligence
Archive for the ‘Competitive Intelligence’ Category
Avoid these missteps to be a better investor in 2014
My recent review of many investors’ portfolios prompted the saying “the more things change, the more they stay the same” to keep ringing in my mind. With a new year quickly approaching, investors would do themselves a favour by...
Street Smarts
There is one investment strategy that is so simple, it could be the recommended strategy for a book called The Idiot’s Rules for Investing. Many readers will be wishing their advisors had delivered results that were this good. In a nutshell, the...
Learning About Drawdown
Drawdown, in a nutshell, gives the history of how much a particular investment has dropped in value before it recovered. If you know the drawdown of an investment (or your portfolio as a whole), you know what to expect in terms of potential...
Know Your Fees
Investment management fees often make the difference between comfortable retirement living and a highly restricted retirement lifestyle. Imagine you had $100,000 in your RRSP invested in low-fee ETFs (exchange-traded funds) and your average...
The Piggy Bank vs The Pay Cheque
OVERVIEW: One of the challenges that many affluent families face is establishing a regular cash flow payment structure for family members, which I refer to as ‘The Family Pay Cheque’. Specifically, often after the sale of a business, the...
A sense of history will help to interpret small cap return rankings
When asked recently to examine a portfolio manager’s track record, I was reminded of how careful one must be with performance rankings. In this case, I was assessing the strong five-year run of a Canadian Small/Mid Cap Equity manager. It...
Bond bears’ growl is all noise
Type the phrase “bond bear market” into Google and you’ll see a long list of articles proclaiming the certainty of the oncoming bear market in bonds. I agree that bond yields are artificially low and that bonds are expensive...
Private REITs require careful due diligence
The Globe and Mail shed a bit of light on the small universe of private real estate investment trusts (REITs) in Canada. The article touches on both the benefits and perils of this emerging product segment. I recently reviewed a Canadian...
Covered-call strategy offers no free lunch
Extra-lean bond yields are prompting investors to reach for yield with corporate, high yield and emerging markets bonds. Their appetite for stocks is meagre overall but investors still hunger for those that regularly spit out cash –...
Webinar: ETF Portfolio Construction
Last week, I spoke about constructing portfolios using exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to a group made up mostly of financial advisors. Investment Executive hosted the June 19 webinar and they archived the entire presentation and question period on...
