Get new posts by email:

Short Takes: Billionaire Spies and more

Here are my posts for the past two weeks:

The Stock Market Only Goes Up

Victory Lap Retirement

Here are some short takes and some weekend reading:

Preet Banerjee interviews investor, spy, billionaire, and holder of 11 honorary doctorates, Stephen Jarislowsky. As an added bonus, Preet uses his latest Drawing Conclusions video to show us what kind of income you need to be able to afford rents in various cities across Canada.

Canadian Couch Potato uses his latest podcast to answer questions about the role of bonds in today’s portfolios.

The Blunt Bean Counter reports from the tax-hell trenches about financial institutions sending incorrect capital gains reports to their clients.

 Big Cajun Man reports on an unfortunate side-effect of the Federal Civil Service’s inability to pay its own workers properly. Workers are afraid to make any changes to their pay which means they’re avoiding automated charity donations.

<< Previous Post Next Post >>

Comments

  1. Big Cajun Man (Alan W.)April 28, 2017 at 8:23 AM

    Thanks for the inclusion this week. The whole Phoenix thing should have tax payers screaming blue murder, as it is their money being muddled around, but I guess that is not the case. Thanks for the inclusion this week, enjoy the Spring in Ottawa!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Short Takes: InvestorLine’s HISAs, 24-Hour Trading, and more

I recently moved some cash into BMO InvestorLine’s high-interest savings accounts (HISAs) that are structured as mutual funds.  Their designations are BMT104, BMT109, and BMT114, and they purportedly pay 4.35% annual interest (which they can change whenever they like).  However, the way they report the monthly interest payments is so baffling that I wasn’t able to sort it out in my first 15 minutes of trying.  A further complication is the following text in the HISA description: “The Bank may pay, monthly or quarterly, compensation to your Dealer at an annual rate of up to 0.25% of the daily closing balance in the BMO HISA.”  I couldn’t find any evidence of such a charge, but I haven’t been invested for a full quarter, and I can’t yet say that such a charge isn’t buried somehow in the confusing reporting.  I have more digging to do before I can recommend these HISAs. Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: Preet Banerjee explains the dangers of Robi...
Read more

My Asset Allocation

I’ve resisted discussing my asset allocation for some time, but now is finally the time to describe it and the reasons behind it. I’m not holding it out as a model portfolio; I believe it’s suitable for me and not necessarily anyone else. With that warning, enjoy the discussion and feel free to ask questions or take some pot-shots. The main reason why I haven’t discussed my asset allocation in detail before now is that I don’t want readers to treat it like a model portfolio and follow it blindly. Everyone’s situation is different. The need for variation in asset allocation from one investor to the next usually isn’t huge, but there is no one-size-fits-all portfolio. A secondary reason for keeping my asset allocation to myself is that I can’t be sure I’ll never change it. For example, I recently made the minor change of switching from an ETF of small-cap stocks to an ETF of small-cap value stocks . I don’t have any plans to change my current allocation, but I may think differe...
Read more

What to Do About Crazy Stock Valuations

Image
The last time I had to put a lot of effort into thinking about my finances was back when I retired in mid-2017.  I had ideas of how to manage my money after retirement, but it wasn’t until a couple of years had gone by that I felt confident that my long-term plans would work for me.  I had my portfolio on autopilot, and my investing spreadsheet would email me if I needed to take some action. I was fortunate that I happened to retire into a huge bull market.  I got the upside of sequence-of-returns risk.  The downside risk is that stocks will plummet during your early retirement years, and your regular spending will dig deep into your portfolio.  Happily for me, I got the opposite result.  My family’s spending barely made a dent in the relentless rise of the stock market. However, stock prices have become crazy, particularly in the U.S.  One measure of stock priciness is Robert Shiller’s Cyclically Adjusted Price-Earnings (CAPE) ratio .  In the U.S...
Read more

Archive

Show more