U.S. broker Charles Schwab’s launch this week of 8 new exchange traded funds (ETFs) could be a watershed event for providers and users of ETFs and mutual funds. What’s remarkable is that they have fixed their management expense ratios (MERs) even lower than the Vanguard ETFs and are allowing their ...

An email from David K. of Toronto nudges me to post on a point I had thought to include in yesterday’s column on short selling leveraged ETFs – but left on the cutting room floor. It concerns the strategy of shorting leveraged ETFs and the distinction between historical and future ...

In the previous post, I had linked to an article by a financial advisor who had painted a rather bleak picture in regards the level of service provided by financial advisors remunerated through trailer fees and other embedded commissions. It suggested that financial plans were performed at even lower rates than ...

A reader sent in an email with an interesting supplementary to the claim that trailer fees represent the cost of financial advice (in Part I). As you may recall, MacKenzie Financial’s publication claimed that an apples-to-apples comparison of ETFs to mutual funds required that the ETF orange be converted into an ...

Here is the second part of the post on the ETF vs. mutual fund debate ….

Oh my! Mackenzie Financial, the biggest mutual-fund family  in Canada, has fired a broadside at exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Financial columnists Ellen Roseman and Jon Chevreau have recently commented on the critique, which can be found on the Mackenzie Financial website under the title ‘I thought I wanted an ETF.’ Here are ...

It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's Superman! No wait…. it’s the loonie, a.k.a. the Canadian dollar. It’s closing in on parity with the U.S. dollar and by the looks of it, might blow past this psychologically important milestone before you finish reading this post. 

A previous post on bond ETFs elicited requests to explain why it is important to look at the yield to maturity instead of the yield quoted on financial portals like Yahoo Finance. Just why, for example, is it misleading to use Yahoo Finance’s quote of 4% on the iShares Canadian Short-Term ...

Another aspect of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) coming to the fore lately is front-running. That’s the practice where traders buy ahead of large orders from ETFs and short sell ahead of large sell orders. They scalp profits by flipping their newly acquired long positions back to the ETF at higher prices and ...

It’s time for another quarterly update to the One-Minute Portfolio (the last was on April 13, 2009). In a nutshell, the second quarter extended the gains of the first quarter to raise the portfolio’s return since December to about 17%.