Hot Off the Web– March 29, 2010 Personal Finance and Investments In the Financial Times’ “Reveal the ‘true cost’ of the croupier’s take” Jonathan Davis writes about the lesser known cousin of the ‘efficient markets hypothesis’, named ‘costs matter hypothesis’. “Like death and taxes, which are anything but hypothetical, fund costs are one of nature’s […]
Hot Off the Web– March 23, 2010 Personal Finance and Investments In the Journal of Financial Planning magazine’s “Unsafe at any speed? The designed-in risk of target-date glide-paths”Zvi Bodie et al say that despite the fact that U.S. Department of Labor allows target-date funds as an investment default in 401(k), their recent poor performance has […]
Hot Off the Web- March 16, 2010 Personal Finance and investments In the Financial Post’s “Loonie surge triggers hedging” Eric Lam discusses hedging of the rising Canadian dollar. (In retrospect, this would have been a great idea 12-15 months ago when the Canadian dollar was trading in the low-80s relative to the U.S. dollar, however […]
Hot Off the Web- March 9, 2010 Personal Finance and investments In the NYT’s “Learning how to hedge yourself, and not just your portfolio”Paul Sullivan discusses the difference between human capital (HC i.e. earning power) and financial capital (FC i.e. assets), and the importance of insuring adequate diversification and even hedging to protect one’s overall […]
Hot Off the Web- March 1, 2010 Personal Finance and investments Brett Arends in WSJ’s “Buffett’s advice for the rest of us”summarizes some of the key elements of Buffett’s advice: (1) stay liquid (always have more than enough cash to meet expected requirements), (2) buy when everyone is selling, (3) ”don’t buy when everyone is […]
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 […]
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