40 years ago trying to invest by yourself was almost unheard of. Buying stocks and trying to invest in companies always involved a lengthy conversation with your broker. Only the rich would do it, since employing a broker to work for you was always an expensive endeavour. Fast forward a decade later and the advent…
Every good investor knows that you should have balance in your investment portfolio. That means there should be a good mixture of equities, bonds and even cash in your portfolio. Over the last ten years, though, the pace of growth in equities have far outstripped the growth of interest provided by fixed income assets. In…
Unless you own a house in Toronto or Vancouver, Canada hasn’t been a good place to invest over the past ten years. If we look at the performance of Canada’s main stock index, the TSX, over the past decade, the returns have been abysmal. With only a 17% cumulative gain over 10 years, anyone who…
I get asked all the time “What should I buy?” It’s assumed by many that the best way to financial independence is to find the right assets to buy so that your money can grow quickly. This is exactly the wrong type of thinking. Achieving financial independence isn’t about finding quick hit wins with your…
Most people don’t follow their investments. They tend to just buy whatever their advisor at the bank says or use a passive investment portfolio like the popular Canadian Couch Potato portfolios. When it comes time to review, which might happen once year, investors wonder why the gains are so small when the market has done…
It’s not often that you can go on vacation and come back to see you actually made money having fun, but heck that’s what just happened. Over the last month while I was out of town, the TSX has been up over 2.5%. The S&P 500 has gone up over 2%. What gives? I’m starting…
“Did you buy Apple?” “I made a killing on my weed stocks.” “Facebook went up 3 times the price that I bought at.” Those are all common phrases that I come across all the time. It’s not uncommon for regular investors to hit it big on stocks where they put a few thousand dollars in…
