January 31 roundup
On ETFs for your portfolio, using a Defined Benefit pension plan and testing your financial savvy.
etfs
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iShares + Claymore is not good for Clients
Recently, BlackRock which offers 48 ETFs in Canada under the iShares label announced that it will be acquiring Claymore Canada, a vendor of 34 exchange-traded funds. The press release accompanying the announcement said that the transaction enhances BlackRock’s ability to “deliver excellence in innovation, quality and choice”. According to the Canadian ETF Association, iShares is [...]
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Tax-Efficient Investing With ETFs
If you’re investing outside of tax-sheltered accounts like RRSPs and TFSAs, you need to choose your investments carefully—otherwise you risk giving a big slice of your returns to the good people at the Canada Revenue Agency. Today we’ll look at ways to create a tax-efficient index portfolio using some innovative ETFs. Swapping dividends for capital [...]
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Norbert’s gambit: A better way to buy U.S. dollars
Use Norbert’s gambit to get rid of those currency exchange fees when trading your Canadian dollars for American ones.
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Are ETFs Growing for the Wrong Reasons?
On the day his company announced it was acquiring Claymore, BlackRock’s CEO Bill Chinery called ETFs “electric cars in a world of internal combustion engines.” What he meant was that ETFs, despite the attention poured on them by the media and DIY investors, are still only a small part of the fund industry. ETFs in [...]
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BlackRock and Claymore Make Good Partners
Announcements in the ETF world are mostly tedious these days—usually they involve the launch of another exotic and increasingly narrow new product. That’s why yesterday’s announcement that BlackRock is buying Claymore Investments was a shocker. I’m not the only one who didn’t see that coming. BlackRock, of course, is the parent company of iShares, the [...]
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Performance of the Currency-Neutral MSCI EAFE Index Fund
[Note: This post was originally published on January 6, 2010. I've updated it with the data for the past two years on the performance of the iShares MSCI EAFE CAD-Hedged Index Fund (TSX: XIN) relative to MSCI EAFE local currency returns. Bottom line: Though the performance lag of the past two years was slight, the [...]
Performance of the Currency-Neutral MSCI EAFE Index Fund is brought to you by Canadian Capitalist — Helping you to invest & prosper.
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When your adviser hates index funds
When Derek asked his adviser about switching to ETFs, he got a list of reasons not to. I don’t agree with any of them.
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An ETF Creation Story
The Couch Potato strategy thrives on simplicity, but advanced index investors (geeks) should understand what goes on under the hood of ETFs. One of the most important concepts is how ETF shares are created and redeemed. I’ll warn you that this gets a bit technical. But it turns out that this process is the single [...]
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A Chat With Vanguard Canada: Part 2
Here’s another excerpt from my recent interview with Atul Tiwari, Dennis Duffy and Joel Dickson of Vanguard. These questions focus on the types of products we might see from Vanguard in the future. You can read also read Part 1 of the interview here. Your first family of ETFs have all been plain vanilla funds [...]
