Category: ETFs

snowball toss in los penitentes mendoza

Review: Snowball Analytics

RobHLeave a comment

Snowball Analytics (link here) is a tool that markets itself as a “Simple and Powerful Portfolio Tracker” with “automated dividend tracking”.

I don’t remember when or where I first kicked the tires of this tool but I figured I’d give it another look. I’m only using the free version of Snowball, since my multi-asset tracker tracks my portfolio and also I don’t really care about dividends.

Startup

Snowball gives you full access to all its feature set for 2 weeks so you can really see if it’s worth paying for. That’s a plus in my view. But even the free version allows you to manually create a single portfolio with up to 10 holdings in it. All the paid-for versions include direct connection to your brokerage, and the ones I’m most familiar with (Questrade and Wealthsimple) are both supported.

For fun, I created a public portfolio that’s sort-of1 based on the percentages in my June 2026 portfolio update. You can see it here. What you see on these public portfolio pages is similar, but not identical, to the screens shown if you create your own login.

Dashboard

Gives a high level overview of what’s going on in the portfolio: what it’s worth, how much you made today/all time, and, atypically, Passive Income aka yield.

One weird thing Snowball does is insist on putting your assets into “Categories” which you can define yourself or let it assign them automatically. It doesn’t really know what to do with ETFs and so it classifies them all as “Funds”, which is about as helpful a category as “Unclassified”. I flagged this with support, but I don’t really expect much. If you click through the pie charts, it does show what’s underneath, so this is mostly a cosmetic issue.

Pie Chart, like the one I show every month

Also shown on the dashboard are the timing and predicted value of future dividend payments, which is nice.

Future passive income from dividends shown on the Dashboard

Dividend tracking

Here we see what Snowball’s focus is. The dividend screen is quite comprehensive, and will warm the heart of the dividend-focused investor. I can’t really comment if the numbers presented on this screen are sufficient for that audience. My portfolio focus is on absolute growth, and I’m completely indifferent as to whether that growth comes from dividends or unit price appreciation. 

Anyway, I’m happy to hear whether others out there find this sort of dividend analysis useful, let me know at comments@moneyengineer.ca!

Analytics

Here you have a bunch of views of the makeup and performance of your loaded portfolio. For the holder of all-in-one ETFs, these pages are a mixed bag of helpful and not-helpful. On some screens, Snowball isn’t able to look deeply enough into what’s actually inside an all-in-one and thus produces unhelpful results. For example, I know my portfolio is 80% equity. Snowball has other ideas, especially when it comes to Canadian ETFs:

Asset class distribution has obvious problems

There’s problems here:

  • XGRO/XEQT/HXT are missing asset classes. Their percentages don’t add up to 100%
  • A lot of Canadian all-in-one ETF asset classes are classified as “Other”, which is wrong. XGRO (for example) should line up exactly as AOA does, with 80% stocks and 20% bonds, more or less. For XGRO, the bond percentage is right, but the other 80% is suspect.
  • XIC/VFV/HXT are 100% Canadian equity, but Snowball seems lost here.

The performance widget seems to be a lot better; here you can backtest your portfolio against a bunch of benchmarks. Unfortunately, none of the included benchmarks includes bonds, but you can see how my portfolio stacks up against a global equity pool, namely the MSCI World index:

Growth charts are helpful to see how your portfolio compares to a benchmark

I did see a few problems here, too:

  • Not all of my portfolio holdings have been around for (for example) 5 years. So how is the tool generating 5 year return charts?
  • When you select “all” as a timeframe, my portfolio shows a one year performance. Puzzling.

The fact that my portfolio lags the MSCI World is unsurprising since my portfolio has 20% bonds, and the MSCI World has none. Bonds add stability to a portfolio at the expense of growth. Sometimes I wonder if that stability is really worth it.

Conclusion

Snowball, like many tools, struggles with understanding what’s actually inside an all-in-one ETF like XEQT or XGRO. For me, that sort of shortcoming is a deal-breaker. If you were a holder of individual stocks that cared about passive (dividend) income, it might be worth your time.

What do you think? Let me know at comments@moneyengineer.ca!

  1. “sort of” because I have more than 10 holdings in my portfolio. I got most of them, and scaled it to start as a 100k CAD portfolio. ↩︎

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News: No change to Bank of Canada Rates

RobHLeave a comment

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but yesterday the Bank of Canada left interest rates unchanged — again. This is of interest to DIY investors only because it drives the kinds of rates you can expect from high-interest savings accounts and the like. I’ve updated the page that tracks some HISAs and cash-like ETFs over here.

The overnight rate remains at 2.25%. That makes 6 straight rate announcements with no change. The next one for the Bank of Canada happens on September 2nd. Next up is the US Federal Reserve on July 28,

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What companies are in my retirement portfolio?

RobH1 Comment

I cover what I hold in my retirement portfolio every month (latest update is here), but as you can see, I only hold ETFs. What’s underneath the ETFs? Let’s take a look!

Calculating this is straightforward:

  1. Use the percentages I have of each ETF from the June update
  2. Look at the “Holdings” section of ETF or in the case of AOA/XGRO/XEQT, “Aggregate Underlying Holdings”1 and write down the percentages of each stock. I stopped when I accounted for 20% of each ETF.
  3. Multiply (1) by (2) and add them all up.

By doing this exercise, I can now account for the 20 companies that make up 20% of my retirement portfolio:

These 20 companies are really the tip of my personal investment iceberg — my aggregate retirement portfolio has at least 32,000 holdings, since that’s what’s actually inside AOA, the one ETF I own with the most holdings2. But the fate of these 20 companies will have an outsized influence on the overall performance of the portfolio. The only surprise for me is that there is only one company outside North America in the list. I would have expected one or two more.

It will be interesting to see what kind of differences I see once I complete kicking USD out of my retirement portfolio and go back to a list of only seven magnificent ETFs. I’m not sure there will be big changes, given that I’m keeping my asset allocations constant throughout, but I’m expecting some differences3. We’ll see come January 2027, I guess.

Just for fun, and given my recent article on the SpaceX IPO, I wanted to know how much I held of that particular company. AOA hasn’t included it yet4, but XGRO and XEQT have already. As of June 30, 0.02% of my portfolio is invested in SpaceX.

  1. In most cases, as of June 30. VFV only shows to May 30. ↩︎
  2. XGRO has 22000, for reference. I think the extras in AOA come mostly from fixed income (bond) products since they have broader geographic coverage. ↩︎
  3. The biggest changes won’t be visible since they occur in the bond side of my holdings. AOA and XGRO have very different approaches to this part of the market, but as it’s only 15% of my retirement holdings, they don’t show up as a “top” holding in my retirement portfolio . ↩︎
  4. And won’t until SpaceX is profitable. AOA includes IVV, which is an S&P 500 index fund, and the S&P 500 requires companies to be profitable before inclusion in that index. ↩︎

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News: Questrade adds fractional share support for (some) Canadian ETFs

RobHLeave a comment

“Fractional Shares” allow you to buy less than a single share of the stock or ETF that supports it. Fractional shares ensure that every last penny of cash in your account is actively invested, which, in my view, is a Good Thing. Non-interest earning cash isn’t helping you meet your retirement goals.

Questrade currently holds the majority of my retirement savings, mostly because they were offering free money last year to move accounts over to them1.

They provided support for fractional US ETFs over a year ago, to great fanfare, with Canadian ETFs “coming soon”. It would appear that “soon” is “now”. There’s no way to see which Canadian ETFs have support for fractional trading in any sort of list, but here’s the status of the Canadian ETFs on my magnificent seven ETFs list2, which you can see if you ask for a quote of any symbol you’re interested in.

ETFFractional share support?
XGROYes
XEQTYes
XICYes
VFVYes3
XCBNo
ZSTNo
ZMMKYes

I’ve tested it out, and the one flaw I’ve found is that you cannot enter a dollar amount for a trade when using the Edge Web version of the Questrade platform. You’re free to do the math yourself and enter a decimal number of shares when using Edge Web4.

Wealthsimple also offers fractional ETFs, and there I have found no restrictions. Questrade is catching up, but still behind Wealthsimple in this regard.

  1. And if you are considering Questrade yourself, you can earn a bit of free money if you use my referral code: 755609544498867 ↩︎
  2. These are the ETFs that make up the lion’s share of my retirement portfolio. ↩︎
  3. Fractional VFV is particularly valuable since its unit cost is north of $100. ↩︎
  4. Which you are forced to do if you want to make trades on accounts for which you are the authorized trader. ↩︎
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What’s in my retirement portfolio (June 2026)?

RobH1 Comment

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, so that’s a good trigger to update this post. On June 30 before the markets opened, this is what it looked like:

The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars, (and if not an all-star, they are probably on the Magnificent Seven ETFs list). But the observant reader will start to see some changes from last month as my strategy to Kick USD out of my retirement portfolio starts to take effect. The contributions of AOA and ICSH (both USD funds) to my retirement portfolio are notably down and SCHF has disappeared entirely — SCHF was the last bit of USD in my non-registered accounts. ZMMK, XGRO and VCN, on the other hand, have gained in importance to make up for the USD-denominated departures. And ZST (ultra short-term bond fund) and VFV (S&P 500 US Index fund) have begun to make an appearance; you’ll see more of these funds in future months. My ETF all-stars post has been updated accordingly.

Plan for the next month

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

The moves I made to start reducing USD in my portfolio have quickly allowed me to get to my recently revised target allocations I have for each asset class:

  • 5% cash or cash-like holdings like ICSH and ZMMK
  • 15% bonds/income (most are buried in XGRO and AOA, rest are in XCB)
  • 23% Canadian equity (mostly based on ETFs that mirror the S&P/TSX — HXT and XIC); this is up from the old 20% target
  • 37% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500); this is up 1% from the old target
  • 20% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets); this is down 4% from the old target

With the asset class splits under control, next month will see more moves to get rid of USD in my portfolio. There’s only USD in my RRIF accounts now, all invested in AOA and ICSH. These positions will be reduced by 1/6th in July as my target is to be fully USD free by the end of the year.

My timing for starting the conversion looks to have been pretty decent; the USD/CAD rate moved significantly in my favour this month. I don’t expect that to last!

Overall

Part of using VPW1 as a strategy is the need to calculate your retirement net worth on a monthly basis. And once again, a new all-time high:

My VPW-calculated salary continues to increase, albeit at a more modest rate, as expected.

  1. Variable Percentage Withdrawal, my chosen decumulation strategy. ↩︎