As regular readers, you all know I’ve struggled what to do with my investment strategy over the past weeks and months. I’m a contrarian at heart, I find myself attracted to names and sectors that other investors shun. Yet, as I’ve discussed numerous times here, do I really have the knowledge advantage to outperform the market?
After much deliberating, I’ve come up with my investment strategy. While I’m hardly sure I can outperform the market picking contrarian names, I definitely can’t if I don’t try. At the same time, I want the safety that comes with taking a passive approach. How can I accomplish both?
Basically, I’m going to split my portfolio in two. I will invest my RRSP and TFSA in passive index funds. I will split my money equally between 4 funds: XIC (tracks the TSX Composite), XSP (tracks the S&P 500) XIN (tracks the rest of the world) and XBB (Canadian bond index). This will give me a 75% equity and 25% fixed income weighting, which is fine for my age. Every year I will buy whichever one of these indices that is the worst performer for my contribution that year.
For my non-registered portfolio, I will continue to pursue contrarian investments. I will continue to try to outperform the market, and I’ll do a better job keeping you guys in the loop, via The Uproar Fund. I’ll actually start giving you the quarterly updates I’ve promised. I’ll actually start doing more analysis on individual stocks. You’ll still hear me talk about ETFs too, I’ll just usually make it about a beaten up sector. Look for some sort of analysis about once a week.
So that’s it. I’m not ready to admit defeat from active investing yet. What’s fun about this whole exercise is I can compare my results from passive investing directly to active investing. Will it be worth my time? Will the market kick my ass? Only time will tell.
So I’m about to leave for the day, heading downtown to pickup my contacts from the eye place, (more on that later) when there’s a knock on my door. Luckily I was wearing pants, so I go and answer. There I’m greeted by a bald guy, producing a police badge, asking me if I could answer a few questions.
There is nothing like the panic when a cop wants to talk to you. I haven’t done anything more illegal that jaywalking, ever, yet seeing that cop scared the crap out of me.
Anyhoo, he wants to ask me questions about my neighbour. To give you background, my new neighbour bought the house with a possession date of May 1st. He showed up on that day, and then I haven’t seen him or his wife since. The grass isn’t cut, there’s isn’t a piece of furniture in the house, clearly nobody lives there. So the cop wants to know everything I know about the guy, which was a pretty short conversation, considering I don’t even know the guy’s name. When I asked what was up, all the officer said was “I need to talk to your neighbors, and I can’t find them. And if I can’t find them, that’s a problem.”
So I’m a little concerned about my neighbour. But I’m also a little jacked, since there’s some cool stuff going down in my hood.
Random Thing I Enjoyed This Week
I finally got my contacts, after approximately 347 weeks of waiting. Stupid eye place.
If you’ve never had ‘tacts before, you probably think that putting them in and taking them out is really easy. And it is, once you practice enough to get good at it. Until then, you will be hopelessly pathetic at it. Your eyeball will not be happy once you actually get them in or out. It took me 23 minutes to take them out last night, but only about 3 minutes to put them in this morning.
I also find that the right one tends to get cloudy as the day goes on. I asked the eye place girls about it, and they didn’t seem to have any idea what I was talking about. They give me a new right one, and it’s been better so far. So lets hope that works out for me.
Random Thing That Irritated Me This Week
I don’t want this to turn into a Blue Jays piece every Saturday, but I think Jays’ manager John Farrell has the IQ of a waffle. On Tuesday though, CLEAN UP hitter Yunel Escobar sac bunted. I really, really hate sac bunting, and I hate it even more when managers insist on having good hitters do it. I yelled at the tv a lot. I think the guy in my basement was a little scared.
Song That I Like And Therefore You Should Too
You have never heard of Jim Croce (unless you’re a million years like the Big Cajun Man) but you’ve definitely heard this song.
I try to find a way to play this song at least once a day. It’s so delightful. I love finding these songs from the 70s, they’re all new to me.
Simpsons Quote Of The Week
Belle (Burlesque house madam): …are you wearing a garbage bag?
Homer: I have misplaced my pants.
Blogging Snack Of The Week
You know, I don’t think I ate a single thing this week that was any good. I’ve been thinking about this for a solid 3 minutes now, and I can’t think of anything… Wait, I got something.
There was steak, and I barb-e-qued the HELL out of it. It was delightful. I’d really suggest you go out right now and buy some steak, and fire up the ‘que.
So I haven’t really been trying to eat that well lately, since I reached my 220 pound goal. I’m still aware of what I eat, and I’m still making an effort to control my portions, which usually means not taking seconds these days. I went 3 months without eating much unhealthy stuff, so I’m making up for lost time. Somewhat nervously, I weighed myself this week. The result? 218.8. I lost weight and wasn’t even trying. Score!
Sports TV You Should Watch This Week
Well, I’ll tell you what you’re not going to watch this weekend, and that’s the NHL playoffs. Or the NBA playoffs. How long will Vancouver wait before games, like a year? The NHL should really start game 1 on Sunday or Monday night.
The Indy 500 is this weekend. I won’t watch it, because I don’t really care for watching guys turn left over and over again. I can’t believe NASCAR is more popular in the southern U.S. than hockey. What’s wrong with these people? Right, the inbreeding.
Blogging Babe Of The Week
Next week, I should feature a song by Canadian artist Lights. Her stuff isn’t so bad. In the meantime, let me treat you to her picture.
Quite, quite lovely. I follow her on the Twitter, and she’s pretty weird. Still, when she looks like that, I can look past a LOT of weirdness.
Oh Right, Time For Links
My girl Money Rabbit is facing some major career decisions. For some reason, she didn’t take my “move to Alberta and be my sexy assistant” idea very seriously, probably because I wouldn’t pay her anything.
Krystal has gone to about 288 baseball games in the last week. And she got to meet Pat Hentgen. This Jays’ fan is jealous.
Dividend Ninja warns bloggers about guest post scams. I’ll say it again, I’m more than happy to post good guest posts from legitimate bloggers. Everyone else, who want back links back to their site, can kindly pay for the privilege.
Tweet During last week’s link dump, I treated you to a post by dividend growth investor Dividend Pig titled You’re Not Contrarian and Don’t Know Squat. As you can probably imagine, the title of that particular post got me a little excited. Not swear words excited by any means, but a little excited nonetheless. It could be said that I Read More [...]
Tweet So there I was a few weeks ago, just playing around on my laptop a few weeks ago in my living room and minding my own business, when I see a tweet from MoneySense magazine. All I had to do is be one of the first two to reply to the tweet, and I’d have my very own copy Read More [...]
Tweet This is the scene in a northern Alberta town called Slave Lake last week, as the town got in the way of an out of control wildfire, burning over a third of the town into the ground, including the town’s administrative building. Since the fire knocked out utilities, even the people who will be lucky enough to be able Read More [...]
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