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Tag: asset mix

  • How often should you rebalance?

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    But markets do not stand still. Over time, some asset classes outperform while others lag. Stocks may surge ahead during a bull market. Bonds may stabilize the portfolio during downturns. As those returns compound at different rates, the asset mix begins to drift from your original allocations. 

    An 80% equity portfolio can quietly become 85% or 90% equities after a strong rally. A rough year for stocks can tilt you further into fixed income than you intended. Performance swings, good or bad, can push your portfolio away from the risk profile you originally chose. 

    At some point, the mix no longer reflects your original plan. So, should you step in and rebalance?

    You might look to large ETF providers for guidance. The answers are not always clear. The Vanguard Growth ETF Portfolio (VGRO), for example, states that its 80% stock and 20% bond portfolio may be rebalanced at the discretion of the sub-advisor. That leaves plenty of room for interpretation.

    Others are more prescriptive. The Hamilton Enhanced Mixed Asset ETF (MIX) uses 1.25x leverage on a 60% S&P 500, 20% Treasury, and 20% gold allocation. Hamilton specifies that it rebalances automatically if weights drift 2% from their targets. That is a tight band and implies frequent turnover.

    But you are not running a fund with institutional constraints or leverage targets. You are managing your own portfolio. For most DIY investors, a simpler approach works better. Rather than reacting to every small market move, sticking to a consistent, time-based rebalancing schedule can reduce complexity and prevent decision fatigue. 

    In today’s column, we will look at why you should rebalance, how different time-based approaches have historically behaved, and why consistency often matters more than perfect timing.

    Why rebalance your portfolio at all?

    Rebalancing is the process of selling assets that have grown beyond their target weight and buying those that have fallen below it, such that you restore your portfolio to its intended allocation.

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    When you combine assets that are not perfectly correlated and periodically rebalance them back to target weights, you create what is referred to as a rebalancing premium. The underlying explanation has to do with how returns compound. 

    The arithmetic return is the simple average of yearly or periodic returns. It treats each period independently. The geometric return is the compounded growth rate of your money over time. It shows what you actually earn after gains and losses build on each other.

    The arithmetic average of returns does not reflect the true investor experience. Investors live with the geometric return, which accounts for the effects of compounding and the impact of volatility. 

    Large swings in portfolio value widen the gap between arithmetic and geometric returns. By blending assets with different correlations and rebalancing them, overall volatility can be reduced. That narrows that gap and improves the compounding outcome. A simple back test illustrates this effect. 

    Source: testfolio.io

    From April 2007 through February 2026, U.S. stocks returned 10.5% annualized. U.S. bonds returned 3.16% annualized. If you simply averaged those two numbers, you get 6.83%.

    Now consider a portfolio that held 50% U.S. stocks and 50% U.S. bonds and rebalanced once per year. That portfolio returned 7.25% annualized over the same period. The difference between 7.25% and 6.83% of 0.42% per year reflects the benefit of combining and rebalancing the two asset classes rather than simply averaging their stand-alone returns.

    The improvement also shows up in risk-adjusted terms. The all-stock portfolio delivered a Sharpe ratio of 0.53. Bonds delivered 0.35. The 50-50 portfolio, rebalanced annually, achieved a Sharpe ratio of 0.62. Even though its raw return was lower than 100% stocks, it generated more return per unit of risk taken.

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    Tony Dong, MSc, CETF

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  • What is the price of gold in Canada? And more about gold investing – MoneySense

    What is the price of gold in Canada? And more about gold investing – MoneySense

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    That, together with the fear of a stock-market correction, has prompted a lot of Canadians who never considered owning the precious metal before to wonder whether this age-old asset should be part of their portfolios. After all, Canada’s largest robo-advisor, Wealthsimple, allocates 2.5% of its clients’ accounts to gold—and 10% in its halal portfolios.

    Should it be part of yours? Or would you just be buying in at the peak? There’s no way to know, except in hindsight. There will always be “gold bugs” out there urging you to sell everything and buy gold before the world goes to pot. Their advice is best avoided.

    Here instead are some important facts around investing in gold that will help you make a better-informed decision.

    Why is gold so valued?

    Gold is used for a wide range of products—such as jewellery, dental fillings and electronics—but most of it is simply stored in vaults, in the form of gold bars. Like money itself or cryptocurrency, gold is valuable because people have decided it is. But unlike the other two, it’s immune to manipulation.

    As of mid-October, all the refined gold in the world, an estimated 212,582 tonnes, was worth a staggering USD$18.3 trillion. Mines around the world poured another 1,788 tonnes in the first half of 2024. So, the supply of gold is increasing, but slowly. And there’s little anyone can do to change that.

    Why do investors buy gold in Canada?

    As an investment, gold is classified as a commodity. That is, it’s a standardized and graded substance that trades globally. But unlike, say, soybeans or Brent crude oil, you can store a meaningful amount of gold in your jewellery drawer or safe deposit box. It’s also uniquely non-perishable; part of its appeal in ancient times was the fact it didn’t corrode like other metals. So, you can hold it indefinitely.

    If you own gold as an investment, it won’t generate any income; it’ll just go up and down in value according to supply and demand. Over the very long term, its price tends to track the rate of inflation.

    Most importantly, gold has a history as a store of value and unit of exchange. Many central banks still hold it to help stabilize their currencies. In developing countries like India and China, many people consider it more trustworthy than paper or electronic money. This is why it continues to hold a privileged place in investment portfolios.

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    Michael McCullough

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  • Private equity, private debt and more alternative investments: Should you invest? – MoneySense

    Private equity, private debt and more alternative investments: Should you invest? – MoneySense

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    What are private investments?

    “Private investments” is a catch-all term referring to financial assets that do not trade on public stock, bond or derivatives markets. They include private equity, private debt, private real estate pools, venture capital, infrastructure and alternative strategies (a.k.a. hedge funds). Until recently, you had to be an accredited investor, with a certain net worth and income level, for an asset manager or third-party advisor to sell you private investments. For their part, private asset managers typically demanded minimum investments and lock-in periods that deterred all but the rich. But a 2019 rule change that permitted “liquid alternative” mutual funds and other innovations in Canada made private investments accessible to a wider spectrum of investors.

    Why are people talking about private assets?

    The number of investors and the money they have to invest has increased over the years, but the size of the public markets has not kept pace. The number of operating companies (not including exchange-traded funds, or ETFs) trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange actually declined to 712 at the end of 2023 from around 1,200 at the turn of the millennium. The same phenomenon has been noted in most developed markets. U.S. listings have fallen from 8,000 in the late 1990s to approximately 4,300 today. Logically that would make the price of public securities go up, which may have happened. But something else did, too.

    Beginning 30 years ago, big institutional investors such as pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and university endowments started allocating money to private investments instead. On the other side of the table, all manner of investment companies sprang up to package and sell private investments—for example, private equity firms that specialize in buying companies from their founders or on the public markets, making them more profitable, then selling them seven or 10 years later for double or triple the price. The flow of money into private equity has grown 10 times over since the global financial crisis of 2008.

    In the past, companies that needed more capital to grow often had to go public; now, they have the option of staying private, backed by private investors. Many prefer to do so, to avoid the cumbersome and expensive reporting requirements of public companies and the pressure to please shareholders quarter after quarter. So, public companies represent a smaller share of the economy than in the past.

    Raising the urgency, stocks and bonds have become more positively correlated in recent years; in an almost unprecedented event, both asset classes fell in tandem in 2022. Not just pension funds but small investors, too, now worry that they must get exposure to private markets or be left behind.

    What can private investments add to my portfolio?

    There are two main reasons why investors might want private investments in their portfolio:

    • Diversification benefits: Private investments are considered a different asset class than publicly traded securities. Private investments’ returns are not strongly correlated to either the stock or bond market. As such, they help diversify a portfolio and smooth out its ups and downs.
    • Superior returns: According to Bain & Company, private equity has outperformed public equity over each of the past three decades. But findings like this are debatable, not just because Bain itself is a private equity firm but because there are no broad indices measuring the performance of private assets—the evidence is little more than anecdotal—and their track record is short. Some academic studies have concluded that part or all of private investments’ perceived superior performance can be attributed to long holding periods, which is a proven strategy in almost any asset class. Because of their illiquidity, investors must hold them for seven years or more (depending on the investment type).

    What are the drawbacks of private investments?

    Though the barriers to private asset investing have come down somewhat, investors still have to contend with:

    • lliquidity: Traditional private investment funds require a minimum investment period, typically seven to 12 years. Even “evergreen” funds that keep reinvesting (rather than winding down after 10 to 15 years) have restrictions around redemptions, such as how often you can redeem and how much notice you must give.
    • Less regulatory oversight: Private funds are exempt from many of the disclosure requirements of public securities. Having name-brand asset managers can provide some reassurance, but they often charge the highest fees.
    • Short track records: Relatively new asset types—such as private mortgages and private corporate loans—have a limited history and small sample sizes, making due diligence harder compared to researching the stock and bond markets.
    • May not qualify for registered accounts: You can’t hold some kinds of private company shares or general partnership units in a registered retirement savings plan (RRSP), for example.
    • High management fees: Another reason why private investments are proliferating: as discount brokerages, indexing and ETFs drive down costs in traditional asset classes, private investments represent a market where the investment industry can still make fat fees. The hedge fund standard is “two and 20”—a management fee of 2% of assets per year plus 20% of gains over a certain threshold. Even their “liquid alt” cousins in Canada charge 1.25% for management and a 15.7% performance fee on average. Asset managers thus have an interest in packaging and promoting more private asset offerings.

    How can retail investors buy private investments?

    To invest in private investment funds the conventional way, you still have to be an accredited investor—which in Canada means having $1 million in financial assets (minus liabilities), $5 million in total net worth or $200,000 in pre-tax income in each of the past two years ($300,000 for a couple). But for investors of lesser means, there is a growing array of workarounds:

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    Michael McCullough

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  • Are GICs worth it for Canadian retirees? – MoneySense

    Are GICs worth it for Canadian retirees? – MoneySense

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    In other words, during the near-zero interest rates that prevailed until recently, investors wanting real inflation-adjusted returns had almost no choice but to embrace stocks. (Read more about TINA and other investing acronyms).  

    GICs have a place in locking in some real-returns, especially if inflation tracks down further. But Raina says investing in bonds offer opportunities to lock in healthy coupon returns, with the prospect of higher capital appreciation opportunities if interest rates fall further, since bonds currently trade at a discount. The risk is the unknown: when interest rates will start falling. Based on what the Bank of Canada (BoC) announced in the fall, Raina feels that could be some time in 2024. (On Dec. 6, the BoC announced it was holding its target for the overnight rate at 5%, with the bank rate at 5.25% and deposit rate at 5%.)

    CFA Anita Bruinsma, of Clarity Personal Finance, is more enthusiastic about GICs for retirees in Canada. “I love GICs right now,” she says. “It’s a great time to use GICs.” For clients who need a portion of their money within the next three years, she says, “GICs are the best place for that money as long as they know they won’t need the money before maturity.”

    Other advisors may argue bond funds could have good returns in the coming years, if rates decline. However, “I would never make a bet either way,” Bruinsma says, “I think retirees looking for a balanced portfolio should still use bond ETFs and not entirely replace the bond component with GICs. However, I do think that allocating a portion of the bond slice to GICs would be a good idea, especially for more nervous/conservative people.” For Bruinsma’s clients with a medium-term time horizon, she recommends laddering GICs so they can be reinvested every year at whatever rates then prevail. 

    GICs vs HISAs

    An alternative is the HISA ETFs. (HISA is the high-interest savings accounts Small referred to above). HISA ETFs are paying a slightly lower yield than GICs and also do not guarantee the yield. “I also like this product but GICs win for the ability to lock in the rate,” says Bruinsma.

    When investing in a GIC may not make sense

    Another consideration is that GICs are relatively illiquid if you lock in your money for three, four or five years or any other term. “If you are uncertain if you will need those funds in the near future, you can look at a high interest savings account ETF like Horizon’s CASH,” says Matthew Ardrey, wealth advisor with Toronto-based TriDelta Financial. “This ETF is currently yielding 5.40% gross—less a 0.11% MER.”

    Apart from inflation, taxation is another reason for not being too overweight in GICs, especially in taxable portfolios. Even though GIC yields are now roughly similar to “bond-equivalent” dividend stocks (typically found in Canadian bank stocks, utilities and telcos), the latter are taxed less than interest income in non-registered accounts because of the dividend tax credit. In Ontario, dividend income is taxed at 39.34% versus 53.53% for interest income at the top rate in Ontario, according to Ardrey. This is why, personally, I still prefer locating GICs in TFSAs and registered retirement plans (RRSPs). 

    When GICs are right for retirees

    Ardrey says GICs can be a valuable diversifier when it’s difficult to find strong returns in both the stock and bond markets. “This is especially true for income investors who would often have more of a focus on dividend stocks.” Using iShares ETFs as market proxies, Ardrey cites the return of XDV as -0.54% YTD and XBB is 1.52% year to date (YTD). “Beside those numbers a 5%-plus return looks very attractive.”

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    Jonathan Chevreau

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