Hub Blogs

Hub Blogs contains fresh contributions written by Financial Independence Hub staff or contributors that have not appeared elsewhere first, or have been modified or customized for the Hub by the original blogger. In contrast, Top Blogs shows links to the best external financial blogs around the world.

BDAY: Bitcoin exposure with DayMAX™ advantage

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Hamilton ETFs

By Hamilton ETFs

(Sponsor Blog)

Bitcoin has become an increasingly accessible asset for investors, with growing participation from both institutional and retail investors through regulated investment vehicles. Institutional adoption, new regulatory frameworks and improved custody solutions continue to bring Bitcoin further into the mainstream.

Cryptocurrency ownership among U.S. investors has increased from 6% in 2021 to 17% in 2025, according to Gallup[1].

At Hamilton ETFs, we focus on developing innovative solutions that address real portfolio needs. As interest in Bitcoin has grown, we saw an opportunity to apply our options expertise to the asset class in a way that addresses the needs of income-oriented investors while avoiding the traditional trade-off between income generation and upside participation.

Introducing BDAY

The Hamilton Enhanced Bitcoin DayMAX™ ETF (BDAY) is a first-of-its-kind strategy designed to provide 100% exposure to Bitcoin’s potential upside while generating income through Hamilton’s innovative DayMAX™ strategy, which utilizes zero-days-to-expiration covered call writing (0DTE).

Until now, investors seeking income from Bitcoin have generally faced a trade-off: generating option premium in exchange for less Bitcoin upside potential. By not writing call options on BDAY’s Bitcoin holdings (achieved through investing in IBIT, iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF), we preserve full participation in Bitcoin: up or down. In addition, the actively managed DayMAX™ covered call strategy offers more opportunities for income generation by monetizing volatility every day.

In short, BDAY consists of:

  • 100% Bitcoin exposure, via iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT), without covered calls
  • 25% Nasdaq 100 exposure, via Invesco NASDAQ 100 ETF (QQQM), from modest leverage, on which to apply 0DTE options strategy to generate attractive semi-monthly income

The DayMAX™ advantage

BDAY brings our popular DayMAX™ approach to investors seeking Bitcoin exposure and income. Rather than writing covered calls directly on Bitcoin, BDAY generates attractive tax-efficient yield through a separate QQQM sleeve and an actively managed 0DTE covered call strategy.

This structure allows the portfolio to clearly separate its roles. Bitcoin serves as the growth potential, providing 100% exposure to the asset, while QQQM in conjunction with the DayMAX™ strategy is used to generate option premium income.

Key features of the DayMAX™ strategy include: Continue Reading…

The underestimated Power of Pensions

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Adobe Stock Image, courtesy CAAT Pension Plan

By Anthony Damtsis

Special to Financial Independence Hub

Expectations of the future shape how we behave today, especially when it comes to planning for retirement. When people overestimate or underestimate where their retirement income will come from, it can affect how they save, how they plan, when they retire, and how financially secure they feel over time.

That sounds simple enough. But retirement has a way of making simple things complicated.

Recent research from CAAT Pension Plan shows a clear gap between what working Canadians expect retirement to look like and what retirees actually experience.

The retirement we picture

Nearly one in four working Canadians expect personal savings to be their primary source of income in retirement. In reality, only about one in seven retirees rely on personal savings as their primary source of income.

At the same time, working Canadians appear to underestimate the role of workplace pensions. Among working people with a pension, only 10% expect it to be their primary source of income in retirement. But among retirees with a pension, 23% say their pension is their primary income source.   Pensions are a foundational source of income for many. Retirees with pensions report approximately $2,750 more in average monthly household income than retirees without pensions.

For many Canadians, that is the difference between getting by and living well. Defined Benefit [DB] pensions can provide a predictable stream of retirement income, reduce the burden of managing investments alone, and help protect against the risk of savings running out.

This expectation gap matters because expectations are not harmless. If people expect personal savings to carry more significance than they realistically will, they may delay planning, undersave, or assume they will have more time to catch up later. That can increase the risk of outliving savings, delaying retirement, or becoming more dependent on public supports.

The reality today is that 38% of Canadians without a workplace pension report taking little or no action toward saving for retirement. Among Canadians with household income below $50,000, that figure rises to 60%.

This can show up as delayed retirement. For Canadians, the average ideal retirement age is 60, while the average expected retirement age is 67. For many people, there is a meaningful seven-year gap between the retirement they hope for and the retirement they think is realistic.

There is a quiet lesson in that gap. When people do not have a clear path to retirement, they do not always change their savings behaviour today. Sometimes they change their expectations about tomorrow.

The pension habit

This research challenges the idea that pensions crowd out personal saving. Savings habits are an important building block in creating predictable income in retirement. Pensions can act as a foundation for those habits because they make saving structured, automatic, and easier to sustain.

This matters because good financial behaviour is often less about willpower than design. If saving depends on making the right decision every month, life has plenty of opportunities to get in the way. A pension changes the architecture of the decision. It turns saving from something people have to repeatedly choose into something that happens more reliably in the background.

The research suggests this happens in the real world. Pension plan members are nearly four times more likely than non-pension plan participants to report using a full suite of retirement savings tools, such as TFSAs, RRSPs, and non-registered accounts. Specifically, 27% of pension members use a full suite of savings tools, compared with just 7% of those without a pension.

Canadians with workplace pensions are also more likely to use multiple savings approaches at the same time, 30% compared with 16% of those without a pension.

Access is the real barrier

Many Canadians want to save, but they do not always have access to the tools that make saving easier. Continue Reading…

The Cross-Border Retirement Traps Canadians don’t see coming

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You did everything right for retirement in Canada. Then you started spending winters down south, and a different rulebook quietly took over.

Royalty-free image courtesy TheNorthernOffice.ca

By Alex Setzler

Special to Financal Independence Hub

Ask a Canadian snowbird how many days they can spend in the U.S. before things get complicated, and most give the same answer: 182. Stay under half the year and you’re fine. That number is comforting. It’s also the wrong number, and trusting it is how careful savers walk into problems they never saw coming.

Over the past year I’ve talked with a lot of Canadians who split their time across the border, and the same five traps catch them again and again. Here they are:

1.) The day count is weighted, and it bites earlier than 182

The 182-day rule people repeat is a Canadian idea, tied to provincial health coverage and Canadian residency. The IRS doesn’t use it. The U.S. uses the Substantial Presence Test, and it counts three years at once: all of your days this year, plus a third of last year’s days, plus a sixth of the days from the year before. Cross 183 weighted days and the IRS can treat you as a US tax resident, taxable on your worldwide income.

Run the math and it’s sneakier than people expect. Spend about 120 days a year in the U.S. every year, and you land right on the edge. Four months each winter (roughly 122 days) puts you over. Not half the year. A third of it.

There’s a release valve. If you stay under 183 actual days in the current year, you can usually file Form 8840, the Closer Connection Exception, and tell the IRS your real home is Canada. It isn’t automatic. You file it every year, by June 15.

Miss the deadline, or spend one day past 182, and the exception is gone.
The number that protects you was never 182. It’s the paperwork.

2.) Your TFSA, the account Canadians love most, is the one the IRS likes least

The TFSA is close to a national treasure. Tax-free growth, tax-free withdrawals, no catch. In Canada.
Cross the border and the catch shows up. The U.S. doesn’t recognize the TFSA as tax-free. The treaty protection that shelters your RRSP doesn’t extend to it. So the income growing “tax-free” inside your TFSA can be fully taxable to the U.S., and the account itself may be treated as a foreign trust, which drags in extra reporting forms whose penalties start in the five figures.

The reporting piece is genuinely unsettled. Cross-border tax pros still argue about exactly which forms a TFSA triggers, and the IRS hasn’t given a clean answer. When the experts aren’t sure, “assume it’s fine” is not the safe move.

3.) The RESP carries the same surprise, right when you need the money

If you opened a Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP)( for your kids, same story. The U.S. doesn’t see it as the tax-sheltered education account it is in Canada. The growth, and in some cases the government grant money, can become a US tax and reporting question at the worst possible time: when your kid starts school and you’re pulling the money out.

4.) FBAR: the form that has nothing to do with tax, and still bites

This one catches people because it isn’t about how much tax you owe. f you’re a U.S. tax resident and your Canadian accounts added together ever cross $10,000 USD at any single moment in the year, you have to report them to the U.S. Treasury on an FBAR. Chequing, savings, RRSP, TFSA, the business account, all of it, combined.

Ten thousand dollars isn’t a wealthy-person number. One paycheque or a moved-over down payment clears it. And the penalties for skipping it were built for people hiding money offshore, which means they’re harsh, and they don’t care that you simply didn’t know. The form is easy. Not knowing it exists is the expensive part.

5.) The good-news trap: your RRSP is fine, so people guard the wrong account

Here’s the flip. After all that, the account most people worry about, the RRSP, is the one the treaty actually protects.
Under the Canada-US tax treaty you can defer U.S. tax on the growth inside your RRSP until you take the money out, same as you do in Canada. The old extra form for it got scrapped years ago. Continue Reading…

Reminder of next week’s Successful Investor webinar on A.I stocks for Findependence Hub readers

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TSInetwork.ca

Dear Findependence Hub registered user

Happy Independence Day to our American readers!

As we noted in a blog sent out on Canada Day, Findependence Hub registered users are invited to watch a special webinar on investing in AI stocks produced by TSInetwork.ca and The Successful Investor’s Pat Mckeough, a long-time contributor of blogs to the site.

The markets in 2025 were volatile, largely due to the implementation of U.S. tariffs. Despite this, investors who stayed the course were rewarded as markets finished the year on a stronger footing.

That said, a new challenge emerged in 2025 that carried into this year: Artificial Intelligence stocks.

Markets are once again volatile, and many investors are asking:

Should I invest in AI stocks? If so, which companies make sense? … OR
Is there a risk of an AI bubble that could impact the broader market?

In short: what should Successful Investors do?

In an exclusive webinar created by TSInetwork.ca and The Successful Investor, we’ll address these questions and more next Tuesday, July 7th, at 11:30 am EST.

This is a valuable opportunity for readers of Findependence Hub to hear insights based on Pat McKeough’s investment approach. As regular subscribers will know, Pat has been contributing guest blogs to Findependence Hub since its inception in 2014.

We’ll also leave plenty of time to answer your own questions about AI, current market conditions, and what to expect for the remainder of 2026.

We invite you to join us.

Click here to register for the webinar. (  

 

 

WHAT: Webinar- “The Successful Investor Way To Navigate AI” brought to you by Findependence Hub

WHEN: Tuesday July 7  [11.30 EST]

Who: Bob Wiseman, Webinar Host

WHERE: From the comfort of your computer

HOW TO SIGN UP: Click here to sign up now!

 

As a thank you for attending, Canadian registrants are also eligible to receive a complimentary wealth management consultation with Bob Wiseman, a member of the Successful Investor Client Onboarding Team.

Please feel free to invite a family member or friend: just forward this blog by email and have them click the “Register Now” button above.

We hope to see you there.

Retired Money: What investors (especially retired ones) should know about “Finfluencers”

Posted By |
Charles Schwab

My latest MoneySense Retired Money column has just been published. You can find the whole column by clicking on the hyperlink here: Online Influencers Grow Up.

When it comes to financial influencers, the popular term is  Finfluencer, a contraction similar to my own Findependence for Financial Independence.

The column was inspired by an interesting gathering of Canadian finfluencers organized by BMO ETFs, which occurred in the first half of June. The BMO Creator Insights Forum was held at Cboe Canada in Toronto and it ran a scrolling feed of domestic finfluencers which included Yours Truly.

Back in April of 2025, the OSC released a research report titled Social Media and Retail Investing: The Rise of Finfluencers, which found investors are indeed quite influenced by Finfluencers: OSC research on 655 Canadian retail investors found 35% of them had made a financial decision based on advice from a Finfluencer.  Furthermore, 24% of 1,465 Canadian social media users (both investors and non investors) exposed to finance-related social media posts were found to have purchased the promoted assets, versus just 7%  those not so exposed.

“Financial advice on social media is appealing because retail investors perceive it to be accessible, free, and informative,” the OSC said, “While retail investors believe finfluencers are generally motivated by self-interest, about 40% of investors believe that the finfluencers they follow are trustworthy. Those who have made a financial decision based on finfluencer advice were seven times more likely to trust finfluencers they follow.”

To be sure, it appears the more successful ones can make money at it: one BMO slide showed that the global influencer market is worth US$33 billion in 2025,  up 35% from US$24 billion a year earlier; and it estimated C$1.9 billion Canadian spending by corporations on Finfluencer marketing in 2025, up 23% from 2024. One in six Canadian retail investors have purchased an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) because they heard about it on some form of social media.

The MoneySense column highlights the experiences of several (mostly young) Canadian Finfluencers, whose channels typically are YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and a few other platforms. They describe how they got their starts and built commnities that can eventually be monetized. It can be hard work in the early years, as with any one starting a business, and a precious commodity is building and maintaining reader or viewer trust.

Regulatory considerations for Finfluencers

The BMO Creator event closed with a more cautious overview of the regulatory risks corporations and Finfluencers jointly bear. One of the last slides, titled “Be Proactive!” advised Finfluencers to read the OSC notice, review their existing content inventory, evaluate services for registerable activities or disclosure requirements, Follow sponsorship disclosure requirements, Be careful of who you help endorse or promote and to Seek legal help to help stay compliant.

In short, whether you’re a seasoned investor (in both senses of the word) or still working, it’s very much a Buyer Beware world out there, while if you’re a content creator of any age, Trust is not a commodity to be abused or taken for granted. As Adrian Bar warned, content creators are better off passing on what might have otherwise become  lucrative partnerships if it compromises trust with their audience down the line.

Good on creators like that but if you’re a consumer or investor, wait until a Finfluencer has earned your trust; until then, take pronouncements on YouTube or other platforms with the proverbial grain of salt.