Hot Off the Web- October 2, 2009 Personal Finance and Investments In the Financial Post’s “Strange bedfellows: Moore, Boogle” Jonathan Chevreau refers to Bogle’s new book “Enough”.  Chevreau writes that “Enough begins and ends with a short anecdote Kurt Vonnegut Jr. described in New Yorker magazine, about a chat with Catch-22 author Joseph Heller at […]

Hot Off the Web– September 25, 2009 Personal Finance and Investments Jason Zweig in the WSJ’s “Don’t trip in your search for higher bond yield” reminds readers not “to be driven to do desperate things” in search of yield. In search of better than the minuscule money market (or short term GIC) yields, people are […]

Hot Off the Web– September 17, 2009 Personal Finance and Investing WSJ’s Jason Zweig writes that “Buy-and-hold is dead. Long live buy-and-hold.” “There is not much evidence that professional portfolio managers are any better at picking securities in bear markets than they are in bull markets, which is pretty faint praise.” “(Having grown up on […]

Hot Off the Web- September 10, 2009 Personal finance and investing Surprise? In Globe and Mails “Indexed funds beat managed rivals in the long term” Steve Ladurantaye reports that “Only 16.7 per cent of active funds beat their benchmark over three years, and the number slips to 7.6 per cent over five years. The numbers […]

Hot Off the Web-September 2, 2009 Personal finance and investments “Fiduciary duty hits the street-Sort of” “Currently, brokers are held to a more lenient “suitability” standard, which means they can’t put clients in inappropriate investments. Many investment advisers, by contrast, have operated under the fiduciary standard for nearly 70 years.” “Investment advisers want to extend […]

Hot Off the Web- August 26, 2009 Personal Finance and Investments In Globe and Mail’s “Target date funds missing their mark” Shirley Won discusses some of the problems with target-date funds. There are actually two types of these funds discussed in the article: the structured product types which include guarantees and (2) the age-dependent asset […]

Hot Off the Web- August 18, 2009 Back from holidays and ready to roll again. In the next few weeks, in response to some reader requests, I plan to do some special topic blogs on: asset allocation, a quantitative look at the value of LTCI (long  term care insurance) and the impact of savings rate, […]

Hot Off the Web– July 29, 2009 Personal Finance and Advisors Tara Siegel-Bernard in the NYT’s “A boot camp to prepare for retirement” describes a very interesting approach for people within a couple of years to retirement to assessing financial readiness for retirement. “It’s a way for people to really wrap their arms around something […]

Hot Off the Web- July 23, 2009 Personal Finance and Investments WSJ’s Andrea Coombs discusses the need for not just managing all the passwords that we use for our online financial information but to consider what happens if you die in “You need an online estate plan”. “That’s all well and good while you’re alive. […]