Tag: aoa

What’s in my retirement portfolio (Dec 2025)?

RobHLeave a 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:

  • 6 RRIF accounts (2 for me, 3 for my spouse, 1 for me at an alternative provider as a test)
  • 2 TFSA accounts
  • 4 non-registered accounts, (1 for me, 1 for my spouse, 2 joint)

The target for the overall portfolio is unchanged:

  • 80% equity, spread across Canadian, US and global markets for maximum diversification
  • 15% Bond funds, from a variety of Canadian, US and global markets
  • 5% cash, held in savings-like ETFs.

You can read about my asset-allocation approach to investing over here.

The view post-payday

I pay myself monthly in retirement, so that’s a good trigger to update this post. On December 23, this is what it looks like:

Retirement holdings, December 2025

The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars; anything not on that page is held in a non-registered account and won’t be fiddled with unless it’s part of my monthly decumulation. Otherwise I’ll rack up capital gains for no real benefit.

There aren’t really any notable changes this month — AOA’s contribution was down a bit this month, largely due to an unfavourable change in the USD/CAD exchange rate (down about 3% month over month, back down to a level not seen since around May this year). I recalculate the FX rate every month1 since I track my net worth in CAD so I always have an apples-to-apples comparison. I don’t stress too much about the FX rate as it tends to cut both ways. Sometimes it’s a lift to my numbers, sometimes not. In the end, I suppose it all evens out. I tracked my snapshot FX rates starting in February2, just for illustration:

Monthly USD/CAD rates on payday day

Plan for the next month

The asset-class split looks like this

Retirement portfolio by asset class, December 2025

It’s looking pretty close to the targets I have, which are unchanged:

  • 5% cash or cash-like holdings like ICSH and ZMMK
  • 15% bonds (almost all are buried in XGRO and AOA)
  • 20% Canadian equity (mostly based on ETFs that mirror the S&P/TSX)
  • 36% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500)
  • 24% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets)

The end of the year will mean more distributions from my holdings; in my RRIF accounts they are set to DRIP since I only hold AOA/XGRO/ICSH in these accounts. The rest I redeploy to the asset classes that are short funds; typically this means investing in one of the *EQT funds since the bond complement of the portfolio frequently moves above the 15% target.

Overall

Net worth overall is down slightly month over month, but up a little over 10% from the start of the year. Hard to be unhappy about that.

My VPW-calculated salary took a slight decline, breaking the 7 month growth streak. It ends the year a shade under 6% larger than my first paycheque. Not bad. I don’t recall many years where I got a 6% raise 😉

Next month will end my relationship with QTrade as I move the final 3 RRIF accounts to Questrade; I had thought December would be the final month, but as you’ll see in my next post, a (hopefully) small wrinkle has delayed this.

  1. Using =googlefinance(“USDCAD”) of course ↩︎
  2. February because I only thought to start tracking that a month in. January’s rate will be lost to the sands of time. Or I could add it back using the official FX rates, I suppose. ↩︎

Mini-Review: ValueInvesting.io Backtesting

RobHLeave a comment

“Backtesting” is a commonly-used tactic to see how well the portfolio you have (or are considering) would have performed historically. While “past performance does not guarantee future results” it’s better than not knowing.

I stumbled upon valuetesting.io when I was trying to backtest…something, I don’t really remember what I was up to. Anyway, my random internet walk found valueinvesting.io, which seems to be chock full of all kinds of tools that I haven’t looked at, so I’m just going to focus on the backtesting tools, which I did spend a few hours playing around with. You have to navigate to https://valueinvesting.io/backtest-portfolio to access this portion, and if you want to save portfolios, you have to create an account.

So what, in a nutshell, does this tool do? In their words:

Our portfolio backtesting tool allows you to evaluate the historical performance of up to 3 portfolios. We support 2 portfolio types: asset classes and tickers (stock, ETF, mutual funds). Multiple backtesting scenarios are supported such as periodic capital inflows or outflows, allocation rebalancing frequency and leverage type. Our tool provides historical returns, risk metrics, drawdowns and rolling returns information about your selected portfolios.

https://valueinvesting.io/backtest-portfolio

Let’s take a look at the two kinds of portfolio types they support: asset classes and tickers.

Backtesting using asset classes

The downside of this tool as a Canadian investor is pretty obvious when you try to build a portfolio using asset classes. (Asset classes are integral to the way I think about my retirement portfolio — you can read more about my approach here.) There’s no “Canadian Equity” category to choose (boo!).

The class that would hold the most Canadian equity would be “Intl Developed ex-US Market”1, so let’s compare that to say the “US Large Cap” (which I take to be a good proxy for the S&P 500).

The good old S&P has left the rest of the developed world in the dust, it seems…Well, except for THIS year:

Anyway, the asset classes are good fun and all, but without a Canadian index to track, it’s not too useful to me. (And, inexplicably, nowhere could I find a definition of any of these in the tool, and an email to the support address remained unanswered at the time of publication). So let’s move on to something more interesting, namely the ticker backtesting!

Ticker Backtesting

As the name implies, this portion allows you to enter tickers, and there’s full and complete support for Canadian ETFs that I tried.

So of course I immediately tried to build my idealized portfolio, which is what my “What’s in my Retirement Portfolio” would look like without the non-registered assets2.

The problem? XEQT and XGRO (two of my ETF all-stars) haven’t been around all that long, and so I can’t backtest very far. No matter, by looking at the composition of XEQT and XGRO and doing some clever math, I can create the equivalent decomposed portfolio:

And I can prove that I got it right by backtesting the two against each other. Pretty good, eh?

So with my decomposed portfolio at the ready, I can compare its performance long-term against (for example) just buying the S&P 500 index (VOO) or the International Developed ex-US index (VEA).

As expected, my portfolio has quite a bit poorer performance than the S&P, but better than the International ex-US. The bond/cash component smooths out the standard deviations (that’s “volatility”) so my worst years (although still a bit scary) are still a bit less than experience of owning 100% equity.

One more thing to look at — this backtesting assumes we don’t rebalance anything. That’s not correct, since that’s one of the benefits of holding ETFs like AOA, XGRO and XEQT — they automatically rebalance periodically. valueinvesting.io lets you choose monthly, quarterly, semiannually and annually. I know for a fact that AOA rebalances twice a year, so we will assume XGRO/XEQT do the same. This is what the result looks like:

This reduces the volatility and the return a bit, which if you stop and think about it, makes sense: equities consistently outperform bonds and cash over time so the rebalancing exercise makes sure the equities remain at an 80% contribution to the portfolio.

Conclusion

The backtesting portion of valueinvesting.io is a good tool to test various combinations of ETFs / stocks you may be interested in. There’s not very much documentation on the site, but it’s easy enough to use. The free account (which requires registration) is enough to get you that far.

  1. Did a bunch of tests and determined that VEA was the ETF that matched the performance of this index most closely. This ETF is about 11% Canadian Equity. ↩︎
  2. The non-registered assets are being sold off, little by little, to fund my retirement. This year, they have provided about 2/3 of my “salary” (RRIF minimum payments gave me the other 1/3), so I am –slowly– drifting toward the ideal portfolio. The AOA percentage in the ideal portfolio will get smaller over time as I transmogrify it as needed to XGRO using Norbert’s Gambit. ↩︎

What’s in my retirement portfolio (Nov 2025)?

RobH2 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:

  • 6 RRIF accounts (2 for me1, 3 for my spouse, 1 at an alternative provider as a test)
  • 2 TFSA accounts
  • 4 non-registered accounts, (1 for me, 1 for my spouse, 2 joint)

The target for the overall portfolio is unchanged:

  • 80% equity, spread across Canadian, US and global markets for maximum diversification
  • 15% Bond funds, from a variety of Canadian, US and global markets
  • 5% cash, held in savings-like ETFs.

You can read about my asset-allocation approach to investing over here.

The view post-payday

I pay myself monthly in retirement, so that’s a good trigger to update this post. On November 25th, this is what it looks like:

ETF Breakdown of retirement investments, November 2025

The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars; anything not on that page is held in a non-registered account and won’t be fiddled with unless it’s part of my monthly decumulation. Otherwise I’ll rack up capital gains for no real benefit.

No notable changes this month; HXT is down slightly because that’s the fund I sold in my non-registered account this month to help pay the bills. I’ve sold quite a few shares of this fund this year and I’m seeing the capital gains mounting, but it’s around where I expected to be. I try to keep taxes owing reasonable; nonetheless I’m guessing I will certainly be moving to quarterly instalments in FY 2026; that’s the downside of having no withholding tax of any kind this year.

Plan for the next month

The asset-class split looks like this

It’s looking pretty close to the targets I have, which are unchanged:

  • 5% cash or cash-like holdings like ICSH and ZMMK
  • 15% bonds (almost all are buried in XGRO and AOA)
  • 20% Canadian equity (mostly based on ETFs that mirror the S&P/TSX)
  • 36% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500)
  • 24% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets)

All looks to be in order from an asset allocation perspective, no need to do anything here. Cash is slightly elevated as a result of the pending closure of the three remaining QTrade accounts and will drift back to the normal 5% over the coming few weeks, I expect.

Overall

Net worth overall stopped its 6 month winning streak and I’m down slightly month over month. But I will reiterate: my net worth is still growing even though I’m taking a living wage every month. You might think that “decumulation” means “a steady reduction in net worth” but it needn’t be the case. And, in my particular case, my retirement income will include no pensions, so it’s probably a good thing that it keeps increasing overall.

My VPW-calculated salary continues to grow for the 7th straight month in spite of the step back this month in my net worth. That’s a feature of the “cash cushion” that is integral to the VPW withdrawal. It serves as a shock absorber to the monthly ups and downs of the stock market.

Next month will end my relationship with QTrade as I move the final 3 RRIF accounts to Questrade2.

  1. My QTrade one is no more, transferred to Wealthsimple to take advantage of their Summer promotion. ↩︎
  2. I had hoped to move these to Wealthsimple and generate more free money, but alas, they still don’t support self-directed spousal RRIFs, which is very odd indeed. ↩︎

What’s in my retirement portfolio (Oct 2025)

RobH2 Comments

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

Portfolio Construction

The retirement portfolio is spread across a bunch of accounts:

  • 7 RRIF accounts (3 for me, 3 for my spouse, 1 at an alternative provider as a test)
  • 2 TFSA accounts
  • 4 non-registered accounts, (1 for me, 1 for my spouse, 2 joint)

The target for the overall portfolio is unchanged:

  • 80% equity, spread across Canadian, US and global markets for maximum diversification
  • 15% Bond funds, from a variety of Canadian, US and global markets
  • 5% cash, held in savings-like ETFs.

You can read about my asset-allocation approach to investing over here.

The view post-payday

I pay myself monthly in retirement, so that’s a good trigger to update this post. On October 27th, this is what it looks like:

The portfolio is dominated by my ETF all-stars; anything not on that page is held in a non-registered account and won’t be fiddled with unless it’s part of my monthly decumulation. Otherwise I’ll rack up capital gains for no real benefit.

No massive changes this month; the one you might notice is a slight shift from AOA to XGRO. I move some of my USD holdings into CAD every quarter, and last month was when I did it. The majority of my spending is in CAD, so I use Norbert’s Gambit to move funds around.

Plan for the next month

The asset-class split looks like this

It’s looking pretty close to the targets I have, which are unchanged:

  • 5% cash or cash-like holdings like ICSH and ZMMK
  • 15% bonds (almost all are buried in XGRO and AOA)
  • 20% Canadian equity (mostly based on ETFs that mirror the S&P/TSX 60)
  • 36% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500, with a small sprinkling of Russell 2000)
  • 24% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets)

All looks to be in order from an asset allocation perspective, no need to do anything here.

Overall

The retirement savings had a great month, again — a 6-month growth streak at this point. Overall, I’m now 11.5% ahead of where I started even though I’ve been drawing a monthly salary since the beginning of the year. I don’t really expect the winning streak to continue, but VPW allows me to take some benefit from the frothy stock markets at moment.

Net Worth as a percentage of starting point

My VPW-calculated salary has hit a new high this year, 5.92% higher than my first draw in January. The monthly salary is also on a 6-month growth streak.

Monthly Salary as a Percentage of Jan 2025 salary

The months ahead will see the final “goodbye” to QTrade1 as the last of my RRIF investments will move to (mostly) Questrade2.

  1. I didn’t have a great deal of issue with QTrade as a provider, but their support (lack thereof) was beginning to become irritating. ↩︎
  2. My own QTrade RRIF will join the RRIF holdings I already have with Wealthsimple. They remain a potential backup provider of my retirement savings. I would have moved more to take advantage of their cashback promotion, but they still, inexplicably, do not support self-directed spousal RRIF accounts. ↩︎

News: Norbert’s Gambit Tracking Update

RobH2 Comments

If you have no idea what Norbert’s Gambit is, it’s a way to cheaply convert USD/CAD in your online brokerage account. Most brokers support it1.

Because I hold a lot of USD assets in my retirement savings, and since I live and spend most of my money in Canada, I need a way cheaply convert to Canadian funds in my RRIF. So last week, I had to convert some of my AOA holdings into XGRO holdings and so I updated the log I’m keeping. So far, I’ve done the Gambit three times this year, and twice I’ve lucked out on the FX rate changes and actually made money2 on the transaction.

  1. And many people expect Wealthsimple to join this club soon. ↩︎
  2. What I mean: if the funds had converted instantaneously with no fees rather than waiting around for the 3-5 business days for the Gambit to complete, I would have received LESS money than by using the Gambit. Over time, I expect this will even out, but right now I’m about $55 CAD ahead. ↩︎