black and white wrenches on asphalt surface

Recent DIY Investing tools I’ve heard about

RobHLeave a comment

Lately, I’ve been exposed to a flood of new1 tools that target the DIY investor. Some I read about in the media (the Globe and Mail’s On Money newsletter is a good read), and some I get wind of through mails I get to comments@moneyengineer.ca (I do read all my mail).

I figured I’d summarize what I’ve seen; appearance here means I know they exist; I don’t use any of them at the moment.

I have taken (relatively) recent closer looks at tools like MyACB/AdjustedCostBase, Portfolio Pilot, Snowball Analytics and Portfolio Tracker should you be looking for a more in-depth review. I may at some point spend more time with some of tools below — let me know if you’ve got a favourite you’ve got in mind at comments@moneyengineer.ca, or tell me about your own experience with any of them!

ActiveACB: An ACB Tracker

Their website: www.activeacb.ca

Their pitch: Canada’s most complete ACB calculator for every investor. ActiveACB reads the trade history your broker already exports, rebuilds the ACB of every security you have held across all of your accounts, and turns the result into the proceeds, adjusted cost base, outlays, and gain or loss that Schedule 3 asks for on each disposition.

My quick take: Everyone who owns assets in a non-registered account should be tracking their ACB themselves, as brokers are notoriously bad at it2. ActiveACB has explicit support for options trading, and for assets held across multiple non-registered accounts, which might be of interest if that reflects your own situation. I can say from firsthand experience that the development team is VERY responsive to feedback.

Gilded: A financial planner/advisor

Their website: https://www.gildedfinancial.com

Their pitch: “Gilded is a future-focused financial planning app for a new generation of wealth builders. Through accurate projections, easy data tracking, and seamless simulations, we empower you to take control of your money and be your own best advisor. You don’t have to guess your financial future. You can know.”

My quick take: Canadian fintech. Projections, what-if scenarios. Includes retirement planning, too. I paid for a personal financial plan when I was getting ready for retirement to give me a sense of ease that I actually had enough to retire. I recommend some sort of oversight for everyone. Gilded isn’t just for retirement, it looks like it can also help people saving for that future, too.

Greenline: A portfolio tracker

Their website: https://usegreenline.com/en-ca

Their pitch: “See everything you own. In one place. You’re probably checking a few different apps just to see what you own. Greenline brings every account into one view.”

My quick take: Currently (October 2026) in free public beta. “Canadian focused, and Canadian built”. Lots of nice looking charts to take a closer look at what’s inside your portfolio. If you want a dashboard view of your overall portfolio across multiple accounts and providers and don’t like using spreadsheets, this is worth a look. I track my portfolio performance using my Google Sheets template. I’m ok with that.

Looniee: A portfolio tracker

Their website: https://looniee.ca

Their pitch: “Track your net worth and your TFSA/RESP/RRSP/FHSA room. If you invest in Canada, your money probably sits in more than one place: a TFSA at one app, an RRSP at the bank, maybe a pension and a home. Each one shows you a piece. None of them show you the whole thing. Looniee puts it on one screen, in Canadian dollars, with the room you have left in each account.”

My quick take: Looniee has some unique features that would be of interest to those who are still in the accumulation phase of their financial journey. For instance, tracking remaining contribution limits for Canada’s various savings vehicles can be challenging, at least based on my reading of the community of savers out there. Unlike some other tools, they work off of your statements, so there’s no need to trust Looniee with brokerage login information. I’ll probably take a closer look at this one.

Manticore: A portfolio tracker

Their website: https://manticorefinance.com

Their pitch: “Your entire financial life, in one place. A premium desktop app that tracks stocks, ETFs and crypto with auto-updating prices, plus your bonds, your net worth, budgets and a full suite of institutional-grade analytics: private by design, encrypted at rest.”

My quick take: It’s Windows software and I have nothing to run it on. It doesn’t support Canadian taxes, but may someday. And, like I said earlier, I’ve already got a portfolio tracker that suits my needs. If you’re Windows user and you want to do deep analysis on your portfolio, then this might be for you.

TextPhi: A finance companion

Their website: https://www.textphi.com

Their pitch: “The future of investing is in your contacts. Research. Watch. Test. In your texts. Whatever you want to understand, track, or test, just text Phi. Research that runs 24/7. Filings, earnings, markets, news, social, and more. Phi keeps digging even when you’re not. Phi remembers everything that matters. Over time, Phi builds a model of you as an investor, not just a record of your portfolio.”

My quick take: Built by UW students3, this product is still in invitation-only beta. Its innovation is relying on text messages to inform you about things you might want to know about your portfolio. You can ask it questions and get answers, all from the comfort of your phone. If you like to buy individual stocks, this might be for you. Given that I’m a boring asset-allocation passive index investor, I don’t trade on news, quarterly earnings or the latest social media post. I just stick to my asset allocation targets.

ValuEdge: an investor terminal

Their website: https://valuedge.app

Their pitch: For long term investors who want clarity, not noise. Know what you own, what it’s worth, & what changed. ValuEdge brings your brokers, valuations, watchlists, dividends, and alerts into one investor terminal — so you can track business value instead of just price.

My quick take: Although ETF tracking is supported, the focus of the tool and the included analytics would be more useful to the stock picker. I don’t buy individual stocks, preferring to buy the market through the use of all-in-one ETFs, primarily.

  1. Well, new to me ↩︎
  2. I use adjustedcostbase.ca myself. ↩︎
  3. Gotta support the alma mater ↩︎
illustration of credit concept with money

The bond portion of my portfolio

RobH2 Comments

I’m a bit curious as to what’s under the hood of the category I refer to as “bonds” in my portfolio. I try to keep the level at 15% of my retirement net worth. Bonds have historically acted as a volatility reducer at the cost of overall performance. You can see that pretty clearly by comparing the performance of XEQT (100% equity) with XGRO (which holds the same equity funds, but less of them to make room for 20% bonds).

The drag on total return is pretty clear. And for this reason, 15% bonds is enough for me; adding to this is the other 5% of my portfolio which I call “cash” but is also actually very short term bonds.

But what kinds of bonds do I actually hold? I’m most interested in understanding a few parameters:

  • What kind of interest are they paying?
  • What is the duration of the bonds I hold? “Duration” means “when are these loans due”? The further in the future the loans are due, the more the bonds are impacted by changes in interest rates.
  • What’s the quality of the bonds I hold? “Quality” means “how creditworthy are the entities I’m loaning my money to”? Lower credit rating means higher yields, but greater risk of default. The least creditworthy are usually called “junk” bonds. The lower the credit rating, the more the bond begins to look like an equity ETF, with volatility to match. That’s not really what I’m looking for.

So the first thing to figure out is where my bonds are. Looking at my handy dandy asset tracker, (download a template here), I can check on my overall retirement allocation by ETF:

So from memory, I know that my bonds are held in XGRO (20% of that fund), and XCB. Let’s take a look at XGRO first. Heading over to the ETF fact sheet, you can quickly see what’s inside:

So to get to the bottom of this analysis, I have to look up what’s inside each of XBB, XSH, GOVT and USIG. I also hold XCB which is not a fund of funds, and by referring to its fact sheet so we can easily add construct the table below:

ETF symbolNamePercentage in portfolio Current yieldWeighted avg maturityQuality
XBBCanadian bond universe6.56%3.55%9.4 years89% A or above
XSHCanadian short term corporate bond1.55%4.01%3.24 years57% A or above
GOVTUS Treasury Bonds0.99%5.04%7.44 years100% A or above
USIGUS Broad investment grade0.98%5.97%9.70 years50% A or above
XCBCanadian Core Corporate4.4%4.26%7.96 years56% A or above
total/ weighted average14.5%4.08%8.18 years74% A or above

So a few comments on the results:

  • The percentage of bonds is actually sitting at 14.5%. I don’t track how closely XGRO keeps to its 20% target, I just assume that on average, that’s where it will be. But this calculation shows that there’s a bit of drift.
  • The Current Yield is as of October 14, 2026.
  • The weighted average maturity is meaningful because the longer the duration here, the more sensitive the bonds are to interest rate changes. 8 years isn’t super long, but in a rising interest rate environment, these holdings will suffer.
  • The quality is universally pretty high, with 75% rating A or above.
  • Missing in action are any bond holdings outside of the US and Canada, and even the US exposure is quite small.

My impression overall is that my bond holdings are quite conservative. Which I suppose is what they should be, but I am a little surprised how little the overall picture looks from what I consider cash, namely ZST. Here’s the table again, comparing my average bond holdings to ZST/ZMMK.

ETF symbolNameCurrent YieldWeighted avg maturityQuality
Average of bond holdingsXBB/ XSH/ GOVT/ USIG/ XCB4.08%8.18 years74% A or above
ZMMKMoney market2.38%0.22 years100% A or above
ZSTUltra short term2.59%0.36 years71.5% A or above

So here you see the improved yield picture compared to my “cash” holdings, which looks a bit better. I suppose I could look into adding some lower quality bonds1 to goose the yield a bit, but I’m not so keen on expanding the number of ETFs I hold. Less complexity is better than more, right?

  1. For example, ZJK (great ticker symbol, by the way) invests in much lower quality bonds. ↩︎
a tree stump on the seashore

Why I’m dubious about the “cash wedge”

RobH2 Comments

The cash wedge, as the name may imply, is a chunk of cash (i.e. liquid assets that are safe to withdraw at any time, in any market, the cash under the mattress being the 0% interest option1) that allows you to survive market downturns. The concept comes up again and again in reading the personal finance blogs and media. Here’s a typical treatment2: https://www.sunlifeglobalinvestments.com/content/dam/sunlife/regional/canada/documents/slgi/810-4986-10-20-cashwedge.pdf

And the article linked above has some quite specific recommendations, which is typical. The details will vary a bit from source to source, but let’s keep rolling with Sun Life.

  • Put about one year of expenses in a money market account (I would add: or HISA)
  • Put another two years of expenses in something slightly less liquid (e.g. GICs, bond funds)
  • Invest the rest “to match your individual investment profile”. This, I think, is supposed to imply some percentage of things that aren’t cash (e.g “equity”), but here is where the vagueness begins…

I have some issues with this first bit, which you may find surprising. After all, doesn’t my own retirement allocation strategy have a “cash wedge”? It does have cash, and it’s true — until I actually stopped earning a salary, I had NO cash in my retirement savings. It was strictly 80/20 (equity/bonds). Once I decided to use VPW3 for my decumulation strategy, I saw I would need to have what they called a “cash cushion”. I formalized it by adding 5% cash to my overall retirement asset allocation.

What I have in my retirement portfolio is 5% “cash” (actually, ultra short term bond funds, but close enough), 15% “bonds” and 80% equity (with targets by geographic region for USA, Canada, and everywhere else). But this 5% cash position isn’t a cash wedge since the amount of cash I hold will vary with my net worth. It’s a fixed percentage. If times are good, I add cash. If times are bad, I subtract cash. Mostly I’ve been adding cash in retirement, since my net worth has also increased. The wedge strategy suggests you keep the amount fixed, regardless of net worth.

This downside of keeping a static amount of cash set aside is that it could become either a vanishingly small portion of your savings (which means more limited downside protection), or a very large portion (which means limited growth opportunities) of your retirement savings over time.

This is, in the end, not the main objection I have. The big problem I have with the “wedge” idea is that too many questions are left unanswered and unaddressed:

  • If you are paying yourself from the wedge, when do you top it up?
  • Some variations of the wedge idea suggest that you pay yourself from the wedge “when markets are down”. “Down” compared to what? How far is “down”. When does “down” become “up” again?
  • In any case, the wedge should be replenished. How frequently? From where?

Maybe some people have figured out rules and procedures to answer these questions. My fear is that new retirees set up the wedge but then are left on their own to make decisions about when, where, and how much to draw down. And this sort of decision making is what I would call “timing the market”. Which, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, is something that I strongly believe simply cannot be done4.

My retirement methodology, based on VPW, takes all the potential for bad behaviour out of my hands:

  • My cash position is always a fixed percentage of my net worth
  • How much I withdraw every month is based on my net worth. If markets are bad, I spend less. Same as when I worked in sales and had a bad quarter/year: less quota bonus means less spending..
  • There is no temptation to time the market, since every month is more or less the same
    • Sell XGRO from my RRIFs5
    • Sell additional non-registered assets6 to reach my recommended monthly salary
    • Augment or subtract from my cash cushion as needed7
    • Make additional trades to pull my asset allocations back into line if needed8

The longer I live my retired life using VPW, the more I find to like about it. But happy to hear from you if you think you’ve found a way to use cash effectively without trying to guess where the market is headed. Hit me up at comments@moneyengineer.ca!

  1. Or like most big banks ↩︎
  2. And although Sun Life and their financial products are not something I would wish on my worst enemy, the ideas expressed in this article can be found in lots of sources. ↩︎
  3. “Variable percentage withdrawal” which is a methodology that considers age, future pensions and current asset allocation to generate a sustainable income flow. ↩︎
  4. For about 2 years now, I’ve been reading about the imminent market crash. I’m still waiting, now worth 20% more than when the first rumbles started, and so now I can survive a 20% decline in the market and be exactly where I was 2 years ago, except that I’ve been drawing a generous salary the whole time. I’m not saying that there isn’t a crash likely coming at some point, but no one can say when that will happen. If you stay invested, you tend to be rewarded. Leaving money sitting idle means that you have to guess right twice: once that the crash is imminent, and once when the bottom is reached. ↩︎
  5. Which reduces all the asset classes I track except cash. Cash grows rather slowly so every once in a while I have to buy a little more to keep the 5% in line. ↩︎
  6. Here I do exercise some discretion over what asset(s) are liquidated, but normally I just sell the asset class that is the most overweight in my portfolio. ↩︎
  7. The full monthly workflow is described in The Mechanics of Getting Paid in Retirement: 2026 Edition. The VPW methodology tells me exactly how much to manipulate my cash cushion. ↩︎
  8. Trading is free on the platforms I use, but I don’t obsess; as long as the assets are within 1% of targets, I don’t make additional changes. ↩︎
salesman discussing real estate to a senior couple

What’s it cost to manage your own retirement?

RobH2 Comments

One of the big reasons I became a DIY investor in the first place was to stop paying the typical 1% to 2% annual charges professional money managers charge.

Now before you start scoffing at “small” numbers like 1%, you have to consider a few things

  • 1% of one million dollars1 is $10,000. Retirement savings generally involve relatively large numbers, and small percentages translate into large real dollars. The lineups I see at the gas pumps to save a buck or two on a tank of gas tell me that real dollars are generally more meaningful to people than percentages.
  • Compound interest. Throwing away $10,000 on management fees every year means you’re $10,000 poorer every year. Fast forward ten years at an assumed 6% rate of return, and that $10,000 annual hole turns into (roughly2) ~$135,000 hole
  • …and the most annoying thing? A 100k portfolio is charged the same percentage as a $1M portfolio, meaning the $1M portfolio attracts 10x the fees of the 100k portfolio. Is the $1M portfolio ten times harder to manage? No!

But ok, even a DIYer doesn’t invest for free.

  • If you hold any kind of asset, there’s potentially3 commission fees every time you buy and sell
  • If you hold ETFs (as I do) then the FER4 will cost you, although not explicitly. FERs kick in before you see your own returns.
  • You might pay interest if you borrow money to trade (aka using margin)5
  • You may pay FX fees if you trade in currencies other than CAD6

So let’s look at what my retirement portfolio is actually costing me. For me, that’s now down to FER costs. Using my latest What’s in my retirement portfolio? article, it’s easy enough to calculate. I track in real time how much of each asset I hold, so by looking up the FER and multiplying by $1,000,000, you can get the annual cost :

It’s a bit higher than I expected, admittedly. $1902 is a far cry from the $10,000 I talked about earlier, but it’s not nothing.

I wonder what my rock bottom costs would be? If I were to eliminate all-in-ones (which are convenient, but costly) and just focused on 5 funds, one for cash, one for bonds, one for Canadian equity, one for US Equity and one for International equity, what would I end up with given my asset allocation targets? Here’s that table:

I chose ZAG over XCB because ZAG is a broader bond fund than XCB and diversification is good. I use XCB today because I get broad bond exposure via XGRO. I picked ZST over ZMMK for this exercise, but in reality I would probably still hold ZMMK and ZST in equal proportion. That would lower my overall costs ever so slightly.

I suppose this experiment shouldn’t surprise me: I covered the costs of all-in-ones in a previous post. But this shows that I could cut my annual costs in half should I choose to forgo the convenience of XGRO and XEQT. XGRO would be hard to give up because it makes managing my RRIF accounts (the only place I hold XGRO) much easier. I only sell XGRO to cover my RRIF minimums at the moment, no decisions necessary.

But XEQT I only hold in my long-duration7 TFSA account. There I could possibly make the switch with no real impact other than reducing my fees by about 0.01% or $100 on a million. Something to think about. What about you? Do you pay close attention to MERs/FERs of assets you own? Let me know at comments@moneyengineer.ca!

colorful assortment of french macarons in box

What’s in my retirement portfolio (September 2026)?

RobH3 Comments

This is a monthly look at what’s in my retirement portfolio. The original post is here.

Portfolio Construction

The retirement portfolio is spread across a bunch of accounts:

  • 5 RRIF accounts
    • 3 for me (Questrade, Wealthsimple)
    • 2 for my spouse (Questrade)
  • 2 TFSA accounts (Questrade)
  • 4 non-registered accounts, (1 for me, 1 for my spouse, 2 joint, all at Questrade)

The view post-payday

I pay myself monthly in retirement, and the charts that follow reflect the view post-payday, which happens around the end of the month. On September 30th before the markets opened, this is what it looked like:

The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars, aka the Magnificent Seven ETFs list.

As you can see, I’ve now successfully kicked USD out of my retirement portfolio; it’s completed faster than I originally planned thanks to Questrade’s offer of free Norbert’s Gambit to all Questrade users for a few months. The demise of USD-denominated assets does not mean a demise in the holding of US assets, in case you were wondering. The portfolio is still well exposed to the US equity market, since my asset allocation targets have remained unchanged:

  • 5% cash/ultra short term bonds
  • 15% bonds
  • 23% Canadian Equity
  • 37% US Equity
  • 20% International Equity

The asset-class split looks like this; you can read about my asset-allocation approach to investing over here.

This chart is an almost-perfect reflection of my asset targets, with all categories within 0.5% of the intended allocation.

Plan for the next month

Nothing looming, which given the time I’ve had to spend moving USD out of the portfolio, is a welcome change.

The only thing I’m keeping an eye on is the relative size of my RRIF holdings compared to that of my spouse. From a planning and tax perspective, it’s much easier to manage if the size of our RRIF holdings is equal. At present, my spouse’s RRIF is 0.25% larger than mine, so probably that’s close enough. All I can really do to control this (since one cannot add to a RRIF) is to allocate more equity to one over the other, and cross fingers that the equity portion outperforms the bond/cash portion. Historically this has been the case, but one never knows when the timelines are measured in months!

Overall

Part of using VPW as a strategy is the need to calculate your retirement net worth on a monthly basis. My net worth stayed stagnant month over month but it’s still 20% above when I started on my retirement journey.

My VPW-calculated salary has now increased for 9 straight months; it’s nice getting a monthly raise!