Tag: BMO

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News: Passiv adds support for more brokerages

RobHLeave a comment

I was introduced to Passiv as a result of joining the Questrade family back in 2025; Questrade subsequently broke off ties with Passiv earlier this year and have been working on improving their own platform to do a lot of what Passiv did. (Like recently introducing custom indexing1).

Anyway, I still use Passiv since it makes it easy to see my entire retirement portfolio (including accounts owned by my spouse) all in one screen. Even its free version is useful in that regard2.

Anyway, Passiv up until this week only natively supported Questrade and Wealthsimple in the Canadian market. But I see that they now also support DIYers using BMO Investorline and CIBC Investor’s Edge. So if you’re a user of these brokerages, you can enjoy the benefits of one screen for all your accounts.

  1. A decent looking concept, but of no interest to me personally unless they add support for RRIF accounts. I’m not holding my breath. ↩︎
  2. The paid version allows you to execute rebalancing trades, among other things. Passiv’s main competition is all-in-one ETFs. ↩︎
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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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Advice: Stop listening to the noise

RobHLeave a comment

As a self-directed investor, it can be challenging to avoid the constant noise of the latest and greatest moves in the industry. A sample of the kinds of things that have landed in my inbox lately will hopefully illustrate this point:

  • “Single stock SpaceX ETFs are coming”
  • “This 11% dividend is a screaming deal”
  • “This divvie is the ultimate ‘pick and shovel’ play on Elon, Inc”
  • “Should we have sold in May and walked away?”

The noise is nearly impossible to avoid; there always seems to be one company, one trend, one segment, one market, one product that’s just booming while your portfolio languishes.

What’s the reason this is so? Beyond the need for news sources to produce content, I mean? A peek at Blackrock’s “periodic table“1 of market performance gave me an answer, maybe.

This table illustrates the performance of thirteen segments of the market on an annual basis. What is evident is that the “hot” segment keeps changing. What was hot last year rarely repeats this year. Take for example this year’s darling, Commodities. This index can be found over at https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/crb.asp and tracks (among other things) the price of oil, gold, copper, wheat…and I’m sure you’ve noticed the recent uptick in ETFs covering this space (or a subspace):

  • GlobalX has three new silver-focused ETFs (SLVX, SVCC, and SVCL) and three commodity producers ETFs (COMX, CMCC and CMCL)
  • BMO launched a covered call gold bullion ETF (ZWGD.T) and a hedged broad commodity ETF (ZCOM.F) this year
  • TD launched TCOM which looks like it’s achieving exposure to broad commodities markets through swaps and derivatives2

My sense is that all of these ETFs were launched in an effort to attract FOMO investors who are trying to ride the commodities wave this year. Commodities as a category aren’t a terrible thing to invest in, as the Annualized column shows — they have actually performed pretty decently over the past decade — but still behind US Equity, Emerging Market Equity, Japan Equity and European Equity indices.

There’s always going to be some segment that’s on fire in a given year. Predicting which segment that might be isn’t consistently possible, so my advice is to ignore the noise and don’t chase the latest shiny object. Over long periods of time, it’s hard to beat investing in boring index equity funds.

  1. There’s a few of these kinds of tables floating about; a more Canadian-centric one can be found at https://www.stingyinvestor.com/SC/PeriodicTableofAnnualReturns.pl ↩︎
  2. The “Investment Approach” linked here makes my head hurt ↩︎

ZEB versus XIC: Is buying *only* Canadian banks a valid strategy?

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A recent newsletter (On Money) from the Globe and Mail caught my attention. In it, the author (David Berman) made the assertion that ZEB (a BMO ETF that invests solely in the Big 61 Canadian banks) was a better way of investing in the Canadian banking segment over holding the stocks individually. Two of the big reasons align very well with my own philosophy, namely:

  • The ETF fees include regular rebalancing
  • The ETF removes the temptation to time the market

These are the main reasons the majority of my retirement savings are in all-in-one ETFs like AOA and XGRO.

But anyway, what caught my eye about the article were the eye-popping returns of this segment, especially compared to the overall TSX, captured in an ETF like XIC. So I did a quick analysis which I share with you here:

In summary,

  • Canadian banks make up about 1/3 of the Canadian stock market (and hence XIC)
  • This segment has outperformed the overall Canadian market — by a wide margin — over the past 16 years
  • Past performance does not guarantee future results
  • This analysis hasn’t changed my perspective; I still prefer diversification over raw performance…no FOMO for me.
  1. TD, CIBC, Bank of Nova Scotia, RBC, BMO, National Bank ↩︎

XEQT, TEQT, VEQT, ZEQT, HEQT Fee Showdown

RobHLeave a comment

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.

With the news that iShares is reducing their management fees, (BMO did earlier this year) I figured it was time to do a head-to-head fee comparison for the four major families.

Here you have it:

CompanyRelevant TickersManagement Fee3
iSharesXEQT, XGRO, XBAL et al0.17%, effective Dec 18, 2025
VanguardVEQT, VGRO, VBAL et al0.17%
TDTEQT, TGRO,TBAL et al0.15%
BMOZEQT, ZGRO, ZBAL et al0.15%
Global XHEQT, HGRO, HBAL et al0.18%

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.

  1. Technically called “asset allocation” ETFs, which is good, since asset allocation is how I view my own portfolio. ↩︎
  2. Formerly known as Horizons, which explains the stock tickers used here. ↩︎
  3. 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. ↩︎