Insights

Registered Education Savings Plans (RESP’s) are a very popular and useful way to help a loved one pay for their post-secondary education. In many cases the beneficiary of the RESP, a child or close family member, graduates high school and uses the funds in pursuit of a college diploma or a university degree. But sometimes, life changes and the beneficiary of that RESP account no longer needs the money for their education. This situation leaves the RESP holders wondering - what else they can we do with this RESP account? In this post, I offer some alternatives for families that are faced with this question.

Now that we are nearly 10 months into this "death-by-1000-cuts" bear market, you may be looking at me a little bit sideways when I say that a lot of the bad news around a possible recession, among other fears, is already priced into the market. How is this possible?

In this video, I challenge the assumption that retirees should avoid all volatility in their retirement portfolios. I look at a retiree who began retirement in 2008 with a 60% stock / 40% bond portfolio, and compared their withdrawal experience with another retiree who held only cash or short term fixed income estimates.

Investors worry about deploying capital into the market at all time highs. They also worry about deploying capital into the market after a correction. But, what does history tell us about market returns in each of these scenarios?

"Should I simply get out of the market and wait for the dust to settle?" This is a question that many investors have asked themselves so far in 2022. They may even have acted on it. While getting out of the market may feel satisfying for a short period of time; historically speaking, it has been a bad way to manage your investments during downturns.

If the year were to end today, it would mark the single worst year for the US bond market in history. So, what should fixed income investors do about it? In this short video, I show how the bond market has rebounded after significant drops.

Our default emotional setting in volatile markets is to "do something". We want to avoid danger, or possibly take excessive risks in order to make back our temporary losses in a short period of time. Most of the time, the ideal strategy is to simply do nothing. But, there is one thing that you can do which allows you to reverse your default emotional settings and do something helpful for your portfolio - that is to rebalance.

How do yield curves work? How does a bond fund manager navigate global yield curves and generate higher expected returns? I walk through some examples in this video.

Every investor wants to pursue the highest possible return with the lowest level of risk or fluctuation. What most people don't understand is that over the long run, risk and return are tied at the hip - if you want to earn higher returns, you need to be prepared to accept more short term fluctuation in your investments.