Tag Archives: mutual funds

How to get the better of the big Canadian banks

Posted By |

By Larry Bates

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

The big Canadian banks, and by extension the entire Canadian financial industry, occupy a position of paternalistic authority that too many individual investors respect unquestioningly, and even appreciate to some extent. The industry brilliantly capitalizes on a combination of poor understanding of fees, deep loyalty, and misplaced trust by charging Canadians the highest mutual fund fees in the world. This leaves most Canadian retirement investors with 100% of the market risk but only about 50% of market returns.

The impact of these high (and often unseen) investment fees on Canadian retirement accounts is more than a consumer issue, it is a major social issue of our time.

Government pensions will not be nearly enough to provide a satisfactory retirement lifestyle for most Canadians, and guaranteed employer pensions are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. In order to live well in retirement, you now likely need to build significant savings and make those savings grow through investment. So,while previous generations of Canadians with guaranteed pensions could casually observe the markets from the sidelines, most of us today must participate directly in the markets to secure a comfortable retirement.

In other words, you, and only you, have the burden of responsibility to get investing right. But the structure and practices of the investment industry continue to conspire against the ability of the average investor to succeed, to maximize that retirement nest egg. This compromises not only the financial well-being of individual Canadians, but also the health of our retirement system and of our society as a whole.

But there is good news. There are a growing number of very efficient, low-cost investment products such as index ETFs and services such as online discount brokers and “robo-advisors” that enable Canadians to keep a much larger share of their investment returns where they belong … in their retirement accounts. And these lower-cost products and services are offered by the big banks as well as several independent institutions. But you need to know the basics in order to take advantage of these opportunities and build bigger nest eggs. Continue Reading…

Retired Money: How to beat the banks at their own game

Posted By |

My latest MoneySense column reviews the new book by ex banker Larry Bates, titled Beat the Bank. As the headline suggests, it’s all about how to beat the banks at their own game, which ironically can mean owning the big bank stocks themselves! The full column can be retrieved by clicking on the highlighted text here:  Tips for DIY investors on beating the Big Five banks.

The formal launch date for the book is this Thursday: September 13, 2018. I first met Bates over lunch in March as his manuscript was nearing completion, where he expounded on what he called the “two Bay Streets.” Old Bay Street and its secrets are the focus of chapters 4 and 5, and New Bay Street is chapter 6.

Old Bay Street is not the investor’s friend

Most experienced investors will have encountered Old Bay Street at some point. This is the traditional investment industry: the commission-based mutual fund and brokerage industry, insurance company reps, investment “specialists” in the bank branches and various salespeople who call themselves “advisors.”

New Bay Street = Discount Brokerage, ETFs & fee-for-service planners

The New Bay Street includes providers of low-cost index funds or Exchange-traded Funds (ETFs) or online robo-advisers that automate the purchase and rebalancing of ETFs along with setting asset allocation.

At 62, Bates is well into his own “Victory Lap,” leaving employment for self-employment. Actually, his New Bay Street model isn’t all that new, as it describes models similar to what I myself described back in 1998 in my own financial book, Findependence Day. My version consists of buying ETFs at a discount brokerage and using a fee-for-service financial planner. The same year, similar principles were also described in Stop Buying Mutual Funds!, by Mark Heinzl, now a Globe & Mail stock market columnist.

Dinosaur banks have the lowest T-REX scores

Bates has fashioned something he calls T-REX scores  This is an acronym for Total Return Efficiency Index Score. A T-REX score of 100% would be paying absolutely no fees at all, no matter how long your time horizon.

Mutual funds with 2% annual fees would have T-REX scores of 54% over 20 years and true fees of 46%, but the longer you hold, the worse the performance; thus, over 40 years the T-REX would be 41% and the true fee 59%. Fees of 3% inflict even more damage. This is the basis for his statement that long-term customers of Old Bay Street lose half their money to fees. You can find more at his website at www.larrybates.ca.

The pure DIY model of buying individual stocks or bonds at a discount broker yields the highest scores: a T-REX of 96 to 99%. (Remember, the higher the better, with 100 being perfect).

Continue Reading…

This is Easy Street for Canadian investors

Posted By |

By Dale Roberts

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Investing is simple. We are all familiar with the KISS acronym. Simplicity is the key to successful investing. I have been reading and studying investing and investment strategies for decades and came to the conclusion that for the most part “nobody knows nothing.”

Great. All that research and tens of thousands of hours of study and I came back to the fact that I don’t need to know much at all. What a complete waste of time? No not at all. The thousands of hours of study showed me why I, we, don’t need to know much. We do not need to be experts when it comes to investing. As I like to write: It ain’t rocket surgery. Here’s how you find Easy Street.

What is an investment portfolio? In its basic form we can think of a portfolio as having two components: great companies for greater growth potential and bonds to manage the risk. Those bonds work like shock absorbers on the portfolio to reduce the risk or volatility. The more bonds in the portfolio, the lower the risk level of the portfolio.

A typical portfolio will hold great blue-chip companies (stocks) such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Johnson & Johnson, Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett’s company), Coca-Cola and on and on. On the Canadian side we’ll hold Tim Hortons, the big Canadian banks, the telco companies such as Bell, Rogers and Telus, plus railroad companies such as CN and CP Rail and major energy players such as Suncor and Enbridge and on and on.

The rich are business owners

We know that the richest people on earth are usually business owners. We’re going to join them. We’re going to own a piece of those businesses. When enough of those companies do well, you do well. And certainly not every business is going to do well: that’s why you own a bunch of ’em. And that’s why you’ll own great companies in Canada, US and around the globe. And we don’t have to know how to analyze those companies, we can simply go and buy the ‘entire’ stock market. Here’s What is Index Investing and why it’s simply a superior form of investing. It’s so easy we call it Couch Potato Investing.

And back to risk or volatility. Certainly stock markets mostly go up over time, but they do correct or go down with regularity; it’s a normal and expected part of investing. For the potential of those 9-10% annual returns from stocks we need to accept some risk. Keep in mind that stocks can go down by 50% in major stock market corrections. That’s not everyone’s cup of tea to watch their investment portfolio get cut in half. That’s why many or most investors will need some bonds in the portfolio. Bonds are fixed-income investments and are typically less risky than stocks. A bond pays you a fixed payment on a regular basis and bonds can also go up in value when stocks go down – think teeter totter.

A portfolio with a very generous amount of bonds would have only decreased by about 10%-15% in the last major market correction. For the period of 2008 to end of 2009, here’s a comparison of the US stock market (S&P 500) as Portfolio 1, and a Balanced Portfolio as Portfolio 2.

We see that the all-stock portfolio declined by 50% while the Balanced Portfolio with a 70% bond component declined by just over 15%. By the end of 2009 that conservative Balanced Portfolio is almost back in positive territory while the all-stock portfolio still has more of that hill to climb.

Percentage in Bonds a critical decision

The most important decision that will be made, or the most important question answered will be “What percentage of bonds do you need?” What is your risk tolerance level? What roller coaster do you want to ride? You get to decide. Continue Reading…

Vanguard Canada unveils low-cost actively managed mutual funds

Posted By |
Vanguard Canada’s Atul Tiwari

On the heels of its three asset allocation ETFs that shook up Canada’s investment industry in February, Vanguard Investments Canada Inc. today announced it will be providing four new low-cost actively managed mutual funds to the Canadian market.

The four new mutual funds are its first actively managed products for the domestic market: until now, it has been providing 36 exchange-traded funds (ETFs), with more than C$16 billion in assets. Vanguard says Canadians hold more than C $28 billion in Vanguard investments if you include both its Canadian products and its funds trading on US stock exchanges.

All four of the new active mutual funds are globally diversified: Vanguard says its management fees are about half that of the mutual fund industry average in Canada. (According to the Investment Funds Institute of Canada here, the average total cost of ownership of mutual funds for clients using advice-based distribution channels in Canada at the end of 2016 was 1.96% when taxes are excluded.)

IFIC has said these costs continue to fall and there’s little doubt Vanguard’s entry will accelerate the trend, and not a moment too soon, given last Thursday’s disappointing proposals from the Canadian Securities Administrators. (See the Hub’s roundup here or my Motley Fool Canada blog here).

In a press release distributed at 8 am Monday, Vanguard said the four new funds “feature global investment strategies from some of Vanguard’s longest-tenured sub-advisors” and complement its broad-based lineup of ETFs.

Vanguard Canada managing director Atul Tiwari (pictured) said “Vanguard has a deep 40-year history of active management expertise and we are excited to extend that to mutual fund investors in Canada, at a low cost … These mutual funds reflect our philosophy as an organization with a disciplined long-term approach and world-class investment managers that have worked with Vanguard for decades.”

Despite the fact The Vanguard Group Inc. pioneered index funds and low-cost passively managed investing (with more than US$5 trillion under management), it is also one of the world’s largest active managers, with US$1.2 trillion in global actively managed assets. The key contributing factors to successful active management are low costs, talent and patience, said Tim Huver, Vanguard Canada’s head of product.

Pricing varies with investment performance

Vanguard says it will use a unique pricing structure in the Canadian marketplace that aligns the interests of the sub-advisors with the funds’ investors. The maximum management fee for each mutual fund will be 0.50% and the management fee will vary up or down, up to that maximum amount, based on the investment performance of each fund.

 

Mutual Fund Maximum Management Fee First Year Management Fee
Vanguard Global Balanced Fund

 

 0.50% 0.38%
Vanguard Global Dividend Fund

 

 0.50% 0.34%
Vanguard Windsor U.S. Value Fund 0.50% 0.35%
Vanguard International Growth Fund 0.50% 0.40%

 

The first year management fee shown above is effective from June 25, 2018 to June 30, 2019. The funds will be available to financial advisors through Series F units and institutional investors through Series I units.

Canadian investors currently hold $1.5 trillion in mutual funds, according to Tiwari. “Vanguard has a long track record of lowering investment costs in the areas in which we operate, so we see providing greater choice and lower costs to a broader group of investors as very positive.”

More on the four actively managed global mutual funds Continue Reading…

Doing the math on investment fees: the math isn’t pretty

Posted By |

A few weeks ago I invited readers to share their portfolio details with me so I could help ‘do the math’ on their investment fees. Many of you did, and the results weren’t pretty. From accounts loaded with deferred sales charges (DSCs), management expense ratios (MERs) in the high 2 per cent range, and funds overlapping the same sectors and regions, it was a predictable mess of over-priced products.

The worst of the bunch: the number of portfolios filled with segregated funds.

I’ve highlighted segregated funds as the biggest offender when it comes to fees for two reasons:

1.) The MER on segregated funds are higher than most mutual funds (which we know are already high enough). I looked at one portfolio that held a suite of segregated funds from Industrial Alliance called Ecoflex, with MERs of 2.99, 3.26, and 3.29 per cent;

2.) Segregated funds were exempt from CRM2 disclosure rules because they are considered insurance products. Investors receive the fund facts sheet, which still express fees in percentage terms rather than breaking them down and disclosing in dollar terms.

Doing the math on your investment fees

 

Keep in mind most readers were looking for me to do the math on their investment fees for portfolios valued at $250,000 or more. One reader, a soon-to-be retiree, had an average MER of 3.13 per cent for his $412,000 portfolio.

I told him he paid nearly $13,000 in investment fees last year and asked if he thought he was getting good value for his fees. He said he hadn’t met with his advisor in three years, despite repeated attempts to get together to discuss his retirement plan.

Another reader held $300,000 in high-fee mutual funds with Investors Group. She recognized the fees, but was on the fence about switching because she was in the middle of the deferred sales charge schedule:  a penalty that would cost her $10,000 if she sold the funds and transferred to a robo-advisor. Continue Reading…