Unpacking VRIF, Vanguard’s New Monthly Income ETF
When Vanguard launched its family of one-ETF portfolios back in 2018, Canadians embraced them enthusiastically. And why not? These so-called “asset allocation ETFs” took a good idea—a balanced mutual...
View ArticleForeign Withholding Taxes Revisited
Justin Bender and I have just completed the second edition of our popular white paper, Foreign Withholding Taxes: How to estimate the hidden tax drag on US and international equity ETFs. Originally...
View ArticleAsk the Spud: Reverse Share Splits in ETFs
Q: I noticed the unit price of some iShares ETFs changed radically last week. For example, the iShares MSCI Singapore ETF (EWS) shot up from around $10 to $20 overnight on November 7. Another fund went...
View ArticleMaking Sense of Capital Gains Distributions
Imagine you’re part of a group of 10 friends at a restaurant to celebrate the holidays. Everyone else arrives on time and enjoys cocktails, appetizers and a main course, while you get stuck in traffic...
View ArticleModel Portfolio Update for 2017
After two years with no changes to my Couch Potato model portfolios, the 2017 edition comes with an update to the ETF version. Before I get to the details, I feel compelled to stress that if you’re...
View ArticleA New ETF Structure for Accumulators
ETF launches are generally unexciting these days: most new products focus on increasingly narrow niches or exotic strategies. But last week BMO unveiled an innovative ETF structure that may just have...
View ArticleHow TD Put the “Managed” in ETF Portfolios
What Canadian bank was first to launch a line of ETFs? You might think it was BMO, which is by far the biggest bank in the industry today, with more than 70 ETFs and some $37 billion in assets. But in...
View ArticleCan ETFs Make the Market Go Up in Smoke?
[Note: This was an April Fool’s joke!] Does the growing popularity of indexing and ETFs pose a real danger to the markets? As I discussed on a recent podcast, some market experts are concerned that the...
View ArticleRBC Gets Back to Basics With New ETFs
When RBC entered the ETF marketplace back in 2011, it tested the waters with a family of specialized bond ETFs. Since then they’ve created a number of equity ETFs, all with active strategies. However,...
View ArticleVanguard’s One-Fund Solution
It was one of the great mysteries in the Canadian fund market: why had no one created an ETF version of the balanced index mutual fund? These days you can find ETFs focusing on just about every...
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