I spent a total of four minutes working on my RRSP portfolio last year.
It wasn’t benign neglect: my two-ETF all-equity portfolio really is that simple! I made four trades, which took about a minute each after determining how much money to invest, in which of the two ETFs to allocate the investment, and how many shares that would buy (plus a few seconds to enter my trading password).
The buying process is easy since I don’t have any bonds in my portfolio. I simply add money to the fund that brings my portfolio closest to its original allocation – 25 per cent VCN and 75 per cent VXC.
Back when I was picking stocks I’ll bet I spent a good three hours a week reading about individual stocks and market trends, plus another hour a week staring at my portfolio and playing around with stock screeners. That adds up to over 200 hours a year spent obsessing over my portfolio and trying to find an edge with my investments.
Has investment performance suffered? Hardly. This four-minute a year portfolio was up 18.08 per cent in 2015, up 8.76 per cent in 2016, and is up 5.66 per cent year-to-date. Compare that to the benchmark I used for my dividend stock portfolio, iShares’ CDZ, which was down 11.53 per cent in 2015, up 20.93 per cent in 2016, and is up 1.3 per cent year-to-date.
When it comes to return on time invested, my four-minute portfolio is pretty tough to beat.
In addition to running the Boomer & Echo website, Robb Engen is a fee-only financial planner. This article originally ran on his site on March 5th and is republished here with his permission.