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There’s been more and more chatter in the media about whether we’re entering a new “Roaring Twenties” now that the pandemic recedes. I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing, because yes the decade after the 1918 flu pandemic ended saw record economic expansion and rampant stock market gains, but it also famously ended in the crash of 1929 which began the Great Depression. Not completely convinced that’s history we want to repeat.
But hey, now that we are officially at the halfway point of 2021, let’s see how our portfolio has been doing…
For the purposes of this checkup, we are only going be looking at Portfolio A, which is the original portfolio we retired on. Portfolio B contains the money we earned after retirement and are still contributing to, so it’s not as easy to get a read on how its investments are performing.
At the beginning of 2021, we made some important changes to Portfolio A. First, we got rid of REITs and redirected it into the dividend stock ETF PDC. We also switched over our aggregate bond ETF ZAG to a short-duration bond index ETF ZSB in order to blunt the effect of higher interest rates. So right now, our portfolio targets look like this.
| Description | Ticker | Weighting |
| BMO Aggregate Bond Index ETF | ZAG | 25% |
| BMO TSX Composite Capped Index ETF | ZCN | 16% |
| Powershares Canadian Dividend Index ETF | PDC | 9% |
| Vanguard Total Market Index ETF | VTI | 25% |
| iShares MSCI EAFE ETF | EFA | 25% |
And how are we doing so far this year? Well…
Yowza. Portfolio A started off the year at $1,227,000, so this represents an 10.3% increase year-to-date. That is a pretty stunning performance for only six months. Keep that up and who knows where we’ll end up at the end of 2021. Granted, we are all one bad variant away from everything shutting down again, so it’s important not to spike the football too early, but still. That ain’t bad.
So what happened? Why did the portfolio perform as well as it did so far?
Hot Vax Summer
The big bet that Wall Street is making is that there will be a massive economic recovery as people get vaccinated and stores reopen. For the past 16 months, world governments have been printing money and handing it to their citizens in the form of stimulus checks, wage subsidies, or unemployment insurance benefits. The result has been a massive buildup in cash in people’s bank accounts. The American savings rate has gone up from a steady state of 5% to a stunning 35% at the height of the pandemic.
And in Canada, our banks are reporting $212 BILLION dollars of cash deposits just sitting in people’s checking accounts at the end of 2020.
That money is being saved, economists reason, not because of people’s prudent financial habits, but because that money had nowhere to go. Once the economy opens up, that cash is going to get blown, and blown hard.
The optimist in me likes to believe that people are taking their stimulus checks, going to our Investment Workshop, and learning how to invest their cash and turn it into a passive income source that will let them retire in their 30’s, but the realist in me acknowledges that the economists are probably right. A tiny percentage of people (you guys, specifically) might do something smart with their money, and everyone else is going to blow it on jet skis and ketamine (in that order). Hot Vax Summer, baby!
And the data bears it out. Check out the American vaccination rates…
Now compare it to the shape of VTI, Vanguard’s US Total Market Index fund…
It’s hard to deny a striking resemblance. And as the rest of the world plays catch up with the Americans in their vaccination rates…
We can expect those countries stock markets to start to look a lot like the US too.
The Canadian Catch-up
Here’s something I wasn’t expecting. Because so much of our pre-retirement income was Canadian, we have a fairly significant allocation of our equity exposure in the Toronto Stock Exchange, or TSX. We like to keep it split about evenly between Canada, the US, and the MSCI EAFE (Europe, Australia, Far East) Index.
This has, annoyingly, caused us to underperform our American counterparts for a number of years as our stock market would just keep getting ignored by worldwide investors while poring money into the American stock market.
Well, this year it’s come roaring back. Here’s VTI’s YTD performance for 2021…
And here’s the TSX overlaid in red…
FINALLY. We get to beat the US at something. We may not be able to kick your ass militarily, or at football, or basically at anything cool, but this year we get to claim victory in politeness, maple syrup production, and the TSX! Ha! Take that! In your face!
And now that I’ve said that, the US stock market will probably take off and leave us in the dust over the next 6 months, but you know what? We’re Canadian. We never get to win against you guys at anything. So just let us have this one, OK?
Seriously though, what gives? What’s going on with our stock market? One of the reasons is vaccination rates. If we overlay Canada’s vaccination rate over that previous chart…
We can see that we’ve actually overtaken the US and Europe! Apparently, we have a LOT fewer anti-vaxxers up here, and that’s definitely a competition we are happy to lose against the Americans.
Secondly, we can also glean some more insight by overlaying the performance of PDC, the Canadian dividend stock index we also own on top of the chart from before. If we do that, we can see that PDC (in purple)…
…actually outperforms both VTI and the broader TSX! PDC contains mostly large mature dividend-paying companies, so basically banks, insurance companies, stuff like that. Our financial sector is brimming with cash, not just from all the deposits they’re holding, but the mortgages they’ve sold to desperate horny Home Boners who’ve purchased at wildly overinflated prices out in the sticks because they thought they’d never have to commute into the city again.
That and our financial regulators has forbidden companies who’ve received financial assistance from raising their dividends, so while dividend payments have been frozen in place, cash has been building up on corporate balance sheets. Hence, higher stock prices reflecting this excess cash.
Honestly, it’ll all probably normalize once the regulators let companies spike their dividends again, but for now we can gloat at our southern neighbours in our technical, temporary superiority.
Honestly, as Canadians, it’s all we can ever hope for.
The Return of Dividends
Speaking of dividends, they are back, baby!
Our Yield Shield strategy states that by pivoting to higher-yielding assets and relying on dividends to fund your living expenses, you can avoid selling assets during recessions and hedge off sequence of return risk. However, this isn’t a perfect solution because dividends can be cut, which we acknowledge in our book. In 2008, dividends on our portfolio got cut by 10%, and then were restored the year after. And in year 2020, dividends on our portfolio got cut by about 5%, and it looks like they’re being restored the year after. Not only that, the pandemic caused our spending to plummet from $40,000/year down to $34,000/year, and with dividends of $38,000, we still managed to book a $4000 surplus.
I gotta admit, it feels good to be proven right. When we wrote the book we were pretty confident that no matter what happened we could always drop our living expenses by travelling (“If shit hits the fan, we’re going to Thailand”), but the pandemic combined with my dad’s cancer diagnosis at the same fucking time was totally unexpected, and took away our magic bullet of international travel for a year and a half. And yet the Yield Shield strategy still got us through it!
And now, with the pandemic receding, the few funds that cut dividends (looking at you, EFA!) have restored them, and our passive income is flowing as expected again. We run our math targeting an annual dividend yield of $40,000 from our combined portfolios, which according to Passiv, is right on track with $20,000+ at the half way point.
Nice.
Shortening Durations Works
Durations on bonds is a bit of a confusing subject, and ever since I wrote this article articulating my thoughts on what we were planning on doing with our bond allocations in a rising interest rate environment, our inbox has been exploding with questions. I think that article just generated more confusion. *hangs head in shame*
Ok so to recap, when interest rates fall, bond funds rise. And when interest rates rise, bond funds fall. Note that interest rates don’t actually need to rise or fall for the effect on the bond market because just the expectation of interest rates moving one way or the other is enough for the bond market to react. Bond traders are trying to get ahead of the interest rate moves so they don’t lose money.
Bond durations are a measurement of how sensitive a bond fund is to interest rate moves (or rather, an expectation of interest rate move). If a bond fund’s duration is 10, and interest rates go up 1%, then the bond fund’s value goes down 10%. Conversely, if interest rates go down 1%, the bond fund’s value will go up 10%.
So when interest rates are expected to go up, you can expect bond ETF’s to go down. Because the pandemic is receding and interest rates are already at rock bottom levels, we can expect interest rates to go up over the short to medium term. That’s why a bond fund like ZAG has this shape.
This is expected since bonds are anti-correlated to equities, so naturally when equities rise bonds fall and vice versa.
ZAG is an aggregate bond ETF. It has a duration of 8.1. ZSB, which is the fund we switched into, on the other hand, only has a duration of 2.8, meaning it’s far less sensitive to interest rate moves. This is what ZSB’s performance looks like overlaid on ZAG.
Now, this better performance isn’t free. I did have to give up something for that. Specifically, ZSB has a lower yield than ZAG. ZSB’s yield is only 2.36% vs. ZAG’s which is 3%. So I gave up 0.6% of yield, but in exchange we will avoid similar drops like this in the future as interest rates continue to rise.
That being said, I will be returning back to my neutral bond allocation at some point in the future, and when I do, you can be sure I’ll tell you all about it on this weird little blog we’ve made, so stay tuned!
Conclusion
So have the Roaring 20’s begun? Maybe. I sure hope so. After such a miserable start to 2020, the rest of the decade has got some major catching up to make up for it. I don’t know about you guys, but we are going to travel SO HARD once borders open up, which look like they might do any day now, so yeah!
And on the portfolio front, it sure looks like stock markets are being primed for a pretty major expansion. Everybody who took all this government stimulus and exchanged it for a giant mortgage are going to miss out, but you know what? I’m totally OK with that.
We just all need to set a reminder for October 2029. If this Roaring 20’s ends the same as the last Roaring 20’s, that’ll suck hard.
But for now, wheeee!
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First, we got rid of REITs and redirected it into the dividend stock ETF PDC
————-
Hmmm. Is that a good move?
VNQ is up 25% YTD.
PCD only 17%.
I needed my dividends to be stable and REITs were dropping theirs, so for me it made sense.
Realistically from a purely investing perspective, 2020 was little more than a trivial blip (unless you sold at the bottom). To be honest, I was sort of hoping for a 2008 type of crash. I wanted an actual “stress test” on my assets (which will happen at some point regardless) to see just how things work out. If after some catastrophe I’m having to return to the workforce, better now than a few years out when I intend to be completely unemployable !
Yep, the last seven or so years have been very very good for my investments (including 2020). Business is humming and everyone is making bank $$ without much effort. Going forward into the 2020’s, I’m guessing the biggest risks are another pandemic, or possibly some geopolitical flashpoint.
What, this pandemic wasn’t stressful ENOUGH for you? You are clearly more zen than I.
Hi guys, if you see this, I actually just came across your blog in the last week, and in that time have read most of it, also read your book, etc. (I am unofficially FI and have time to do whatevah I want basically).
You guys have a fun schtick, and also were uniquely suited to this, being young, ambitious, scarred by poverty, etc, which gave you a drive. Also obviously you are book smart and street smart, and got some excellent intellectual training, so you could figure this stuff out, much more easily that the average person without those skills and abilities.
I will be in an official FI position in a couple more years, as long as things keep somewhat as they are.
But officially I am already in unofficial FI, as I spent years putting together my skills for working at what I find interesting, and am good at, and have fun doing. (creating music, etc.).
I currently make 2x-5x-10x my expenses “working” under 20 hrs week, (but some weeks I choose to work 24/7 basically) so savings range from 25%-80% of income per month, and taxes are low as a self-employed Artiste’ with deductions etc. (no car, no mortgage, etc).
Also due to moving online and going global, income has doubled recently. Example: about 4 hrs of work makes enough to cover about 5 days expenses, costs? Zero, as all the audio gear I have anyway. It’s fun.
So for me, it’s a nice balance of FI and CE which is Creative Entrepreneurship.
[ FICE ] = Financial Indy + Creative Entrepreneurship.
Doing good work you want to do, are good at, and are “meant” to do.
Once officially into FI with enough income from investments, life will only change a little, release a few clients, increase expenses a bit, more sandboxed creative projects for fun, etc. But day to day won’t change that much, as I already do mostly what I want now.
It’s like we are all little frogs in a giant pot of water, and the powers-that-be started to slowly increase the heat the last number of decades, and the water is close to the boiling point, and people are flailing around in the hot pot with their heads underwater and drowning with no way out.
But some are able to use their intellect, basic math skills, financial software, street smarts, and self-discipline and willpower to bootstrap their way out of the hot-pot, and now live on the other side of the matrix-system.
I also happen to be decent in that area, but one has to generally hide that part of your brain when you are an Artiste’ and be artsy-fartsy so people think you are cool. (lots of long-term successful rock stars are exactly like that, in fact, behind the scenes).
I started to think if too many people started doing this, that gov’t would bring in new taxes, etc, but that is not likely to happen. 99% of the peeps are safely secured in the pot for life. Unless they turn up the heat too high, then there might be a real revolution.
Can I ask what’s in your RRSP account ? When you take money out to spend every month, do you need to pay tax on the money you take out from RRSP? ( I have a medium size RRSP, I want to make it like giving me dividend of $400/per month, how can I do it? Do I need to pay tax on this? Thx
About a third of it is in RRSPs. When I withdraw from my RRSPs, I do have to pay some taxes, but that’s because we’re still earning an income from our blog/book. If we didn’t have any income, we’d be able to do those withdrawals for free.
thanks guys for this article, but its stressing me knowing you guys changed the portfolio where as i am still blindly buying the original funds in the workshop
My current portfolio is (VAB-20%, VCN-30%, VUN-30%, XEC-4%, XEF-16%) 600k
i have another 400k sitting in savings account right now (dumb me of sitting on sidelines for the past 6 months) hoping another crash/correction happens, but after this article, its time to buy lumpsum before it gets too late.
So please suggest/clarify if i should continue the original portfolio and buy the same funds with the new money
OR
Keep original portfolio AS IS & buy these new funds (ZAG-25%, ZCN-16%,VTI-25%, EFA-25%,PDC-9%) using the new money 400k
OR
Sell the existing portfolio and buy (ZAG-25%, ZCN-16%,VTI-25%,EFA-25%,PDC-9%) even with the new money..
I have not sold till now and not sure if its worth changing the portfolio as i am still in accumulation phase (another 1 year to get FIRED).
Appreciate as i am getting confused between my current funds vs. your current funds..should i keep them or convert them to your funds along with new money..
rgds
Mak
Mak, it’s outrageous that these guys are changing their portfolio based in what they think this or that is going to do. That sort of fiddling with an excellent plan is almost guaranteed not to end well. The portfolio you have is excellent – a globally diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds. There is no need to change a thing. If I were your, I’d invest the cash you have in the portfolio you have, and, as you have learnt, timing the market doesn’t work, so just invest new cash when you get it without delay.
Thanks Grant for the response.
I am thinking the same but as i am following them since beginning and learnt a lot from this blog, wanted to have their opinion as well.
They are masters in this investing and can come ahead by fiddling the portfolios but people like me cannot do that constantly.
Thinking of going DCA again instead of lumpsum but wanted to make sure to buy the same old funds this blog advocated or buy the new funds if they are much efficient than my current portfolio.
As i got maxed out all my registered accounts…putting 400k in non registered account is tax efficient or not.
Actually, the evidence is very clear. Those who change their portfolios trying to guess market conditions lose out. They might think they will come out ahead, but they don’t over the long term. The perfect portfolio is unknowable in advance, so just pick a sensible one, as you have done, and stick with it.
As you’ve maxed out your registered accounts, it’s fine to invest the rest in a non registered account.
Hi Mak, I wouldn’t change your portfolio. One thing to note if you have been following them is their original actual portfolio (Portfolio A) was always different than the workshop one (Portfolio B). The two older portfolios are here: https://www.millennial-revolution.com/invest/our-2018-finances-2/ And I’m going to guess their Portfolio B workshop one hasn’t changed. So their original portfolio was actually (VAB, XCB, CPD, VCN, XDV, XRE, XSP, XEF, XEC)
The workshop portfolio I believe was an older couch potato portfolio which is totally great long term as mentioned above. Even over on the couch potato blog the new portfolio has changed a bit but he doesn’t recommend people change their holdings from the earlier portfolios.
They switched XSP to VTI. That seems smart. XSP was hedged, and VTI & VUN are not hedged. I think an advisor helped them make the early portfolio A and he likes preferred shares (CPD) reits. My advisor also liked XSP CPD and I switched them too. Maybe the reasons are less downsize risk, or don’t need the income, or just an easier ultra simple portfolio is just nice. JL Collins ditched his reits too and wrote about why. Some people like them, some don’t. Not sure it will make a massive difference in the end if you don’t need the income from them. You can play around with portfolio visualizer for fun: https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio
If anything their new portfolio looks a lot closer to yours now. Just slightly more simple.
I’m curious why switch from VCN to ZCN. I think Wealthsimple often uses XIC. This was an ok write up about the differences but after all that text it still just ends with “don’t obsess over which one is best”: https://www.canadianportfoliomanagerblog.com/understanding-canadian-equity-etfs/
It’s still fun to hear why someone picks one over another so I am curious on the why behind the switches they made too. It’s nice for learning to hear the various ideas why behind the changes.
Excellent explained, thanks for that!
The answer for why ZCN vs VCN is no good reason. I owned ZCN before I wrote the workshop, but I promoted VCN because VCN tracks the same index and has slightly lower fees. But because switching over for me would have caused me to incur a large capital gain tax, I was “forced” to stick with ZCN.
Thanks Lori for the explanation.
will stick to the VAB/VCN/VUN/XEC/XEF at 80:20 ratio that i currently have it.
Stick with the fund allocations from the workshop. My personal portfolio has shifted from the workshop over the years, but that’s because my risk tolerance has gone up and my yield needs have gone down.
But for someone in your position (still accumulating), the workshop portfolio is still the right choice.
Thanks Wanderer..
will continue as suggested.
Btw..even though i am in accumulation phase (still one more year to go), i am not able to buy any equity ETF’s due to their growth while attempting to re-balance.
Bit worried to keep buying bonds (VAB) to rebalance as i already drifted from 60E40B to 80E20B.
Travel – yes ! For the fully vaccinated traveler the world is opening up – trips to Croatia, France, Austria, Czech Republic, Italy and Portugal have all been booked already through next year – getting some great mileage awards and just plain low airfares. The rising balance in investment accounts helps too –
Cool !
Mmm…something doesn’t add up. In your March 29 article you said you own VAB, but now you are claiming you switched to short term bonds and avoided the 5% drop in VAB which occurred from Jan – March? Which is it?
Regardless it’s a mistake to switch bond durations just because you think you can predict the direction of interest rates. When interest rates go up, there is a temporary price drop, which is recovered over the duration of the bond fund as maturing bonds are reinvested at higher interest rates, after which time you will have higher returns than if interest rates has not gone up. Bond investors should want higher interest rates as that increases expected returns over the long term. Besides you will only do better in a rising interest rate environment, over the short term, by going shorter if interest rates go up more than expected – not likely as the expected increases are already priced into the yield curve, and the yield curve is the best predictor of interest rates.
For long term investors the evidence based strategy is to own intermediate term bond funds and stay the course. Forget about thinking you can outsmart the bond market by shifting durations because you think you know what interest rates are going to do.
Oh shoot, you’re right. I still owned VAB in March, so I didn’t actually avoid the drop. I will update the article to no longer imply that I did…
With a nearly 40% increase since inception, your Portoflio A is going well for you guys. Congrats on that!
It turns out that our portfolio DOUBLED since we become FI and started to travel the world exactly 3 years ago (7/1/2018). While we have heavily invested in low-cost index funds, we did not sell all of our individual stocks from the company we worked at. The latest chunk coming from Amazon.com which has been way outperforming the S&P for the past few years. That that has definitely got a nice boost to our portfolio…
Here is a picture of our portfolio: https://ibb.co/SvY2wq6.
If this link doesn’t work, you can refer to this tweet for more details: https://twitter.com/NomadNumbers/status/1404867616787759107
Roaring 20? Well, I hope that the next market correction won’t be that severe!
It’s not a competition 🙂
Get article, Go Tampa Bay!!
It is absolutely shocking. If the roaring Twenties does come back and we actually see a prolonged increase in the stock market for another 9 years… then it’s like.. 20 years of positive recovery. Very unprecedented.
I hope it’s back as well. Until we see a Great Depression 2.0, weeeee!
Great article. I have followed your investment workshop and I still own VAB.TO(20%), VCN.TO(25%), VFV.TO(25%), XEC.TO(5%) and XEF.TO(20%).
However, when I look at your tickers its completely different than the one in the workshop. So I am wondering should I also change my allocation to your index funds ? We are still in accumulation stage.
I am in the same situation and followed their original funds mentioned in the workshop.
But not sure why you bought VFV, where as they mentioned VUN.
Lets wait for their opinion.. for now i am holding back
Yup.. still waiting on their response to all this confusion. :/
Stick with the tickers in the portfolio workshop
The reason mine are different is because those are the ETFs I owned before I wrote the workshop articles. The ETFs in the workshop track the same indexes and are cheaper than the ones I own, but if I were to switch to the better workshop ones, I would get hit with capital gains taxes.
@Wanderer: perhaps consider a post on this. Include some analysis of the different portfolios and the cost impact of switching your portfolio to align with the portfolio in the book.
Also, the table after the text: “So right now, our portfolio targets look like this” shows ZAG and not ZSB
I was reading an analysis that basically said that returns are based on risk, higher risk yields higher returns obviously. But because the Fed has chosen to make investing in the stock market fundamentally less risky through their monetary policy, the returns must become lower. We’ll never have a stock market crash like the great depression or the 2008 financial crisis because we’ve put policies in place to prevent them. The downside to that is that since the market is less risky, it must produce lower gains. Obviously that’s just one analysis, but it makes sense to me.
– Where’s the FIRE
Changing the portfolio’s etfs -zag to zsb- based on (bond) market predictions smells like market timing. Everyone from J Bogle to JL Collins (and you in other articles) says don’t do it because nobody can predict the markets. Not sure how to read this article.
Sure, I don’t like making portfolio moves based on the news, but interest rates are at zero! They have nowhere to go but up!
“We may not be able to kick your ass militarily, or at football, or basically at anything cool, but this year we get to claim victory in politeness, maple syrup production, and the TSX! Ha! Take that! In your face!”….LOL, Keep up that attitude !! LOL
Investing is picking ETF’s for 10+ years expecting gains. Gambling is picking ETF’s for 6months/1 year thinking you can predict the markets. When investing you don’t care about short term (1-3 years) risks, so no need to change your bond etfs, they will come back after a dip.
The problem with market timing and overconfidence in your ability to predict the markets: you changed from long-term to short-term bonds after reading the news that interest rates should go up… and after they go up, you think you’ll predict reliably when they go down again and change the ETF’s again. Bad news: nobody can guess it, not even the Central banks know what events will occur next that will influence the markets.
Just stick with your allocation and invest for long term, 10+ years.
Sure, investing is boring then, although you make money. If you really want to gamble- use 5% of your money, and gamble hard.
I’m not basing my decision to go short on bonds based on the news predicting rising interest rates as much as the fact that they’re already at 0 and can’t go any lower.
Very little correction. EAFE stands for Europe Australasia (not just Australia) and Far East =)
Also, you forgot to mention that Canadians do beat the US in Healthcare as well … 😉
If you were americans and not canadians, you might have worked a few more years in order to get more assets to cover the US Healthcare Costs (traveling to Mexico for a cleaning is doable if you live in Texas or Arizona, but probably not if you live in Oregon or New York State).
“we have a fairly significant allocation of our equity exposure in theTSX. We like to keep it split about evenly between Canada, the US, and the MSCI EAFE (Europe, Australia, Far East) Index.
This has, annoyingly, caused us to underperform our American counterparts for a number of years as our stock market would just keep getting ignored by worldwide investors while poring money into the American stock market.”
I am confused here. As indicated in the first paragraph above, being invested in the TSX does not mean that you are 100% invested in Canadian Stocks (as you also own EAFE and US stocks via those TSX ETFs).
So why would you then say in the second paragraph above that being invested in the TSX (and still owning US Stocks) would cause you to underperform the American Stock Market (that you STILL own via your ETFs in the TSX) ?
Do you also invest in US Based ETFs (trading on the NYSE and not the TSX)?
Wanderer: Why PDC for Canadian dividend stock? Is it not on the side of higher MERs? I used PDC early on (and still have it due to capital gains), but am putting new funds in XEI (or another one that follows the sector mix you see right but is lower cost).
I wonder what your thought process was in selecting PDC. Thanks
I had the same question. PDC’s MER is 0.56%
Way way higher than the other ETFs.
I am assuming they needed the dividend payments from PDC for their Yield Shield strategy.
But is it worth paying 0.56% in MER for those dividends?
Rather than selling other ETFs with a lower MER to provide the income?
This was a super interesting read! Love your point in the beginning that it’s great were heading for the “roaring 20s” but maybe not so great that if that means another great depression. Thanks for including all of these charts in the post as well as your own commentary. It made the current economy much easier to follow along with. Thanks for sharing.
Hi guys, I just read your book and I loved it! Although this article is still a little beyond me since I’m just a beginner (like what is Portfolio A vs. B? Does it mean you have different accounts?). I tried reading the Intelligent Investor before and was so confused. This is all new to me and I would appreciate any wisdom and insight on the matter.
I want to get started on creating my own portfolio just like you. I currently have Wealthsimple Invest where all you do is dump money into it and they take care of the rest (I chose an 80:20 allocation). I opened up Wealthsimple Trade because I want to try buying my own index funds or ETFs. Would you recommend Wealthsimple over Questrade for buying stocks? Would buying index funds be redundant since I already have WS Invest invested in ETFs? And how do you calculate how many stocks to buy in order to reach a certain target allocation? I think I want to settle on an equity:bond allocation of 72:25 for the WS Trade account and am wondering how you did the calculation on how many stocks of each to buy in order to have a specific allocation! Sorry for asking a bunch of noob questions haha, maybe all the answers are on your site but I’m still going through the posts. Thank you and keep doing what you do best 🙂
Hey guys, I’m late, but following your workshop and started investing today in a portfolio
Zsb 40%
Vcn 20
Vun 20
Xef 16
Xec 4.
But then I see in 2021 you changed it all…
Zag 25
Zcn 16
PDC 9
Vti 25
Efa 25…
From what 8 understand the only fixed income in there is zag. So you Switched from 60/40 to 75/25?
I felt so happy to finally start investing with all my accounts setup, but now am confused of the direction to keep?
Can you please clarify that change?
Hi there,
First of all, I wanted to send huge thanks for the author of this great paper. In my opinion, we’ve not entered the “roaring 20s”, but rather a cycle of growth / depression which may last for decades, with recurrent inflation that will become a common story year after year. I am sorry if that might sound pessimistic, but the war in Ukraine in the now obvious first climate change consequences are calling for prudence…
Congratulations to your blog! I read your book and is really amazing.