Canadians | WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo.com

Home Bias

Posted by Preet on Feb 9, 2010 | 11 comments

I was speaking to some American financial advisors once and we started talking about geographic diversification. I mentioned that it wasn’t uncommon for Canadians to have extreme home biases, and many Canadians only invest in Canadian stocks. They said the same thing for American investors. Considering that the US has traditionally been 50% of the world’s stock market (by size) it’s less of a stretch for Americans than it is for Canadians (Canada has traditionally been about 2 to 4% of the world’s stock markets by size). Some of the American financial advisors fell of their chairs during our discussion since it would be akin to an American...

Guest Article: DSC Index Funds

Posted by Jim Stark on Feb 8, 2010 | 2 comments

This is a another guest article by Jim Stark. Jim Stark is a pseudonym for a practicing Canadian financial advisor. Why are there no DSC Index Funds? On one hand, pretty much any advisor knows that there is no such thing as a DSC index fund and why that is so. On the other hand, many retail investors probably never thought about it- and likely wouldn’t be able to accurately explain why this little wrinkle exists even if they did. There’s likely a pretty severe disconnect on this- a topic that could have applications in the fields of practice management, ethics, client suitability and advisor ‘value propositions’ to name a few. (Note: there actually are DSC...

A Lap Of The Blogs

Posted by Preet on Feb 4, 2010 | 7 comments

If you are new to WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo.com, every Friday I run a post called “A Lap Of The Blogs” which provides links to articles I found interesting and think that others may want to read for themselves. I also sometimes include some commentary on what’s going on in my personal life and a weekly “racing video” since my former life was in the auto-racing industry. The name “Lap of the Blogs” is in reference to “A Lap Of The Gods” which is an old video series which chronicled on-board footage of the world’s greatest F1 drivers lapping various racetracks from around the world. NOTE: you have to visit the actual website to see the embedded video – it...

Research or Marketing Gimmick?

Posted by Jim Stark on Feb 2, 2010 | 2 comments

This is a another guest article by Jim Stark. Jim Stark is a pseudonym for a practicing Canadian financial advisor. So I hopped on to my computer one morning and typed in the phrase “scientific method” into my search engine to see what came up. Click here for the definition that our friends at Wikipedia use. Then read the following: As far as I can tell, the preponderance of evidence supports the notion that the majority of active products and strategies fail to outperform and that the ones that do cannot be reliably identified in advance. It’s sort of like lottery tickets. The majority of tickets sold are losing tickets and the ones that are actually winners...

A Lap Of The Blogs

Posted by Preet on Jan 28, 2010 | 5 comments

If you are new to WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo.com, every Friday I run a post called “A Lap Of The Blogs” which provides links to articles I found interesting and think that others may want to read for themselves. I also sometimes include some commentary on what’s going on in my personal life and a weekly “racing video” since my former life was in the auto-racing industry. The name “Lap of the Blogs” is in reference to “A Lap Of The Gods” which is an old video series which chronicled on-board footage of the world’s greatest F1 drivers lapping various racetracks from around the world. NOTE: you have to visit the actual website to see the embedded video – it...

What is an RRSP?

Posted by Preet on Jul 30, 2007 | 0 comments

RRSP stands for ”Registered Retirement Savings Plan”. It is a type of savings or investment account which was designed for Canadians to facilitate retirement savings. It is “Registered” with the Canadian Revenue Agency. Many people think that they “buy” RRSP’s every year – that the RRSP is the investment. NO – think of an RRSP as an “account”. You can hold a wide variety of investments INSIDE this account so long as they meet the definition of a “qualifying investment” as listed by the CRA (The Canadian Revenue Agency). But don’t worry, almost everything is a qualified...