Summary: Although iShares(XEQT/XGRO) and Vanguard(VEQT/VGRO) get all the love, the all-in-ones from BMO and TD are actually the current winners in the “lowest all-in-one fee award”. Given how similar they are to their competitors, I see no reason not to park money there.
I’m a fan of all-in-one1 ETFs in my retirement portfolio. If you’re new to the world of all-in-ones, you might want to start here. There’s at least five competing families of products out there, courtesy of iShares (XEQT, XGRO, XBAL et al), TD (TEQT, TGRO, TBAL et al), Vanguard(VEQT, VGRO, VBAL et al) BMO(ZEQT, ZGRO, ZBAL et al) and GlobalX2 (HEQT, HGRO, HBAL et al). We’ve taken a look at some of them “under the hood”, so to speak, but didn’t really find super-significant differences.
One facet I haven’t looked at yet is the fees each of these companies charge. As I’ve shown elsewhere, small differences can add up if you have significant investments or are holding them for a significant time.
TD and BMO are the low fee winners at the moment, but the gap has narrowed significantly from earlier in the year. I like low fees, and so I’ve started to invest in these families.
Technically called “asset allocation” ETFs, which is good, since asset allocation is how I view my own portfolio. ↩︎
Formerly known as Horizons, which explains the stock tickers used here. ↩︎
Most of the time I use MER (Management Expense Ratio) to report on fees, but since a few of these companies have lowered their Management fees this year, and since MER is only calculated annually, the MER values only become relevant again on Jan 1. They are a few basis points higher than the management fee, but just a few. Most of the cost is buried in the management fee. ↩︎
Summary: Vanguard asset allocation funds aka all-in-one funds VEQT, VGRO, VBAL, VCNS. VSIP have reduced their management fees to 0.17%, down from 0.22%, effective November 18, 2025.
It’s a good time to be an all-in-one investor, as I am. New to all-in-ones? Read all about them here.
The summary pretty much says it all. It just got cheaper to own Vanguard’s all-in-one funds. The amount of the reduction amounts to 50 cents for every $10001 invested per year, but compounded over many years, and multiplied by however much you have saved for retirement, it can be a surprisingly large number.
All-in-ones are much cheaper than either roboadvisors or your typical financial advisor, but as we studied before, they’re not without some cost, so fee reductions are always welcomed. Vanguard joins TD and BMO in reducing the cost of their all-in-ones. We looked at the makeup of each of these funds lately; there’s not a huge amount of difference, no matter which one you pick.
Anyway, you may note that Blackrock’s XEQT/XGRO/XINC family is now the most expensive of the lot; there’s no reason for that to be true given the competitive landscape. I would expect Blackrock to follow suit, or if not, I’ll probably be making some moves to get to lower fees, since a lot of my retirement portfolio is currently tied up in XEQT/XGRO. ZEQT/ZGRO I think is the closest in makeup to the XEQT/XGRO family.
Of course, if you only have $1000 saved for retirement, you have other worries. ↩︎
I have financial relationships with 4 different brokers, soon to be reducing to 2, if things go according to plan:
My long-term relationship with QTrade will come to an end by the end of the year as I move the last of my RRIF accounts out1
Questrade holds the vast majority of my retirement savings; they will inherit most of my remaining QTrade holdings this year2
Wealthsimple holds a small percentage of my retirement holdings, normally because I’ve been chasing a particularly attractive promotion (free money, or last year, a free MacBook Air)
My mother’s estate is held by BMO Investorline and if all goes according to plan (CRA willing), I’ll be done with them early next year as the estate wraps up.
I mention all this because I sometimes get wind of new developments from these providers in near-real-time, if they chose to share those developments with their existing clients. You benefit by hearing about them at the same time I do.
QTrade joins the realm of commission-free brokers
Starting October 28th, QTrade is eliminating trading fees on ALL stocks and ETFs, bringing them in line with Questrade, Wealthsimple, Desjardins, and National Bank. This, combined with their reasonably generous cash back offer3 that runs until the end of the year, makes them a serious contender for your investing dollars. Read more at https://www.qtrade.ca/en/investor/campaign/cashbackoffer.html.
Questrade to ditch Passiv in favour of home-grown tool
One of the things I like about Questrade is their support for Passiv, which I covered here. The main thing I like about Passiv is the integrated dashboard that can span both mine and my spouse’s accounts, especially since Questrade’s native support of Authorized Traders is absolutely abysmal.
This week I received an email from Questrade with subject line “Your Passiv integration will be changing soon”.
Uh-oh.
Anyway, in what I suppose is an effort to make their product “stickier”, Questrade appears to be working on their own Passiv-like “Portfolio Monitoring and Rebalancing Tools”, which are supposed to launch “in 2026”. As a result, the current annual access to Passiv Elite will end at the end of the current renewal date, or on January 30, 2026, whichever is later.
Passiv Elite4 is the tier of Passiv that can do rebalancing trades on your behalf. It’s not a feature I really cared about since Passiv doesn’t model all-in-one ETFs the way I think about them. You might say Passiv is an alternative way of getting the benefits of all-in-one ETFs without actually holding them.
Passiv Elite is $99/year, (which is a bargain compared to the cost of all-in-ones), so I’d expect Questrade’s own tools to be bundled into some tier of their current Questrade Plus offering.
No action required at this juncture, but I’m very curious as to how Questrade’s intended offer will work…and what it will cost.
I would have moved everything back in March, but I hit a snag concerning how RRIFs work. In essence, there’s no support offered for changing RRIF providers mid-year. Once the RRIF calculation has been done for the calendar year, your current broker is obligated to pay out the RRIF minimum. If you decide to move RRIF providers mid-year, the current RRIF provider still has to pay you your RRIF minimum for the entire year before allowing the transfer. Read about it here: https://moneyengineer.ca/2025/03/27/cautionary-tale-changing-brokers-when-you-have-a-rrif/↩︎
I think this is what I have, currently. I became a Questrade client just before the launch of Questrade Plus and probably got access to the “full” Passiv experience for the current year (March 2026 to be exact) by virtue of the assets Questrade has under their management from me aka “Questrade Elite”. ↩︎
ZGRO and ZGRO.T are both asset allocation funds (aka all-in-ones1) offered by BMO. They hold the same assets, and they both generate the same (dividends-reinvested) returns. But ZGRO.T says it has a yield of 5.65% whereas ZGRO has a yield of 1.73%2. How is this possible? Full disclosure: I don’t own either of these funds because I have historically invested in a very similar-to-ZGRO product, XGRO, instead3.
Let’s start with a really high level look at these funds4.
ZGRO vs ZGRO.T, Overview Tab (source bmogam.com)
The first thing I’ll point out is one of caution: ZGRO and ZGRO.T have very similar tickers and it’s all-too-easy to mix them up. The fund names are also very similar, although ZGRO.T adds the words “Fixed Percentage Distribution Units” to the mix. That’s a clue. The other things we can learn from this first glance is that ZGRO.T is pretty new (Inception Date), is about 1/20th the size of ZGRO in terms of investments (Net Assets), has an identical MER to ZGRO, but whoa, that distribution yield is off the charts. Put simply, if you had $1000 in ZGRO, and $1000 in ZGRO.T, and the last distribution paid was assumed to be constant5, you’d get $11.73 from ZGRO and $56.50 from ZGRO.T over the next twelve months. Huh?
This is even more puzzling if one takes a look at what each of the two ETFs hold: it’s identical:
Comparing top holdings, ZGRO versus ZGRO.T. Can you see a difference? I can’t see a difference.
I spent quite a bit of time searching on the BMO website trying to get their take on the difference. In a lot of places, (e.g. the simplified prospectus7), the two funds are treated as the same. After nearly giving up, I did come across this document which has a teeny tiny footnote, which I reproduce here:
These units are Fixed Percentage Distribution Units that provide a fixed monthly distribution based on an annual distribution rate. Distributions may be comprised of net income, net realized capital gains and/or a return of capital. The monthly amount is determined by applying the annual distribution rate to the T Series Fund’s unit price at the end of the previous calendar year, arriving at an annual amount per unit for the coming year. This annual amount is then divided into 12 equal distributions, which are paid each month.
So the big difference as I see is is that ZGRO.T attempts to give a stable yield in 12 month chunks. It does this by
Giving you dividends from the underlying assets (so does ZGRO)
Selling underlying assets (and generating a capital gain)
Giving you back your own money (this is known as as return of capital)
Let’s take a look at the two from a tax perspective (note that this only matters if you were to hold these funds in a non-registered account):
ZGRO vs ZGRO.T 2024 Distribution Tax Tab (source bmogam.com)
And here the distinction between the two becomes clearer: ZGRO.T is making good use of Return of Capital (RoC) to distribute a dividend with limited near-term tax implications. But as always, there’s no free lunch — using RoC means that future capital gains will be higher since RoC reduces the ACB8 of the funds in question, and if your ACB drops to zero, you have to treat RoC as a capital gain.
So when might you consider using ZGRO.T instead of ZGRO?
ZGRO.T makes sense in a RRIF account. It’s essentially automating some of the steps I have to take every month to get paid (you can see the mechanism I use here). Every month, I have to sell some of my holdings in order to get the RRIF-minimum payment out.
In a non-registered account, ZGRO.T’s monthly distributions might be useful if you had the need for consistent monthly cash flow; in addition, if you expect to at some point be in a lower tax bracket, it might help you save future tax, since it’s deferring some gains by using Return of Capital. In my case, I don’t see a good reason to use it since I would have to sell existing assets in order to raise funds to buy it, which generates capital gains.
So, in summary, the two funds are the same from a total return perspective, with ZGRO.T more monthly cash and ZGRO providing more paper gains. In a RRIF account, ZGRO.T automates some of the manual selling needed to execute decumulation. In a non-registered account, the tax treatment of the two is different, and you’d have to work out the numbers to see if it’s a benefit or not.
This yield is calculated by dividing the most recent per share distribution by the share price and multiplying by 12. In essence, this number is the value of the most recent (monthly in the case of ZGRO.T, quarterly in the case of ZGRO) dividend payout extrapolated over the full year. It may or may not represent what kind of yield you get in the future. ↩︎
Why? Inertia. There are minor differences in the makeup of XGRO versus ZGRO but either is a fine choice for the lazy investor. ↩︎
All the tables here are right off BMO’s ETF selector, which is excellent, by the way. ↩︎
ZGRO is currently paying 7.3 cents per share every quarter and this has been stable since 2020. ZGRO.T is currently paying 6 cents per unit held every month and this has been stable since March 2025. ↩︎
which weighs in at ~450 pages. I’d hate to see the non-simplified prospectus. ↩︎
Adjusted Cost Base. The average per unit price you pay for a share, necessary to track in order to accurately calculate capital gains (or losses). I use adjustedcostbase.ca for this, found in Tools I Use↩︎
Readers will know that I’m a fan of the asset-allocation ETF. In fact, the vast majority of my retirement savings are dedicated to them. (New to the concept of asset allocation ETFs? Here’s an intro.)
Owning asset-allocation ETFs means you can quite literally invest and forget. The target asset allocations are maintained automatically for you, eliminating the all-too-common desire to tinker/experiment/play and mess with your returns in the process.
As with all things investing, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. This automatic asset re-allocation is reflected in the MER1 of the asset-allocation ETFs. So what’s this automatic management actually costing the holder of the all-in-one?
To work out the answer to that question, you have to look at how the asset-allocation ETF in question is built. Some people refer to asset allocation ETFs as “funds of funds” and this is actually quite an apt description, since most asset-allocation ETFs are just constructed by buying up index ETFs issued by the same company.
For example, iShares and TD each have an all-equity asset allocation ETF, named XEQT and TEQT2, respectively. Here’s what’s actually under the hood of each of them:
(I tried to keep the colours consistent between the two: red is Canadian equity, blue is US Equity, and other colours are international equity).
The thing about the MER of an all-in-one is that it already includes the MERs of the funds from which it is built. The tip-off is phrases like this one in iShares’ literature:
…MER includes all management fees and GST/HST paid by the fund for the period, and includes the fund’s proportionate share of the MER, if any, of any underlying fund in which the fund has invested…
What this means is you can work out what the MER would be if you decided to simply manage the underlying funds yourself, and in so doing, figure out the premium that the all-in-one is adding to the mix.
The MER costs I’m talking about here are lower than a factor of 10 (at least) that what’s charged by typical investment advisors and bank-backed mutual funds
The cost premium of the all-in-one is small, but it’s higher than I expected; even small percentage differences are greatly amplified when you work out (say) the 10 year cost of using these products.
The alternative of managing the constituent parts can be a cheapskate alternative and can save real money over time8, but one must beware of
The added complexity inherent in managing a portfolio of multiple ETFs. The XEQT/TEQT example is the simplest one; if you add bonds to the mix (e.g. XBAL/TBAL) you will need to add a few more ETFs to replicate the all-in-one. I used to manage my portfolio without using all-in-ones. I enjoyed it (you may have noticed I have a deep interest in investing). In retirement I have chosen to be practical and have attempted to create an environment that won’t be cognitively overwhelming as I get older.9
The greater likelihood of straying from the plan due to inaction or emotion kicking in. I myself didn’t put a lot of credence to this argument, but people smarter than me have pointed out that this is probably the one biggest factor that derails investment plans.
The MER (Management Expense Ratio) is the cost of operating the ETF, expressed as a percentage. You don’t directly pay MER fees, but they reduce the overall returns of your investments. Lower MERs = more money for you. ↩︎
Just multiply. Watch those decimal points, though. ↩︎
I’m ignoring trading costs which aren’t zero but ought to be very small. Rebalancing assets is necessary of course but is perhaps a monthly, quarterly or annual exercise. ↩︎
And even a portfolio just based on all-in-ones may prove to be too much to handle at some point. I’ve started to pay a bit more attention to the services offered by robo-advisors. ↩︎
The Money Engineer 