Posts Tagged ‘index’

ETFs and Index Funds in Our Portfolio

March 11th, 2010

We have just added a new page in our blog, called Portfolio. You can access it from the links at the top of our blog. This page contains the complete picture of our portfolio. As we mentioned in our previous posting, we use ETFs and index mutual funds. We also use dollar-cost averaging in our retirement account. Lastly, we try to keep our portfolio as simple as possible.

15% US Index

  • PowerShares QQQ Trust, Series 1 ETF (NASDAQ:QQQQ)
  • BlackRock Enhanced Capital and Income Fund (NYSE:CII)

15% Canadian Index

  • CIBC Canadian Index (CIB300)

15% Emerging Market Index

  • Claymore Canadian BRIC ETF (TSE:CBQ)
  • Market Vectors Brazil Small Cap ETF (NYSE:BRF)
  • Claymore/AlphaShares China Small Cap ETF (NYSE:HAO)

30% Fixed Income

  • TD Canadian Bond Index (TDB966)
  • iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bonds ETF (NYSE:HYG)
  • PowerShares Financial Preferred Portfolio ETF (NYSE:PGF)

5% REIT

  • Vanguard REIT ETF (NYSE:VNQ)
  • iShares Canadian S&P/TSX Capped REIT ETF (TSE:XRE)

Notes

  • For the US index, we basically invest in Nasdaq-100 and S&P 500. We use a closed-end funds (CII) for S&P 500 because of its dividend. Check also our posting here for a couple of different closed-end funds that replicates S&P 500.
  • Although Canada represents only 2% of the world GDP, we maintain a pretty high percentage of Canadian index. Why? It’s just because we live in Canada. Our “native” currency is Canadian dollar.
  • We know that CIBC Canadian Index might not be the best mutual funds. However, we have to keep it this way until end of next year.

Stay Invested with the Index

February 26th, 2010

S&P

We just read a news from The Globe And Mail about performance of Canadian equity funds. Many actively managed mutual funds in Canada cannot beat the index, i.e. S&P/TSX composite index. Here is the result:

  • Year 2009: 39.2% of actively managed funds beat the index
  • Over 3 years: 12.5% of actively managed funds beat the index
  • Over 5 years: 7.7% of actively managed funds beat the index

That’s why; we recommend to invest in the index. As you can also see from our portfolio, most of our money is currently parked in the index as well. Only small amount of money that is used for speculation, including stock picking and timing the market. That’s why; we still have stock picks and participate in the Canadian blogger’s stock picks contest.

Canadian Housing Prices Has Recovered?

February 24th, 2010

Canadian Housing Price 

We just found an interesting Web site, housepriceindex.ca, that provides house price index in Canada. We checked a couple of big cities, such as Vancouver and Toronto. It’s a little bit surprising that housing prices in many cities have recovered. Some are even higher compared to 2008 when the recession started. You can see the house price index for Toronto in the chart above.

We are surprised because the recovery looks like to be in V-shape. We were expecting something like L-shape or U-shape.

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