Efficient Markets - Podcast

Today we talk about what it means to co-sign on a child's mortgage. We look at the implications and the risks, and how to prepare if you decide to take this step. From there we look at a recent report from Dimensional Fund Advisors that looks at the relationship between government debt levels and stock returns.

On today's episode, I am going to spend some time talking about a topic that is on everyone's minds these days - Inflation. I am going to talk about the last time that we saw really high inflation in Canada, how various asset classes responded during those timeframes, what we can take away from that, and the things we can do to protect ourselves against the impact of inflation.

When asked how much people need saved up to have a comfortable retirement, the answer will often come back - $1 Million Dollars. I thought it would be fun to test this out. In this episode I break down what a $1M retirement looks like. I also run through some adjustments that can be made to boost retirement income.

The top 10 lessons from the book "Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever" by Robin Wigglesworth

A look back at Canadian Stock Market Returns by Canadian PM. Intra-Year Declines in perspective. A look at Investor Returns vs. Investment Returns, coined by Carl Richards as the Behaviour Gap.

According to Statista.com - Canadian stocks make up 2.4% of the total global equity market capitalization. According to Vanguard, Canadians, on average, allocate about 56% of their equity portfolios to Canadian stocks. This is called a home country bias. We talk about the issues with allocating so much of your portfolio to Canadian stocks and some of the reasons that you may want to diversify away from Canada in your portfolios.

I walk through the 6 Keys to the Upper Reaches of Investing according to Nick Murray. In his book "Behavioural Investment Counselling" Nick walks us through 6 steps which, if followed, can put you into the top of your peer group in terms of long-term investor returns. This book is one of my favourite investing books, and I'm glad to share it with you.

I can probably convince an investor that diversifying away from a single stock makes sense. I can probably convince them that owning stocks outside of Canada makes sense (getting away from home country bias). I can probably convince them to own fixed income if they don't need or want a lot of volatility in their portfolio. Why, then, is it so hard to pursue other diversifying factors in a portfolio for the long run?

While it may seem like the high-flying growth stocks are the best investment going forward, historically this is not the case. It's not that these aren't great companies with great prospects. It is simply because these stocks are priced too high

If you pick a small handful of stocks out of the 10,000+ stocks in a global index fund portfolio, you may get lucky and outperform for a short period of time. But, there's a good chance that you missed out on some of the big winners as well. What's the cost of missing out on the top performing stocks? Lets take a look.

Standard and Poors (S&P) Dow Jones Indexes releases a semi-annual report that measures the performance of actively managed mutual funds and ETF's. This report is useful tool in analyzing the benefits (or lack of benefits) of investing in actively managed funds in pursuit of market beating returns.