Outstanding Financial Pornography

Asset allocation, risk, diversification and rebalancing. Pros/cons of hiring a financial advisor. Seeking advice on your portfolio?
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deaddog
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by deaddog »

adrian2 wrote: That's the theory. In real life, how many times did you get a double and how often did you get a 10% loss?
That’s the trouble with theory; real life gets in the way.

I rarely get a double; usually take a trade off when I make 15 to 20%. I plan to take stops at around 8% but emotions do get in the way. Something about taking a loss I haven’t quite overcome. This year I kept a couple way to long and had one loss in excess of 50%.

Overall still came out ahead.
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

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deaddog wrote:Something about taking a loss I haven’t quite overcome. This year I kept a couple way to long and had one loss in excess of 50%. ..
Nice to hear from an honest investor! :mrgreen:
For the fun of it...Keith
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

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http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/01/31/work ... youre-100/

An excerpt below from this linked article. If you have any CPP and/or OAS and spend 30K a year -- Mr. Neill thinks you would be OK with a Mil. Gee thanks for that. This crap should not be written. Even if a couple only had 15K from Government pensions and they needed another 20K from their portfolio -- they could annuitize a portion and still have 70% of their $1M.
A million dollars would be fine, says Mark Neill, head of PH&N investment services, if you only spent $30,000 a year, had no debt to pay off, a balanced portfolio of equity and bonds, and were getting a 6.5 per cent return on investments. And if the market didn’t crash like it did in 2008. With a volatile economic climate (though the S&P/TSX Composite Index rebounded nicely by growing 30.7 per cent in 2009 and 14 per cent in 2010, last year it fell 11 per cent), record-level personal debt and registered pension plans becoming a luxury, it is next to impossible to make simple estimates. A better rule, says Neil, is to assume you’ll need less than 80 per cent of your current salary. “When you close your eyes and imagine retirement, what do you imagine?” he asks. “What do you plan to do?”
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by Jo Anne »

JohnL wrote:http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/01/31/work ... youre-100/

An excerpt below from this linked article. If you have any CPP and/or OAS and spend 30K a year -- Mr. Neill thinks you would be OK with a Mil. Gee thanks for that.
I guess this explains why my mother-in-law is living in a cardboard box under a bridge - she didn't manage to save a million dollars.

We told her she needed to save more, but she insisted on spending her money on stuff like food.
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ghariton
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

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Jo Anne wrote:I guess this explains why my mother-in-law is living in a cardboard box under a bridge - she didn't manage to save a million dollars.

We told her she needed to save more, but she insisted on spending her money on stuff like food.
:lol: :lol:

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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by Peculiar_Investor »

Innovate like Intuit | Entrepreneur | Financial Post. I never thought that Innovate and Intuit would ever occur in the same sentence, let alone as a headline.
Innovation is about listening to your customers and solving their problems.

One company that excels at listening is personal-finance software giant Intuit Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.
IMHO they long ago stopped listening. For example, see http://www.financialwisdomforum.org/for ... 45#p381145

As someone who has used Quicken since the DOS days, I can attest that they long ago stopped innovating and have rested on the laurels. The only reason to upgrade these days is to avoid their sunset provisions. I guess that's innovation -- they've found a way to make customer's pay to continue to use the essentially the same old software. :twisted:
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

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Peculiar_Investor wrote:As someone who has used Quicken since the DOS days, I can attest that they long ago stopped innovating and have rested on the laurels.
Me too, on all counts.
The only reason to upgrade these days is to avoid their sunset provisions. I guess that's innovation -- they've found a way to make customer's pay to continue to use the essentially the same old software. :twisted:
In my experience these contrived updates only add bugs, slow down the software and create an increasingly harder to use product. If they've run out of ideas and/or new users and they now just want to milk their Quicken customer base they'd do us all a huge favour by freezing the code and simply requiring us to pay them an annual fee.

Or maybe Intuit's "innovation" with Quicken is that they've found a way to get users to pay them good money to be insulted and pissed off.

P.S. I used to read Spence avidly when he was editor of Profit. It's unimaginable that his research for this piece involved trying out Quicken or speaking with Quicken users. It reads like a promo piece written for Intuit to hype sales of TurboTax during tax season :roll:
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by Insomniac »

Have you tried GnuCash? I am the Treasurer of a small no-profit and I use it to keep track of the accounts and produce reports for the rest of the exec and AGM. I haven't tried the stock & mutual fund tracking features but apparently it can import Quicken files.

http://gnucash.org/
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by ClosetIndexer »

ETF offers bears a no-fuss way to bet on the downside
Going over to the dark side to sell stocks short is usually the preserve of sophisticated institutional investors and hedge funds, but Wall Street, ingenious as ever, has devised an easy way for the masses to try to make money betting against companies.
The fund is the brainchild of two experienced short sellers, John Del Vecchio and Brad Lamensdorf ... Mr. Del Vecchio admits it takes a quirky personality, especially attuned to misfortune and even skulduggery, to take a shine to this line of work.
Better load up quick!
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by Lazy Ninja »

ClosetIndexer wrote:Better load up quick!
:wink:

I don't disagree with everything. This is worth considering:
Mr. Del Vecchio says the market is being artificially inflated by such actions as the Federal Reserve Board’s money creation program, known as quantitative easing. These efforts, he contends, “are just going to lead to bigger disasters down the road.”

Meanwhile, he says sentiment is at a bullish extreme, while the number of S&P 500 stocks in up trends is around 83 per cent, an extreme level suggesting shares are at least temporarily overvalued and due for a correction. “The market is very overbought,” he said.
As far as the ingeniousness of Wall street, I have to begrudingly give credit for doing such an impressive job of bastardizing the ETF concept. I like them for their low, low annual fees. Only 3.29%. Sweet....
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by Bylo Selhi »

Gentlemen, start up your excuse engines: A fading light? Advisers debate the passive trend - IFAonline
City Asset Management research director James Calder believes the appeal of passive investing will dim over the next few years as markets return to a “semblance of normality”...

According to Bestinvest’s Adrian Lowcock, the active v passive debate has been skewed by poor active managers weighing on the good. [Well d'uh! ...bylo]

Some remain unconvinced by the passive argument. “I think it will be one of those things like the emperor’s new clothes– it will be a fad or a phase,” said Almary Green director Carl Lamb. “It will come and go.”
And then just to reinforce the porn, they publish this nonsense :roll:
Image 15.png
Image 15.png (6.55 KiB) Viewed 2171 times
OK, so gold was a big winner last year. So what? Will it repeat in 2012?

P.S. Judging by their names, the top three of these ETFs own "physical gold", so why did one outperform the other two by 5 percentage points?
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by adrian2 »

Bylo Selhi wrote:P.S. Judging by their names, the top three of these ETFs own "physical gold", so why did one outperform the other two by 5 percentage points?
One was getting more physical than the others? :P
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by Dejavu »

Not to sure where to post this, feel free to move it.

A local story from Wellington West, their agent who was under investigation for SEVEN YEARS, and seems to have crossed the line again. Not sure who I am most mad at, the victim, the broker/advisor, or the securities investigator folks who were sooooooo long in dealing with advisor.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ ... probe.html


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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by ockham »

http://www.theglobeandmail.com//globe-i ... le4492479/
"Index funds cost a lot more than you think" opines an investment advisor -- and then offers no evidence in support of his claim.
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

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"Index funds cost a lot more than you think" opines an investment advisor.
Probably thinking "Index funds cost us a lot more than you think".
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

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No evidence? Holy crap, I never realized these index traded funds were full of bad stocks! They're costing me a bundle in lost potential outperformance. I'm dumping mine now and finding a good stock manager. Any one know where I can find someone who's done well over the last 6 years?
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

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IdOp wrote:No evidence? Holy crap, I never realized these index traded funds were full of bad stocks! They're costing me a bundle in lost potential outperformance. I'm dumping mine now and finding a good stock manager. Any one know where I can find someone who's done well over the last 6 years?
To quote: "The cost of owning a broad index, particularly the TSX's, is well hidden but staggering.
No one knows this better than industry veterans."

Get out of those broad index ETFs as quickly as you can, before those hidden costs kill you!
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by IdOp »

ockham wrote:Get out of those broad index ETFs as quickly as you can, before those hidden costs kill you!
:) :)

In all seriousness, I was quite surprised Fabrice Taylor would write something like this. Articles of his I've seen in the past were usually interesting and showed some knowledge. This one though really fits the thread topic to a tee. I suppose it can be good if it makes people think.
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

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IdOp wrote: I suppose it can be good if it makes people think.
It reminded me that XIU is heavily weighted with banks and commodities.
Note to self: remind BIL that while his costs are low, he his not as well diversified as he thinks he is.
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

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DavidR wrote: Note to self: remind BIL that while his costs are low, he his not as well diversified as he thinks he is.
Fabrice Taylor is your brother-in-law? :shock: :shock: :shock:

I have a generally low opinion of Mr. Taylor. Five or six years ago he wrote a column saying that RRBs are a bad investment because the CPI is manipulated by government so as to understate inflation. I sent him several e-mails pointing out the counter-arguments. His answers essentially were: Thank you for the e-mails but I'm sticking by my story -- he gave absolutely no evidence or support for his assertion.

Heck, I can get any number of unsupported assertions from MY brother-in-law.

George
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by DavidR »

ghariton wrote:
DavidR wrote: Note to self: remind BIL that while his costs are low, he his not as well diversified as he thinks he is.
Fabrice Taylor is your brother-in-law? :shock: :shock: :shock:
No relation :!: I was just being the devil's advocate, looking for a small gem among the dross.
The man needs an editor!
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by DanH »

I didn't realize that the Gazette published commercials. Very surprising coming from a journalist who has a long history of gratuitous industry bashing.

O'Leary's funds managed by Montreal's Stanton Inc.
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by randomwalker »

Worth watching. I'm not sure if this is a defense of active management or not.

They do add value in the long run." Kathleen Wylie, Russell Investments

Do they?

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip797184
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by IdOp »

Nancy Woods has a feature at GlobeInvestor.com where she answers readers' questions. (If I'm not mistaken, she used to have a similar column at the National Post.) While there are exceptions, most of the ones I've read have had poor content and have been horribly written. This one today is a "perfect" example.

The question being asked is:
Vanessa wrote:I often hear and read about the MER on my mutual funds. They are expressed as a percentage but how do I find out what I have actually been charged?
Here are some bits from the reply.
Nancy Woods wrote:The amount of the MER that is specifically charged to your mutual funds is available on the various mutual fund companies' websites.
Horribly written sentence, particularly so in the context of the question. It sounds at first like companies are publishing the dollar amount you paid for your funds on their website! Reading on though, it becomes clear this is not what she meant, fortunately.
The active managed fund can be constantly changing with many decision makers behind it to achieve better-than-average results. Investing using a mutual fund can be a good way to invest in markets or countries that we are not familiar with.
Good insight.
The investment style and process of a mutual fund manager can also affect the MER. A fund manager that frequently changes the fund's investment positions will incur higher costs.

This and a later comment indicates she thinks fund trading costs are part of the MER. They are not. They form a separate Trading Expense Ratio.
There are a myriad of reasons for a higher-than-average MER, but in the end it could be justified by above-average returns. The key is to do the research to find out which funds can give you them.
What kind of research do we need, since any fund can give you above average returns sometimes?
The holdings within an ETF may not change at all during a year. Because an ETF is a closed-end fund, meaning the pool of monies doesn't change, it does not have the cash-flow issue.
May not, as in must not, or might not? Oh, and BTW, an ETF is not a closed end fund, the number of units can vary daily and there is no pre-set termination time.
It is a good idea that you have a clear understanding ...
Can't argue with that!

To be fair, somewhere in between all that she did answer the question. Still, is there any wonder Canadians are believed to be confused about mutual fund fees?
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Re: Outstanding Financial Pornography

Post by BRIAN5000 »

IMHO and that may not be worth the paper it's written on. The book PENSION PARADIGM should be included in this topic. Although the author many times suggests talking to your advisor about issues raised and obtain legal advise for wills etc. and some examples are followed by "this is a very general example". For $19.95 it's short on specifics and seems bordering on misleading.

Things that were suggested that I took to be the main points of the book. ( we're talking about retirement and pensions)

1) Commute my DB pension plan seemed to me he was saying it was almost always better
2) A job where I earn $60,000 a year I am most likely netting only $25-$30000 and this amount could be EASILY be replaced by $300,000 in capital assets.
3) Capital of $300,000 could be producing $30-$50,000 per year.
4) Equity in a home is "lazy equity" use a HELOC to build a diversified money pool.
5) Start melting down your RRSP at @ 55
6) If you don't commute your pension take the single life option and with the difference buy term insurance


The good

1) Use an advisor
2) Know what you have especially all the ins and outs of your pension plan.
This information is believed to be from reliable sources but may include rumor and speculation. Accuracy is not guaranteed
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