In Thomas Hardy's masterpiece of a novel written in the 1880s,  The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge, the destinies of the two main characters, the tragic Michael Henchard and the triumphant Donald Farfrae, essentially rested on the outcome of their trading in commodities.

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

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%.

The obstacles to investing on one’s own have come down considerably in recent years. Many investors are responding by switching over to solo mode.  Are financial advisors on the list of endangered species?

I talked recently to Richard Deaves, a professor of finance with a specialization in behavioural finance. As mentioned in his book, he thinks investors should become do-it-yourselfers and adopt the passive-indexing approach (e.g. Couch Potato Portfolio). There are just too many behavioural traps such as overconfidence, performance chasing, and the like; ...

Passive index investing may have lost some of its luster during the bear market of 2008. It seems proponents may have focused too much on relative returns and not enough on volatility and absolute returns.

Over the Christmas holidays, I read The Empowered Investor: A Guide to Building Better Portfolios, authored by Montreal-based investment advisor Keith Matthews. It was the second, “new and expanded” edition published in 2008.

Lazy investors may be less enchanted these days with the Lazy Portfolio approach (investors hold a diversified collection of exchange-traded funds and are spared the task of researching individual stocks). Paul Farrell’s scorecard shows that eight high-profile Lazy Portfolios in the U.S. are down more than 25%, on average, over the ...

The One-Minute Portfolio is down approximately 12% year to date. That smarts but it could be a lot worse considering how much the stock markets have tumbled over the same time.

Another financial advisor has inveighed against do-it-yourself (DIY) investing. First, it was Avner Mandelman; now it’s David West. What they argue may perhaps be true of DIYers with an active approach, but not so for the growing ranks of DIYers with a passive indexing approach.