Tag: asset allocation

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CAGE versus XEQT: what’s the deal?

RobHLeave a comment

It’s not that often an ETF launch causes so much buzz, but my usual feeds are all talking about Avantis CIBC CAGE. So what is it? Per its fact sheet it

Invests primarily in equity securities from developed and emerging markets through a portfolio of ETFs. The fund selects companies based on value and profitability characteristics, using a broad set of company financial fundamentals such as book value, earnings, and cash flow, together with current market prices. Designed to provide diversified global equity exposure in a single investment option.

https://www.cibc.com/content/dam/cibc-public-assets/personal-banking/investment/etfs/pdfs/cibc-fund-snapshot-cage-en.pdf

So let’s break that down:

“Invests primarily in equity securities…through a portfolio of ETFs”

Translation: CAGE is a fund of funds that’s 100% equity. Sounds a lot like XEQT/ZEQT/TEQT/VEQT. Looking a little deeper, it holds

  • CAUS: A US Equity ETF
  • CACE: A Canadian Equity ETF
  • CADE: An International Equity ETF
  • CASV: A Global Small Cap ETF
  • CAEM: An Emerging Equity ETF

Seems pretty normal so far.

“The fund selects companies based on value and profitability…using financial fundamentals”

Translation: This isn’t an index fund. CAGE is picking which companies to invest in based on balance sheet metrics. This starts to sound like a typical managed fund that typically underperforms the index it’s supposed to be measured against1.

I’m skeptical. Index (aka passive) investing has proven that it works over time.

What’s inside CAGE?

So, let’s see what’s actually inside this fund and compare it to XEQT2. As it turns out, this isn’t easy. Figuring out what’s inside CAGE requires you to navigate to each of CAGE’s holdings and look at what’s there. Irritating, but that’s not the worst of it — the constituent funds only show top 10 holdings each. That leads to a tremendous blind spot as to what you’re actually purchasing when you buy shares of CAGE. I hope CIBC fixes this, and soon. Anyway, I took XEQT’s top 10 and compared it to CAGE’s allocation.

CompanyXEQT Holding (%)CAGE Holding (%)
NVIDIA3.07%1.89%
Apple2.52%1.88%
Microsoft1.92%1.45%
Royal Bank1.81%1.88%
Amazon1.64%1.51%
Alphabet Class A1.42%0.96%
TD Bank1.30%1.44%
Broadcom1.25%<1%3
Alphabet Class C1.13%0.77%
Shopify1.07%0.99%
Total ex Broadcom15.88%12.77%
Comparing top holdings of XEQT versus CAGE

What’s immediately obvious is that CAGE doesn’t place as much money in the trillion dollar market cap companies as XEQT does.

A more interesting (?) exercise might be to take a look at CAGE’s top holdings as compared to that of XEQT.

CompanyCAGE Holding (%) / RankXEQT Holding (%)/ Rank
NVIDIA1.89% / 13.07% / 1
Apple1.88% / 22.52% /2
Royal Bank1.88% / 31.81% /4
Amazon1.51% /41.64% /5
Microsoft1.45% /51.92% /3
TD Bank1.44% /61.30% /7
Shopify0.99% /71.07% /10
Alphabet Class A0.96% /81.42% / 6
Canadian National Resources0.91% /90.72% / 16
CIBC0.86% /100.75% /14
Total14.56%17.00%
Comparing top holdings of CAGE versus XEQT

And again, not too much of interest here — CAGE holds less of the trillion dollar companies than XEQT, but the differences aren’t massive.

High level metrics

Well, since we can’t get a good feel on what’s inside CAGE, maybe looking at other vital signs are helpful?

MetricCAGEXEQT
MER0.28%40.20%
Number of underlying holdings692658475
Dividend Yield2.18%60.82%7
Target allocations8US Equity: 39.4%
Canadian Equity: 30%
International Equity: 17.6%
Global Small Cap Equity: 8%9
Emerging Equity: 5%		US Equity: 45%
Canadian Equity: 25%
International Equity: 25%
Emerging Equity: 5%
Comparing CAGE metrics with XEQT

This shows that CAGE is more expensive, holds fewer underlying stocks (we think), has a higher dividend yield (unsurprising, given its focus) and invests more in Canada than XEQT at the expense of International Equity10.

Performance

Comparing performance isn’t going to be very useful since CAGE is new, but CAGE inherits its strategy from an older US-based fund, namely AVGE. Now, to be clear, AVGE and CAGE aren’t quite the same thing. CAGE, as a Canadian fund, will tilt more to Canadian Equity holdings. But the approach used by AVGE and CAGE is the same: find quality companies and invest in them, wherever they are. So to me, comparing AVGE to its benchmark, the MSCI all-country investable market index, is a fair comparison. That index can be purchased by buying ACWI, an ETF that I’ve never heard of. I have heard of VT, so I’ll throw that into the mix since that seems to be a similar idea. Here’s what https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/11 had to say about that:

Comparing performance of VT, ACWI and AVGE to gauge effectiveness of Avantis’ stock picking techniques

AVGE doesn’t have a hugely long track record either (less than 4 years in existence) but, regrettably, it’s coming up on the short end of the stick as compared to the passive index funds. Not by a lot, though.

My take

Buzz or no, I don’t think this product is for me. I buy passively managed ETFs, for the most part12. The lack of transparency on CAGE’s holdings is irritating (I am hoping/assuming that CIBC will fix this) and there’s nothing about the performance of its US sister that leaves me with FOMO. I’ll stick with The magnificent seven ETFs for now.

  1. Canada’s own CPP fund is, sadly, one of those ↩︎
  2. As of April 30, 2026 for both. I note that XEQT provides daily updates on one screen to see what’s inside. For CAGE, you have to resort to spreadsheets. ↩︎
  3. The constituent ETFs of CAGE only show top 10 holdings; Broadcom doesn’t crack the top 10 of CAUS which is 40.13% of CAGE. ↩︎
  4. Per https://usegreenline.com/en-ca/articles/cage-etf-explained. ↩︎
  5. 1782 for CAUS per https://www.investing.com/etfs/caus-toronto-holdings, 299 for CACE per https://www.investing.com/etfs/cace-toronto-holdings, 2403 for CADE per https://www.etfrc.com/CADE.TO, 1316 for CASV per https://www.investing.com/etfs/casv-toronto-holdings, 1126 for CAEM per https://ca.investing.com/etfs/caem-toronto-holdings for a total of 6926. For reasons unclear, CIBC doesn’t seem to think it’s worthy of them to publish this information themselves. ↩︎
  6. As of end April 2026, the latest thing published ↩︎
  7. As of end May 2026. ↩︎
  8. For CAGE, refer to https://www.cibc.com/content/dam/cibc-public-assets/personal-banking/investment/etfs/pdfs/cibc-fund-snapshot-cage-en.pdf. For XEQT, refer to https://www.blackrock.com/ca/investors/en/literature/product-brief/core-etf-portfolios-product-brief.pdf ↩︎
  9. 60% is US Equity, 4% is Canadian Equity per https://www.cibc.com/en/personal-banking/investments/etfs/avantis-global-small-cap-value-etf.html ↩︎
  10. XEQT is a bit of an outlier here; read Are my portfolio’s asset allocation targets “correct”? ↩︎
  11. It seems that my formerly preferred tool has gone to a registration process; I’ll have to revisit Tools I Use I guess… ↩︎
  12. Bond funds are often actively managed. ↩︎

crop sportswoman checking information on tracker

Mini Review: Portfolio Tracker

RobHLeave a comment

Over the years I built my own portfolio tracker (the multi-asset tracker) and I’ve shared it on this website1. I’ll be the first to admit it’s not terribly user-friendly, which is somewhat understandable since I built it for myself.

If you want to take a look at another Google Sheet tracker that is fully documented and more user friendly, then you might want to take a look at Portfolio Tracker.

I’m not sure where I first encountered this tool; possibly on Reddit or perhaps the Financial Wisdom Forum.

Anyway, the brains behind this tool are substantial, and I bow to the organization and wizardry of the author. For people who adhere to the idea of asset allocation as a way to make investment decisions, you won’t find a better fit.

So, in a nutshell, what does it do?

  • It allows you to track the value of your portfolio across multiple brokerage accounts using multiple data sources for near-real time quotes2
  • It allows you to set up your own asset classes to track and to set individual targets for each, both at the portfolio level and at the account level3.
  • It will show you how far off you are from your targets and make high-level recommendations for where (what account) to buy/sell to get back on track

One very nice feature of Portfolio Tracker is that a given asset can be divided up into multiple asset classes. For fans of asset allocation funds (like me) this is a critical feature. With this feature you can accurately depict that (say) XEQT is 25% Canadian equity and 45% US Equity.

Once I figured out the terms used in Portfolio Tracker, it was pretty straightforward to enter my own portfolio across the 5 RRIF, 2 TFSAs and 3 non-registered accounts.

What confused me at the beginning about Portfolio Tracker is that it has more layers than I’m used to:

  • It starts with asset. Like XGRO, AOA or ZMMK. So far so good.
  • Assets belong to one (or more) asset classes. If more than one, the percentage has to add up to 100%. Asset classes are where I focus my attention: Portfolio Tracker has more of them than I need4 by default but you can define as many or as few as you like.
  • Asset classes in turn belong to a unique Asset Category)5.; a given Asset Category can be the parent of multiple asset classes (e.g. US Small Cap and US Total Market asset classes are both included in the US Equity Asset Category)
  • And asset categories roll up into Parents (stocks, bonds, short-term)

One minor point of confusion to the Canadian user is the inclusion of TIPS which is a uniquely US investment vehicle. In Canada you can buy real return bonds or buy ETFs that hold TIPS if you wish. I don’t bother with either myself.

The only limitation I could find in this tool was that it didn’t support multiple currencies. If you hold USD assets (as I do), that is a very serious limitation, but one that I could (and did) correct myself pretty easily with a few changes. When I sent a note to the provided support email on that limitation, the author promptly replied and admitted it was not the first time someone had asked about it.

I recommend this tool as a user-friendly introduction to tracking your own portfolio.

  1. I’ve built a new version based on pivot tables; on my to-do list is to make it generic enough to share. The new design lifts some ideas from Portfolio Tracker, in fact. ↩︎
  2. At one time my own tracker did this too but as it requires web scraping code it breaks pretty frequently, and in the mean time googlefinance() has become much more reliable ↩︎
  3. I’ve only really cared about portfolio level, but I have some broad rules about what goes where at the account level. TFSA: Equity only. RRIF: only place outside of the cash cushion where cash can be held. And the only place I hold bond funds. Non registered: equity only. ↩︎
  4. It divides US Equity into small cap (“US Small Cap”) and total market (“US Total Market”). This particular example I found a bit weird since logically “US Small Cap” is normally considered part (albeit a very small part) of the “US Total Market”. ↩︎
  5. Asset Categories for me are a level of detail I don’t need. If you set them to be the same as your Asset Classes then they effectively aren’t used. Although probably best to given them “AC”names so you don’t get mixed up, e.g. US Equity asset class belongs to US Equity AC asset category. ↩︎

close up view of colorful liquids in laboratory glasswares

Are my portfolio’s asset allocation targets “correct”?

RobHLeave a comment

A key aspect of my investment philosophy is to have targets for each of the asset classes I invest in. Because I like to keep things simple, my asset classes are rather broad1:

  • Cash, which includes ultra-short-term bonds (bonds with durations measured in days, not years)
  • Bonds2, which means corporate and government bonds from multiple geographies with various and assorted durations
  • Canadian Equity: Canadian stocks
  • US Equity: US Stocks
  • International Equity: Stocks that don’t sit in North America

The targets I’ve used for a few years now are

  • 5% Cash
  • 15% Bonds
  • 20% Canadian Equity
  • 36% US Equity
  • 24% International Equity

But where did those target numbers come from?

The easy answer is that they are based on the target number of the Canadian 80/20 fund I use in my retirement portfolio, namely XGRO, one of my ETF all-stars. XGRO’s makeup is actually

  • 20% Bonds
  • 20% Canadian Equity
  • 36% US Equity
  • 24% International Equity

The immediately obvious difference between XGRO and my target is the presence of “Cash” in my target, something XGRO doesn’t have3. “Cash” was a recent arrival to the portfolio, a decision I took to accommodate the presence of a Cash Cushion in my portfolio. The Cash Cushion is an integral part of my chosen decumulation strategy, VPW. So rather than keep the Cash Cushion as something set apart from my asset allocation model, I chose to create a new asset to track. 5% was a small and round number, and is about 2x the value of the Cash Cushion today.

That 5% is almost all invested in ultra-short term bond funds so perhaps you could also argue that I never stopped holding 20% bonds in my portfolio4; I just segmented that category a bit more precisely.

But why 20% bonds? Shouldn’t a retiree have a greater portion of bonds to protect against market downturns5? Habit, I suppose. I’ve held 20% bonds for decades now, since well before I retired. I don’t see any reason to change that now. I’m hoping my retirement will go on for decades, and so having a good chunk of equity is a good way to make sure my portfolio returns outpace inflation and offer some protection against outliving my money.

So 80% equity it is; but are the allocations between Canada, the US and International markets the right allocations? Like I said, I basically picked the equity targets to match what the percentage allocations are in XGRO. If I look a bit further at the other *GRO funds (TGRO, VGRO, ZGRO), I find that XGRO is a bit of an outlier with respect to International Equity allocation:

ETF% CAD% US% Int’l
XGRO (Blackrock)203624
TGRO (TD)626.735.617.8
VGRO (Vanguard)253520
ZGRO (BMO)204020
Average for all22.936.720.4

This tells me a few things

  • My US allocation target of 36% is justified by looking across multiple funds
  • My International Equity target is probably too high if I rely on the wisdom of (small) crowds.

Since I like dealing with round numbers, a case could certainly be made for my targets to instead look like

  • 23% Canadian Equity
  • 37% US Equity
  • 20% International Equity

Using these targets and looking at my current holdings would require me to move about 3% of my International equity holdings into Canadian equity.

I can control my equity allocations in normal monthly transactions, somewhat — since a good chunk of my retirement salary is funded by selling non-registered assets, I get to choose (somewhat) what equity class to liquidate. Here’s the problem I see — my International Equity component in my non-registered account is SCHF, which trades in USD. Liquidating SCHF is possible. but the small problem with SCHF is that it’s denominated in USD, and thanks to my current credit card lineup, I don’t have a way (or need) to spend USD natively anymore.

Sigh. Actually, there’s really no good reason for me to hold *any* USD assets in my non-registered accounts. USD assets are now, for me

  • Difficult to spend as USD
  • Problematic because they are counted against my “foreign income”, per CRA’s T1135; hold too much foreign income, and you have to file additional paperwork at tax time. I hate paperwork.

So, in conclusion,

  • I think I will shift my asset allocations slightly, tilting a bit towards Canadian Equity at the expense of International Equity; this will take time as I draw down SCHF from my non-registered portfolio
  • I will get rid of USD-denominated assets from my non-registered accounts. This will start with reversing the decision I took about a year ago when I went with a majority of ICSH in my Cash Cushion.
  1. 5 categories could easily morph into 20 if you were particular about things. For example, bonds could be split by geography, and/or by duration and/or by bond quality. The US and Canadian equity categories could be split into sectors and/or company size. The international equity categories could be split by region, country, sector, company size. The possibilities are endless, and so could the number of assets you actually hold to meet them. I don’t claim that my 5 are the right ones for you, but I’ve used them for quite a while now. ↩︎
  2. For the longest time, and for many earlier posts, I refer to this segment as “Income”. This made some sense in the days where I didn’t track “Cash” as a distinct category. But it’s time to move on. What lives here are bonds, and only bonds. ↩︎
  3. Of course, all ETFs hold some portion of cash, it’s pretty much unavoidable as you shift assets, collect dividends and so on. I don’t worry about this sort of thing; my assumption is that the ETF manager is doing their job and adhering to their published targets. That MER has to be worth something, right? ↩︎
  4. Questrade (my primary broker) doesn’t offer high interest savings accounts; at my previous broker (QTrade) this cash cushion really was cash held in a high interest savings account. ↩︎
  5. And there will always be market downturns. SORR is a common acronym thrown around; it stands for “Sequence of Returns Risk”. Basically this is the admission that there will be market downturns during retirement; SORR is the risk that those downturns happen really early in retirement and blow up your well-crafted plan because you are forced to sell into a down market. My mitigation strategy concerning SORR? I can always find a job if things got really bad… ↩︎
  6. The reason TGRO’s numbers aren’t round is because the other *GRO funds hold 80% equity while TGRO holds 90% equity. I’ve scaled TGRO’s holdings accordingly. ↩︎

RRIF, TFSA, non-Registered…what do you do with each?

RobH1 Comment

My retirement fund is divided amongst a bunch of different accounts: RRIFs, TFSAs, non-registered. And although I present them as a monolith in my monthly updates (latest one here), I don’t treat them the same way and they have rather different things inside them.

I don’t claim to have a fully optimized portfolio; a thoughtful reader was asking me questions about tax implications of my current holdings, and I admittedly haven’t given a ton of thought to that. But I will in a future post 🙂 .

So, in other words, you’re getting my current thinking for what I hold where. It may not be ideal. But at least you see why things are the way they are.

Below you can see how my retirement funds are divided amongst my various investment vehicles. This one is accurate as of January 8, 2026, and is greatly facilitated by tracking my stuff in Google Sheets. There’s a basic template of what I use over here1.

Retirement portfolio, divided by account type, January 2026

So that’s where it’s at. How do I treat the three main segments of the pie?

RRIF

So the RRIF is clearly the largest piece of the retirement pie and will be around for some time, possibly for the rest of my life. At this point in time, I’m only taking RRIF minimum payments which are recalculated every year and are based on my age and the value of my RRIF on December 31 of the previous year.

I am taking RRIF minimum primarily because I want to avoid the hassle of spousal RRSP/RRIF attribution that I talk about here. RRIF minimum is quite a bit less than the expected return of this account given the holdings therein, mostly AOA and XGRO:

I periodically (once a quarter) shift funds from AOA to XGRO using Norbert’s Gambit2. How much? Well, at the beginning of the year, I see how much of my RRIF is in USD. I then multiply that by my RRIF age factor3, divide by four, and presto, I have a quarterly amount I should move.

All of my many RRIF accounts4 have XGRO, and on the day I make my payday calculations, I have a spreadsheet that calculates how many shares of XGRO I need to sell in each account given the current price of XGRO and the amount of CAD happens to be kicking around in a given account. In very rare circumstances, I might (as well/instead) sell AOA if I had a need for US cash5.

The small contribution of ICSH here is because I have a 5% “cash” asset allocation in my portfolio, and I needed someplace to keep this monthly income. RRIF seems as good a place as any, especially since all those monthly dividends are completely tax-free as a result.

In the coming years, the RRIF will take on more and more of my monthly spending needs. Once the attribution time period has lapsed, I’ll probably take more than RRIF minimum from here in an effort to reduce taxes for older me — once I start collecting CPP/OAS as well as RRIF payments, I could find myself in a taxation world of hurt. Making my RRIF smaller will help, but there is no free lunch. You either pay taxes while you’re alive, or your estate will pay them when you’re not.

Non-Registered Accounts

I really have two kinds of non-registered accounts in my retirement calculations, and they have very distinct usages. Let’s see the difference:

The “legacy” non-registered accounts are long-standing accounts that have grown over the years of accumulation. They are held in my name and my spouse’s name and taxed accordingly. These accounts, specifically the one in my name, account for probably 2/3 of my current income. Every time I withdraw from these accounts, I have to account for capital gains, which is fine, since the taxation treatment of capital gains is generous. You’ll also notice that this account is 100% equity. And as previously noted, the dividends thrown off these investments is not particularly noteworthy (not zero, but nothing a dividend-focused investor would get excited about). That’s why you see funds like HXDM and HXS here, to explicitly avoid dividends. This portion of my non-registered funds is targeted to eventually go to zero in the next few years, probably before I start collecting CPP. That’s a tax avoidance strategy, no idea if it will work out in my favour.

The “cash cushion” non-registered holdings are 100% in ultra-short term bond funds, which to my way of thinking, is equivalent to cash. This account exists because I use VPW as a decumulation strategy, and the cash cushion helps smooth out my monthly salary. Sometimes I add to the cash cushion (directly from my other non-registered account) and sometimes I pay myself from the cash cushion. You can read all about how it works at The Mechanics of Getting Paid in Retirement. Here I keep a bit of uninvested cash floating around in an effort to reduce the number of buys/sells I have to do here. The capital gains are quite minimal in these funds since both ICSH and ZMMK stay close to $50/share6 but it’s possible to make minor gains/losses7 depending on the exchange rate and day of month I make the purchase/sale.

TFSA

The TFSA, per the plan prepared for me by my fee-based advisor, (part of the steps I took to figure out that I had enough to retire) is the last account to decumulate. I continue to contribute to my TFSA monthly, like I have ever since TFSAs were a thing. That would be an “expense” I could cut if needed, I suppose. It tilts heavily towards equities8:

Besides XEQT, you currently see XSH, a bond fund9. This exists in order to keep my target asset allocations in line, and because I don’t really want the monthly distributions landing in a taxable account. Perhaps that holding would be better in my RRIF? There’s also XIC here, which is a Canadian equity fund, necessary to offset the heavy US equity contribution made by AOA.

  1. Over the holidays I’ve started on a new template that makes heavy use of pivot tables, which I do like quite a bit. ↩︎
  2. You can track my progress over at Tracking Norbert’s Gambit Costs with Questrade ↩︎
  3. Per https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/businesses/topics/completing-slips-summaries/t4rsp-t4rif-information-returns/payments/chart-prescribed-factors.html, it’s “1 divided by (90 minus my age)” until I turn 70. ↩︎
  4. Hopefully in a week or two it will be down to five. ↩︎
  5. I do have a USD bank account (via CIBC) and a US credit card (ditto) to avoid FX charges, but my shiny new Rogers Red card also provides sufficient cashback on USD transactions to wipe out the extortionate FX rates charged by credit card companies. ↩︎
  6. Reverts to around $50 on its ex-dividend date, late in the calendar month. Except January, where ICSH doesn’t distribute at all, instead distributing twice in December. ↩︎
  7. Losses are unlikely because I trade frequently enough to fall under superficial loss rules. Best explanation of how this works at https://www.adjustedcostbase.ca/blog/what-is-the-superficial-loss-rule/ ↩︎
  8. Longer timeframe = higher risk acceptable = more equities ↩︎
  9. Here is a bit of problem. XSH is a short term bond fund; by rights, this should be a long term bond fund since the timeline of the investment is longer. Sigh. I picked this one because (a) it had corporate bonds and (b) it had a very low MER. ↩︎

Retirement Portfolio Annual Review

RobHLeave a comment

Happy New Year! A new year means it’s a good time to take a look at what went on in the retirement portfolio.

Let’s start by comparing the makeup of my portfolio at the beginning of the year versus my last update:

PositionJanuary 2025December 2025Notes
AOA: USD 80/2052.2%51.3%Used for RRIF payments1
XGRO: CAD 80/2020.2%18.6%Used for RRIF payments
ICSH: USD short term bond0%4.4%Cash cushion, plus additional “cash” inside RRIF2
ZMMK: CAD short term bond0%0.6%Cash cushion CAD funds
SCHF: International Equity2.8%1.9%Used for monthly salary; held only in non-registered
XEQT: CAD 100% Equity0%6.5%Mostly in TFSA
HXT: CAD Equity7.4%6.3%Used for monthly salary; held only in non-registered
XIC: CAD Equity5.3%6.1%Did not add or subtract from this holding this year
DYN6005: USD HISA3.7%0%Replaced by ICSH
DYN6004: CAD HISA2.6%0%Replaced by ZMMK
HXS: USD Equity2%0%Sold off from non-registered accounts to fund monthly expenses
VCN: CAD Equity1.8%1.1%In TFSA; reduced in favour of XEQT

What didn’t change much

The portfolio is still dominated by XGRO and AOA (not coincidentally, these are two of my ETF All-Stars) and they both had excellent years, as shown by this tool:

What also didn’t change is my overall approach: decisions for shifting funds is totally dependent on maintaining my asset allocations that haven’t changed either:

  • 5% in cash or “cash like” holdings
  • 15% in bonds
  • 20% in Canadian Equity
  • 36% in US Equity
  • 24% in International Equity

This approach meant that what I sold off in my non-registered portfolio to fund my day to day expenses changed throughout the year; as the year progressed I sold HXDM, then HXS (reducing this to zero), and then finally HXT, all in the service of keeping my assets in line with my targets.

What did change

As a result of changing brokers (QTrade to Questrade), I lost the ability to cheaply hold HISAs. And so I had to change tactics and hold “HISA-like” ETFs instead. (which, on Questrade, like all ETFs, can be bought and sold at no charge). At the same time, I realized that I could increase my returns by shifting more to the US market. Significantly higher interest rates in the US means that I can get more for my “safe” funds, with the small annoyance that I have to deal with USD. You can see the latest rates on my frequently updated page.

As I sold off “pure” equity funds from my non-registered accounts, I had to make changes to keep my bond percentages aligned with my targets3. This is the reason XEQT (a global 100% equity fund) now makes an appearance in the overall picture. The nice side-effect of adding XEQT is that my portfolio is now 76% held in all-in-one funds, up about 4% from the beginning of the year. All-in-ones do the rebalancing for you, which is a good way to avoid bad behaviours.

Behind the scenes I also tried to better focus each of the account types to make things simpler and clearer:

  • TFSAs are now 90% equity, with the rest held in bonds. The rationale here is that TFSAs will be the last things I touch to fund retirement, and hence have the longest time horizon. There are still too many individual ETFs here, and my January resolution is to simplify this further.
  • RRIFs now have only three funds: AOA, XGRO and ICSH.
  • Investment accounts will remain a bit chaotic as most of my retirement expenses are coming out of these. It also happens to be the place where my “free money” payments end up and so there is a small amount of inbound cash to purchase things with. The 2026 plan is to continue to draw down my non-registered funds since my spouse is still working and would be taxed higher on her capital gains.

What’s ahead in 2026: RRIF

My own calculations4 show that my household RRIF-minimum income will be up 19% YoY, a result of good returns in the RRIF (roughly 11% YoY by my calculation) and being a year older. Selling XGRO every month will cover the required payments, and quarterly I will shift a portion of AOA into XGRO, converting the USD to CAD using Norbert’s Gambit.

What’s ahead in 2026: TFSA

January will see an effort to reduce the number of ETFs here. There are multiple CAD equity ETFs which I should consolidate into one, for instance.

We continue to contribute monthly to the TFSAs. The goal is to maximize equity percentage while minimizing the number of funds held. Once the cleanup is done, I expect to purchase XEQT monthly. Questrade introduced automated investing which I’ll likely set up to accomplish this.

What’s ahead in 2026: Non-Registered Accounts

The same strategy as 2025 will continue. Shortfalls in my monthly salary will be covered by selling assets in the non-registered accounts. I ended last year up 2% YoY in my non-registered accounts; I don’t really expect a repeat there. All things being equal, I should be down in my non-registered accounts at this time next year.

  1. Indirectly. I haven’t tried to do a USD withdrawal for a RRIF payment, but in theory it should be possible. Instead I convert my AOA into XGRO a little at a time using Norbert’s Gambit. ↩︎
  2. My VPW cash cushion is about 50% of my cash position in the retirement portfolio. The other 50% of my cash position is inside the RRIF in order to avoid taxation on those monthly distributions. ↩︎
  3. AOA and XGRO are both 20% bonds, not 15%, and so mathematically this has to be offset with 100% equity somewhere in the portfolio. ↩︎
  4. My providers will give me the real numbers sometime in the coming weeks. How much hassle this will be is TBD. ↩︎