This and That: Generic advice, debt worries and more…

• This blog post on the New York Times website cautions against blindly following generic financial advice that you obtain from newspaper columns, television programmes and blog posts.
• Worries about debt dominate the headlines these days. Money manager Leith Wheeler analyzes the four components of aggregate debt and finds the picture to be decidedly mixed.
• Odlum Brown’s Murray Leith argues yet again that US blue chips offer far better value than their Canadian counterparts. I’ve been hearing the same argument for 5 years now and it is going come true sometime and I wish I could tell when.
• Larry MacDonald wonders if Beating the TSX, a Canadian variant of the Dogs of the Dow, can sustain its outperformance.
• Preet notes that the original Dogs of the Dow strategy might have become too popular for its own good. Over the past 15 years, it is underperforming the DJIA by 2 percentage points even before accounting for those pesky frictional costs.
• Michael James says that indexing allowed him to stop worrying and start loving investing. I agree that keeping up with a basket of stocks is a chore I could do without.
• Canadian Financial Stuff loathes what the Harmonized Sales Tax has done to prices at the gas pump. Ontarians, though, gave the HST a collective shrug. BC Premier Campbell must be green with envy at how smoothly the HST went down in Ontario.
• Mr. Cheap figures that most claims that a home turned out to be one’s “best investment” are based on some rather shaky arithmetic.
• The Financial Blogger lists the positive financial benefits that come with home ownership.
• Gail Vaz-Oxlade is not pleased with rising costs. It’s not just the HST; she is also paying more for electricity with time-of-use metering.
• Canadian Couch Potato shows why the new Claymore Bond ETF is an instrument for short-term gambling.
• Million Dollar Journey featured a post that claimed that truly active managers outperform. Unfortunately, the problem still remains the same: picking the winning mutual fund manager ahead of time.
• If an investor assembles a portfolio and never rebalances, she is likely to become overweighted in stocks. Thicken My Wallet on why this happens and how to avoid it.

Just a quick reminder that you can read my posts in your favourite reader or delivered by e-mail. Have a great weekend everyone!

Related Reading:

• This and That # 103
• Quick Review: The Til Debt Do Us Part Life Planner
• This and That
• Book Review: Debt-Free Forever
• The Dogs (of the Dow) Don’t Bark

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