Hot Off the Web- February 23, 2010 Personal Finance and investments Jamie Golombek in the Financial Post’s “Investment puzzle: Inside or outside”tries to answer investors’ recurring question: “which investments should be held inside versus outside your registered plan (RRSP)?”, now further complicated with the availability of TFSAs. The short answer is: fixed income in tax […]

Hot Off the Web- February 14, 2010 Personal Finance and investments Jason Zweig in the WSJ’s “High trading is bad news for investors”reminds readers that while “Buy-and-hold hasn’t looked too good lately, but churn-and-burn is no better.” He quotes Morningstar study that “mutual funds with the highest portfolio turnover rates have underperformed the slowest-trading funds […]

Hot Off the Web– February 9, 2010 Personal Finance and Investments In the Financial Post’s “Know your marginal effective tax rate” Jamie Golombek explains difference between the generally well understood ‘marginal tax rate’ (“the amount of tax you pay on an additional dollar of income above a certain amount”), ‘average tax rate’ (“amount of tax […]

Hot Off the Web- February 2, 2010 Personal Finance and Investments Roma Luciw in the Globe and Mail’s “TFSA trumps RRSP, report says” discusses a new C.D. Howe Institute e-brief that TFSA’s are more tax efficient than RRSPs. While I didn’t get a chance to read the report, the simple test on what is better, […]

Hot Off the Web– January 26, 2010 Personal Finance and Investments David Aston in MoneySense’s “Retirement: Three magic numbers” tries to answer the question of “How much money will you need to retire?” He tackles the answer by framing three levels of retirement” (1) bare-bones basic retirement (rent, no cars, and no cable TV or […]

Hot Off the Web– January 19, 2010 Personal Finance and Investments Jason Zweig’s WSJ article “Why many investors keep fooling themselves” writes that many investors (and advisors) are dreaming in Technicolor. He reminds readers that on a net-net-net basis (i.e. after inflation (3%+), expenses(2%) and taxes) US stocks returned about 4% annually; and if “you […]

Hot Off the Web– January 12, 2010 Personal Finance and Investments John Spence in WSJ’s “Wisdom Tree launches currency hedged ETF” reports on the arrival currency hedged international ETF in the U.S. market, hedging against the rise of the U.S. dollar (of course investors also miss out on the benefits should U.S. dollar fall.) The […]

Hot Off the Web– January 5, 2010 Personal Finance and Investments Jeff Opdyke in the WSJ’s “Covered calls prove popular strategy” discusses covered call strategy, which may be advantageous in flat markets, whereby “An investor buys a stock, but also sells a call. The call obligates the investor to sell shares to the buyer of […]