January - 2018

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Time To Rethink Fixed Income

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What Your Company Sponsored Retirement Plan Tells You About You

Most companies offer a retirement plan and if you are smart you are participating. Company sponsored plans are always a good deal. There are three types of company sponsored plan. There is the defined benefit plan, the defined contribution plan, and the group RRSP plan. The defined benefit plan is rarely offered to non-governmental and non-quasi-governmental (teachers, nurses, etc.) employees. The defined contribution plan and the group RRSP plan are prevalent in the priva

Trade is a Win, Win, Win

I trade with my local grocery store. Yesterday I bought three strip loin steaks for $22. Why did this trade happen? I valued the three strip loan steaks at more than $22 cash and my grocery store valued my $22 cash more than they valued the steaks. Trade is voluntary. I didn't have to buy the steaks and they didn't have to sell them. At a $22 price, we both benefit from the trade. This is true when nations trade. Both sides benefit. There will be winners and losers wi

The Rise of the Robo-Advisor

There are three themes to the website. I’ll state them. Investing in markets is a positive sum game but a zero-sum game around the market return. The ramifications are that active managers in the aggregate add negative value after-cost. The second theme is that cost matters, and matters greatly. Everything else being equal, a 10-basis point cost factor is better than a 100-basis point cost factor and is much better than a 200-basis point cost factor. The third theme is t

The Great Supply Side Economic Experiment (Again)

Love him or loath him Trump’s tax package is yet another supply side economic experiment. All other supply side experiments have ended quite well. Both JFK in the early 1960s and Ronald Reagan in the early and mid 1980s slashed personal tax rates across the income spectrum and especially at the highest tax brackets. The economy boomed in both cases. There are many other examples. Trump is doing for the corporation what JFK and Reagan did for the personal side. And, at th

Leverage

We got lucky. We bought a home in the GTA 15 years ago. We borrowed $200,000 and paid $250,000 for our small home. The value has grown to $750,000. Seems like a great investment but let’s look at the arithmetic. Growth from $250,000 to $750,000 in 15 years is an average annual rate of return of 7.6%. That is a fantastic rate for an asset that is supposed to be a slow growing, stable, boring investment. But, did we really pay $250,000 for our home? We have 15 years of