Short Takes: Investment Returns, Minimizing Portfolio Taxes, and more

Here are my posts for the past two weeks:

Money = Human Work

Does Loss Aversion Exist?

Here are some short takes and some weekend reading:

Tom Bradley explains where investment returns really come from. The answer is different from what most people think.

John Robertson tackles the complexity of optimizing how you spread your bonds, Canadian stocks, and foreign stocks across your RRSPs, TFSAs, and non-registered accounts. In my experience, trying to come up with a set of rules to cover all possible situations is very difficult, but most individual cases are easy enough to sort out. For example, I know what tax rate I’ll likely be paying on RRSP/RRIF withdrawals, I own no bonds (I have a cash/GIC allocation instead), and I understand that my RRSP contents partially belong to the government (which eliminates certain behavioural errors). These facts greatly simplify the analysis to determine which accounts should hold each of the asset classes I own.

Canadian Couch Potato interviews Ben Carlson for an interesting discussion of the challenges investors face despite the wide array of low-cost choices we have today. As a bonus, you’ll get a clear and accurate skewering of technical analysis.

Boomer and Echo takes a look at how online mortgage brokers are changing the mortgage business.