Thanks,
Karl

I’ll admit that – while inspired by digging through the crates for danceable music – most of the mix is just the wrong side of the danceable / head-nodding divide. But you knew that.

But in case it’s useful, here’s the list of tracks we actually gave the DJ for the wedding.

And, I spent a while trying to find danceable music for the boomer generation, and came up with the following:

DJ Soo’s Baby Boomer mix
DJ Penny Lane’s Punks in Parkas podcasts

Fairly standard passive investor philosophy. An alternative is the H.Simpson philosophy –>

Bart: You make me sick, Homer. You’re the one who told me I could do anything if I just put my mind to it!

Homer: Well, now that you’re a little bit older, I can tell you that’s a crock! No matter how good you are at something, there’s always about a million people better than you.

Bart: Gotcha. Can’t win, don’t try.

I haven’t actually read A Random Walk Down Wall Street – is it that essential?

Incidentally, should I assume you’ve read A Random Walk Down Wall Street?

Also, it suffers from the same problemyou mentioned upthread – historical purchases in a foreign currency are converted to $CAD using today’s exchange rate.

Couple of questions for the crowd:

- Why do we talk about ‘currency risk’ like it is a bad thing? Isn’t there an equal chance that currency fluctuations will help us, rather than hurt us?

- Your broad-based index funds, how do they compare to the narrow-based ones? The last time I looked at, the difference was in a fairly small tail of the smallest cap stocks (almost by .definition). Still, maybe that’s where the exciting differences are?

1) To date, I haven’t really optimized the cash part of my portfolio. I’m usually making 0.7% in a savings account on some of the cash, 0% in a chequing account for much of the rest, and some fragments of cash scattered across my different brokerage accounts (RRSP, TFSA and non-registered). Cash has been my lowest priority for optimization. My top goal is to avoid bank fees by maintaining the minimum balance – bank fees are much higher than any interest I could earn on cash. I will start looking into the various GIC and money market options soon.

2) The ETFs don’t have an automatic purchase plan. They do offer a Dividend Reinvestment (DRIP) option, which I plan to activate. I may look at an automatic purchase plan for the TDB900 mutual fund, though. This has also been a lower priority for me – my goal has been to first get the overall allocation of assets and diversification right, then get the tax treatment right (putting appropriate assets in the RRSP / TFSA / non-registered accounts), and only then deal with minimizing my cash-on-hand. As it stands, I usually build up much bigger cash allocations during the year, then drop $5,000 – $10,000 on a few ETFs a few times per year to maintain the portfolio balance.

3) Yes, I keep the year-end weighting the same. The theoretical table above assumes that a rebalance happened at the start of 2010. Because I’m continuously contributing to my actual accounts, I usually just direct funds to whichever part of the portfolio is underweight; to date, I haven’t actually had to sell anything.

4) I don’t seek out high-dividend stocks. I’ve only real heard of this goal among “income-seeking” investors – usually retirees who want their portfolio to spin out cash on a regular basis. Is there a portfolio reason to desire this class of stocks in particular? In 2010, the returns from the equity component of my portfolio were 70% capital gains and 30% dividends. Honestly though, I haven’t heard a reason to care much other than for tax reasons near retirement – to me, capital gains and dividends are mostly equivalent. But perhaps others have studied this more closely…

On records – to be honest, I find this very hard to do effectively, especially with an international multicurrency portfolio, in-year contributions, and so on. I find it easier to track a “target” portfolio (like the one above) and do my best to keep my actual portfolio in line with the target. If anyone knows any good, flexible software for managing a portfolio, I’m all ears.