Tag: aoa

abandoned plane wreck on icelandic landscape

PortfolioPilot Review: Any better?

RobHLeave a comment

I last took a look at PortfolioPilot a year ago, and since their email frequency seems to have ticked up, I figured I’d give it another look.

If you don’t feel like looking at the old review, the TL/DR is “good promise, errors in the data make me hesitant to recommend it”.

And guess what? Nothing has changed in that regard. All the lovely formatting in the world, all the tailored recommendations, all the graphs and charts are pretty much useless if PortfolioPilot can’t accurately reflect what’s underneath the ETFs in my portfolio. 

And, as I’ll show with a few examples, both of which I reported to support, the errors are not minor.

Now, bear in mind that I’m a big fan of all-in-ones, and these are essentially “funds of funds”, so if you DON’T hold these kinds of assets, then your perception of PortfolioPilot’s usefulness might be quite different. For me, if PortfolioPilot doesn’t have an accurate handle on what I actually own, it can’t have an accurate handle on anything else: the risk calculations, the forecasts, the recommendations — all are suspect.

Problem number 1: PortfolioPilot doesn’t know what’s in XGRO

So here’s the breakdown PortfolioPilot shows when you give it a portfolio with just XGRO in it:

PortfolioPilot’s Assessment of the “By Holdings” look-through of XGRO

The first few entries are accurate, per the XGRO product page. As of April 17, 2026, it reports:

  • 36.31% in ITOT, the iShares Core S&P Total US Stock Market1
  • 20.31% in XIC, the iShares Core S&P/TSX Capped Composite2
  • 20.21% in XEF, the iShares Core MSCI EAFE ETF3

So it’s got about 3/4 of the holdings right so far. PortfolioPilot now reports that XGRO holds 12.3% in a BondBloxx ETF. This is dead wrong. I’ve never heard of it, and “BB rated USD High Yield” sounds rather speculative, not something I’d want to invest 10% of my hard-earned money in. How can this kind of error creep in? My friend google gives a hint for those in the know:

Google Gemini’s take on BondBloxx BB Rated HY Corporate Bond ETF

The clue? The symbol of this ETF per Google Gemini is “XBB”. XGRO does not hold XBB on any US market4. XGRO does, however, hold XBB.TO, which, admittedly, is also a bond fund, but its description is a lot more boring:

Why XBB? Low cost, broad exposure to the Canadian investment grade bond market

XBB by Bondbloxx is clearly a much different animal than XBB by Blackrock, and that’s a pretty big miss.

There’s more to shake your head at, though. PortfolioPilot has “other equities” sitting at 7% of the portfolio. This is also wrong. XGRO is an 80/20 fund, which means it’s 80% equity. 75% of it we’ve already talked about (ITOT, XIC, XEF), and the other 5% is the next line in the PortfolioPilot report, namely XEC, the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets fund. So by PortfolioPilot’s estimation, XGRO is about 88% equity, which is off by 8 percentage points.

Anyway, two pretty serious errors for a fund that makes up 15% of my retirement portfolio.

But perhaps it’ll do better with a fund based in the USA?

Problem #2: PortfolioPilot doesn’t know what’s in AOA either

AOA is even a more important fund for me at the moment: it’s 50% of my portfolio, give or take. So what does PortfolioPilot have to say about what’s underneath?

PortfolioPilot’s Assessment of the “By Holdings” look-through of AOA

I don’t really know where to begin with this breakdown. Perhaps it’s faster to point out what it has right:

  • iShares US Aggregate Bond ETF (IUSB) percentage is correct

The rest is pretty much random:

  • PortfolioPilot claims the top holding of AOA is a Vanguard fund. Given that AOA is a product of iShares (a major competitor of Vanguard) this seems rather unlikely. And it is, I assure you, completely wrong.
  • PortfolioPilot correctly says that AOA holds the S&P 500 ETF (IVV) but the percentage is totally wrong. Per the AOA product page, it sits at about 45%
  • The other three major holdings (namely “other”, iShares Real Estate and SPDR Gold) are all wrong. AOA holds none of these.

Of course, my test is a very small sample, but important to me. If you do use PortfolioPilot, I’d make very sure that it accurately reflects what you actually own; otherwise the rest of the service cannot possibly work correctly. I’ll let you know if/when the situation at PortfolioPilot changes, but until it does, I’m not trusting it even at its free tier.

  1. AKA “US Equity” to my way of thinking of asset allocation ↩︎
  2. AKA “Canadian Equity” ↩︎
  3. AKA “International Equity” ↩︎
  4. Recall that PortfolioPilot is a US based tool that happens to support Canadian-listed ETFs, but to find them you have to add “.TO” to the end of the Canadian symbol ↩︎
dollar cut in half

Another quarter, another gambit

RobHLeave a comment

Every quarter, I convert some of my USD to CAD using Norbert’s Gambit. A good chunk of my retirement holdings are in USD, but since I spend in CAD, I need a cheap way to convert. I’ve been tracking my actual costs using Questrade’s platform for the past year. You can read about that over here.

Anyway, over the past year, the conversion has been effective. I have never paid the usual FX rates charged by Questrade (1.5% over the spot rate). My most recent conversion was the most expensive one to date, and that was a rate 0.7% over the going rate on the day I started the process. On three other occasions, I actually made out better than the spot rate, but that was because the foreign exchange rate moved in my favour in between the purchase and the sale.

My need for US cash has evaporated now that I have a no-FX fee credit card. (You can read about what cards I’m using over here.) So this makes me wonder if it’s time to get rid of the majority of my US holdings. Note this doesn’t mean that I will stop investing in US equities — that would be unwise — it just means I will stop holding assets denominated in US dollars.

The are downsides to holding USD-denominated assets, of course:

  • It adds complexity to the portfolio. AOA is the US equivalent of XGRO; both are 80/20 asset allocation ETFs. But because AOA is a US ETF, it holds a paltry amount of Canadian Equity, and I have to make up that difference elsewhere by holding pure Canadian Equity ETFs like HXT or XIC.
  • If you hold too much USD (or any foreign property) in non-registered accounts, you’ll be obliged to file a T1135 with CRA1.
  • It may limit the universe of online brokers you can deal with. Wealthsimple, for example, does not currently support USD RRIF accounts.
  • Foreign exchange can work for or against you. It’s another variable that can impact your returns. I’m not convinced this is a downside, but it does make tracking things like ACB in a non-registered account a little more tedious.

    One big hesitation I have about converting all my USD holdings would be the time I’d have to be out of the market while the Gambit runs its course. As you can see in from my tracking, each conversion means I’m not invested in AOA for 3-4 trading days. I just hate that idea. I also hate the idea of converting at a time when the CAD<->USD exchange rate is perhaps not optimal. (A low Canadian dollar would be a good thing for me in this case.)

    One place I sort of like having the USD assets is in my cash cushion, especially since US interest rates are quite a bit higher than Canadian rates. (I track current rates over at HISA and short-term bond table (Canada & US)).

    So perhaps I just need to craft a plan where I make more aggressive conversions over a fixed time frame. x% every month, with a deadline. This helps mitigate the “time out of market” and “exchange rate” issues. Crafting the plan with fixed milestones also takes emotion out of the equation; if I set a series of future transactions, then all I have to do is press the button mechanically.

    More to come on that.

    1. If your cost base exceeds $100,000 CAD ↩︎

    What’s in my retirement portfolio (March 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 March 30, this is what it looks 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). This split is before all the quarterly dividends have paid out. AOA, XGRO, XEQT, XIC all have a quarterly payment that collectively might skew the numbers a bit — I have all these investments on DRIP so I just buy more of the same. All that to say that there weren’t big changes month to month; my USD holdings got a bit of a boost this month thanks to a favourable exchange rate. (A lot of my retirement holdings are in USD, so the FX rates matter somewhat). Here’s what the USD has looked like in CAD since my retirement:

    Plan for the next month

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

    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/income (most are buried in XGRO and AOA, rest are in XCB)
    • 20% Canadian equity (mostly based on ETFs that mirror the S&P/TSX — HXT and XIC)
    • 36% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500)
    • 24% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets)

    The alignment with target is what drives my investment decisions; seeing the chart above tells me there’s no movements needed, which makes things simpler.

    Since we’re just about in to the 2nd quarter of the year, it’s time for me to move some AOA into XGRO using Norbert’s Gambit1. The Gambit has worked out pretty well for me so far; I track my effective FX rate every time I do it, and it’s always less than relying on the instant (and relatively expensive) FX conversions offered by my broker2.

    Overall

    Part of using VPW3 as a strategy is the need to calculate your retirement net worth on a monthly basis. As you can see below, the most recent market gyrations have had a bit of an impact on the bottom line, taking me back to a value I haven’t seen since September last year:

    But my VPW-calculated salary, which has a built in shock absorber (aka cash cushion), continued its upward trend nonetheless:

    I’m expecting to take a pay cut at some point if the markets fail to recover, but pay cuts are an expected outcome of using VPW as a strategy. The “V” is for “variable”, after all. At this point, I’m still taking over 10% more than I did a year ago, so no matter how you slice it, things are more than on track.

    1. Of late, my need for spending in USD seems not so critical anymore. ↩︎
    2. Typically 1.5% of the amount converted. ↩︎
    3. Variable Percentage Withdrawal, my chosen decumulation strategy. ↩︎

    What’s in my retirement portfolio (Feb 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)1
      • 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)

    You will notice that QTrade is no longer in the mix. I successfully moved the last RRIF accounts during the month; I learned a lot in the process. QTrade was the victim in the chase for free money offered by Questrade last year; based on current offerings, I’d say that QTrade still has an edge in terms of user experience over Questrade. I’ll go into more detail in a future post.

    The view post-payday

    I pay myself monthly in retirement, so that’s a good trigger to update this post. On February 28, this is what it looks 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 if you’ve been following along, you’ll see a few changes.

    • I dropped XAW since I realized I didn’t need it if I was smarter the ratios of holdings I already owned (XEQT/XIC/XCB). Less is more.
    • I sold XIC instead of HXT in my non-registered account this month to help pay the bills because I reasoned that eliminating its dividend payouts would be better from a tax perspective2.

    Plan for the next month

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

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

    • 5% cash or cash-like holdings like ICSH and ZMMK
    • 15% bonds3 (most are buried in XGRO and AOA, rest are in XCB)
    • 20% Canadian equity (mostly based on ETFs that mirror the S&P/TSX — HXT and XIC)
    • 36% US equity (dominated by ETFs that mirror the S&P 500)
    • 24% International equity (mostly, but not exclusively, developed markets)

    I am mulling over making a small tweak to these percentages, increasing US equity exposure at the expense of International equity based on some calculations I’ve done4 but this is neither urgent nor will it be massively impactful to the overall picture.

    Overall

    There is a bit of an anomaly this month that I should mention. A number of readers have questioned my wisdom of contributing monthly to a TFSA in retirement. From a tax-free growth perspective, it would be far better to make the contribution at the beginning of the year. And many studies have shown that lump sum investing provides better returns than spacing them out. And so, I have taken their advice5 and made all my TFSA contributions for the year this month. And since my TFSA is part of my net worth, there’s a bump being caused by that contribution.

    And so, net worth overall is up month over month, a two month winning streak.

    My VPW-calculated salary also continues its upward trend.

    1. One spousal, one individual. One at Wealthsimple because (a) I like their user experience and may consider them as my primary broker in the future and (b) they offered me free money and a laptop to move some fees their way. I can be bought. ↩︎
    2. HXT does not pay dividends and instead uses swap contracts to convert them into capital gains, which receive better tax treatment for me ↩︎
    3. Referred to as “Income” on the chart above ↩︎
    4. I’ll share those in a future post ↩︎
    5. With thanks to Steven and Sylvain ↩︎

    Quick links for the long weekend

    RobHLeave a comment

    (Quick aside: as a retiree, I did have to make sure this coming weekend was, in fact, a long weekend 🙂 )

    What’s the deal with AOA?: updated

    While many Canadians are familiar with all-in-one products that trade on the Canadian exchanges (XEQT/XGRO, VEQT/VGRO, TEQT/TGRO, ZEQT/ZGRO), there is also a USD product that I use quite heavily in my retirement portfolio. That ETF is AOA. In this updated post, I break down what’s inside it. TL/DR: lots of US Equity, lots of International Equity, a tiny slice of Canadian equity, and broad coverage of the US and international bond markets.

    Rob Carrick is back in (digital) print

    One of my favourite ex-Globe And Mail staffers was Rob Carrick, the keyboard behind such valuable assets as the ETF Buyer’s Guide. He retired last year, but it seems he’s back doing the same job in a different way. He’s now writing on Substack, and you can find his words of wisdom over here: https://substack.com/@robcarrick1.

    PWL on Retirement: “Finding and Funding a Good Life”

    Not a new publication, but new to me…It’s penned by Ben Felix, a certified Canadian financial rockstar. Looks like a good read over a cup of coffee. Finding and Funding a Good Life.