Invest
What is a K Shaped Recovery?
- Reader Case: Golden Handcuffs - April 16, 2021
- Finding Love During Covid - April 5, 2021
- Is It Time To Ditch Bonds? - March 29, 2021
As a planet, we have been going through quite the shit year, to say the least. What started off as a strange-sounding disease being reported out of Asia has spun into a worldwide pandemic, a stock market plunge, and a worldwide recession. Through it all, economists and politicians (and one in particular) have been predicting an economic recovery, but the nature and “shape” of that recovery has been up for endless debate. Will it be a miraculous rapid V shaped recovery, as the President keeps crowing? Will it be a protacted U shape? Or maybe the math-nerdy Reverse Radical shape, […]
Why is the Stock Market Up While Employment Is Down?
- Reader Case: Golden Handcuffs - April 16, 2021
- Finding Love During Covid - April 5, 2021
- Is It Time To Ditch Bonds? - March 29, 2021
This has been a weird year to say the least. Back in January, if anyone mentioned Wuhan, most people would have said “Where’s that?” I miss thse days. It was a simpler time. Now we’ve been hit with a global pandemic, a sputtering economy, closed borders, and rampant unemployment. By any commonly accepted metric, whether it’s GDP, unemployment, or whatever, the economy is still nowhere close to normal. And yet stock markets are actually higher than where we started the year. How can this be possible? How can Wall Street be looking so rosy and optimistic when Main Street is […]
How Does the Zero-Interest Rate Environment Affect You?
- Reader Case: Golden Handcuffs - April 16, 2021
- Finding Love During Covid - April 5, 2021
- Is It Time To Ditch Bonds? - March 29, 2021
The other day a reader emailed me to ask “I’ve read your advice in the Investment Workshop about owning a mix of stocks and bonds, but that was back when bonds actually paid something. With interest rates in the gutter, does that advice still hold?” Great question. Let’s dig into this a bit, shall we? During the last economic downturn in 2008, one of the key decisions that helped save the economy (or rather, prevented it from falling off a cliff even more) was that central banks around the world chose to drop their key lending rate to near-zero. This […]
Find Out the Commuted Value of Your Pension
- Reader Case: Golden Handcuffs - April 16, 2021
- Finding Love During Covid - April 5, 2021
- Is It Time To Ditch Bonds? - March 29, 2021
“OMG, You have no idea what just happened!” a friend recently texted us. “What? What?” I texted back. “I did what you suggested, and I just heard back from my HR department. All I can say is: WOW!” Let me back up a bit. Defined Benefit vs. Defined Contribution Pension Over the years pensions in the private sector have largely gone the way of the dodo. Most companies these days, when they offer retirement benefits at all to their full-time employees, do it in the form of a defined contribution, or DC pension. How these work is that basically they […]
Investment Workshop 60: Should Questrade Users Sign Up For Passiv?
- Reader Case: Golden Handcuffs - April 16, 2021
- Finding Love During Covid - April 5, 2021
- Is It Time To Ditch Bonds? - March 29, 2021
Passiv is a company that I’ve been aware of for some time and have been wanting to partner with us for years. Basically, Passiv looked at the challenges that people face trying to DIY manage a passive, index-based ETF portfolio like the one we teach in our Investment Workshop and said “let’s make an app for that!” Taking all the repetitive tasks of tracking multiple accounts and rebalancing and wrapping it all up into a cool visual GUI, Passiv always intrigued me as something that would help our readers, but what always irked me was their price. To unlock all the […]
