Building Wealth

For the first 30 or so years of working, saving and investing, you’ll be first in the mode of getting out of the hole (paying down debt), and then building your net worth (that’s wealth accumulation.). But don’t forget, wealth accumulation isn’t the ultimate goal. Decumulation is! (a separate category here at the Hub).

Closure of Hulbert Financial Digest a loss for all investors

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Mark_J._Hulbert_cropHere’s my latest Financial Post blog, which puts a Canadian spin on the announcement late last week that after 36 years, the influential investment newsletter ranking service is shutting down. Click on this headline: ‘A loss for all investors’: The Hulbert Financial Digest says goodbye.

As the blog notes, there aren’t too many Canadian investment newsletters but two of the majors had one or two newsletters that often did well in the Digest.

Here is Hulbert’s Wikipedia entry.

The good news is that Hulbert continues to be a columnist at MarketWatch.com. Check out his recent opinion piece, entitled Don’t be fooled by a bear-market rally in stocks.

Paper-heavy financial industry will go from 10 to 50% digital in 3 or 4 years

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Financial Independence Hub.photoBy Anthony Boright

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

We live at a time when electronic communications is making rapid advances in many walks of life, but surprisingly, the financial-services industry still has a long way to go.

Incredible as it may sound, less than 10 per cent of documents in the industry are delivered electronically today. I refer to client statements, trade confirmations, bills, and a variety of other disclosure documents needed for regulatory requirements. Indeed, the industry and those who work in it are drowning in paper.

From my vantage point, three prominent trends in the industry right now are:

  • The migration from paper to electronic communications
  • An ever-increasing environment of regulation
  • A growing need for technology innovation and the cost savings that brings.

I have worked in the technology side of financial services for 20 years and been involved in lots of innovations. This includes providing Internet and custom web solutions for the industry, developing products that address what were then new Point of Sale (POS) regulations, and in the late 1990s creating the Fund Library, which was Canada’s online mutual fund resource centre, and also f/A Connect,  the Internet workplace for financial advisors.

The benefits of digital

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Trading ETFs can just make dumb moves cheaper

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patmckeoughBy Patrick McKeough, TSINetwork.ca

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Trading ETFs can work just as well in facilitating dumb moves as it does with smart moves.

Most investors would agree when we say that Exchange Traded Funds or ETFs started out as the most benign investment innovation that has come along in our lifetimes.

The problem is that ETFs work just as well in facilitating dumb moves as smart ones. And there are all sorts of dumb moves that ETFs can facilitate.

In fact, if you get an urge to invest in oil stocks, or gold stocks, or Swedish stocks, or windpower stocks, or any of hundreds of other stock groups and themes, you can act on that urge without doing any messy and time-consuming research on individual stocks—research that may give you pause and keep you from investing.

Manage your portfolio successfully into retirement

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Sensible Investing TV: How to Win the Loser’s Game, Part 9

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Screen Shot 2016-03-09 at 1.44.02 PMSensible Investing TV has posted part 9 of its How to Win the Loser’s Game series of videos, which you can view by clicking here. This 9-minute segment is the second-last episode of the ten-part series.

You can also find it here at Findependence.TV, where all the earlier episodes, plus those of FWB TV, are housed.

David Booth, co-founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors (pictured), says this:

“One of the big difficulties is getting people to stay the course when results are disappointing. It should come as no surprise to people that markets go up and they go down. When they go down, there’s a tendency for people to go, ‘Gosh, Are we on the edge of an abyss? Will things really get bad from here?’

In 2008-2009, it was difficult to get people to stay the course. My heart goes out to these people that were invested in equities, lost half their money then got out and missed the rebound. It may take quite a while for them to get back even again.”

We need to stay the course, and this video shows why …. the culprits will be familiar to many investors: buying low and selling high, panicking at the worst possible time, listening to media noise. There’s also a good segment featuring Vanguard founder John Bogle and the long-term returns that come from dividend yield and earnings growth, as opposed to speculation.  Continue Reading…

BitGold: a cure for savers frustrated with low or negative interest rates?

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gold-cubes
The ultimate store of value? (BitGold.com)

Here’s my latest Financial Post blog, which looks at a relatively new service called BitGold (not to be confused with BitCoin): A New Gold Standard: BitGold offers a fresh way to buy and sell the yellow metal.

It notes that while it’s been a tough time to be a saver the last decade,  the new phenomenon of negative interest rates combined with the resurgence of the price of gold so far in 2016 is causing savers to look again to gold as a savings vehicle capable of preserving purchasing power.

As the blog says, BitGold customers’ are credited with real physical gold, which is stored at any of seven Brinks locations in major global financial centers. Customers can also choose to take physical delivery. Through this gold-based global network, you can purchase or sell gold at a 1% transaction cost in each direction. Early customers are mining companies that let employees be paid wholly or in part in BitGold, or permit shareholders to receive dividends in BitGold. Continue Reading…