Short Takes: Mutual Fund Shame, Garth Turner, and a National Securities Regulator

1. Preet put together 15 years of mutual fund indices compared to their benchmarks. The string of mostly negative percentages is a stinging indictment of the mutual fund industry.

2. This week brought us another amusing review of Garth Turner’s latest book, this time by James Daw at The Star. “Turner tells us to buy chickens to raise, buy several seasons worth of seeds to hoard in your safe and buy a gun to shoot squirrels for food.” Great stuff.

3. There were differing opinions on the current effort to set up a national securities regulator in Canada. On the pro side are Canadian Financial DIY and Gail Bebee who believe it will benefit investors. On the con side is the Money Grubbing Lawyer (the web page with this article has disappeared since the time of writing) who believes that the current system works well and gives a detailed legal argument that forcing a national securities regulator on the provinces is unconstitutional.

4. Big Cajun Man tells the story of getting his severance package from Nortel, and feeling guilty that former coworkers who got laid off later won’t get theirs because of Nortel’s bankruptcy.

5. This blog is still partway in Google’s doghouse. I’m still waiting for the situation to be reviewed by an actual human at Google. Here are a couple of the lies a Google bot tells me each week when I have to renew my request for a review: “We'll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than two business days,” and “someone will look over your blog and respond [by email].” In the mean time, my posts don’t seem to be picked up by any search engines. I’m tempted to make the jump away from Blogspot, but have little interest in the IT aspect of blogging; Blogspot allows me to focus on the content.