Tag: google

a person is holding a package with their hands

What companies are in my retirement portfolio?

RobHLeave a 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. ↩︎

Cheapskate Computing with ChromeOS Flex

RobHLeave a comment

I am writing this blog entry from a Acer Aspire 1551, released about 15 years ago, a time when Windows 7 was the state-of-the-art PC OS. When I took this laptop out of the closet, it had Windows 10 on it, and was essentially unusable because the poor CPU1 just couldn’t eke out enough hamster-wheel turns to make it go. It looked like it was headed to the great bit bucket in the sky2. This caused me a bit of pain, since, after all, I had paid good money for that laptop3.

But then I discovered ChromeOS Flex.45 It seems capable of turning just about any old hardware (PC or Mac, I’ve done both) into something quite usable, if not terribly feature-rich6. Simply put, it’s the operating system used on Chromebooks that have been widely deployed to students everywhere.

And installing it really is quite easy. You just need a USB stick, some other internet-connected computer, and about 30 minutes7 to complete an installation. You can test-drive an installation before committing, too, since you can boot right from the USB stick. All the steps are outlined here.

The result is (more or less) a Chromebook with support for a modern browser (Chrome). And since I write this blog using WordPress, all the tools I need to build this site are accessible from that browser. And of course with Google Sheets, Google Docs and Google Slides (all quite feature-rich from the browser), I have no need for Microsoft Office, either8.

The only investment I made (and even this probably wasn’t strictly necessary) was to purchase a new SSD to replace the creaky old spinning hard drive in the original model. Total cost: $30. The keyboard and mouse are from Value Village9 (about $10 total) and the external monitor I had lying around.

So what’s a ChromeOS Flex machine good for? Off the top of my head,

  • Writing a blog
  • Inexpensive bare-bones laptop to take when traveling
  • Simple laptop/desktop for a favorite relative

If you want to breathe new life into old hardware, then I declare Chrome OS Flex cheapskate-approved. You can see it in action, below:

The Money Engineer’s Retro-Tech Design Environment
  1. An AMD Athlon II Neo X2 K325, no less. I think it had a flux capacitor. ↩︎
  2. City of Ottawa has alternatives: https://ottawa.ca/en/garbage-and-recycling/recycling/waste-explorer ↩︎
  3. The cheapskate refrain! ↩︎
  4. There are of course a plethora of Linux distributions out there for the more adventuresome and/or those with a lot more time on their hands. I’ve played around with a bunch of those, too. But ChromeOS Flex is the simplest installation experience I’ve experienced on a range of computers. On some computers, you can actually get a working Linux shell underneath ChromeOS Flex. ↩︎
  5. “Chrome OS” is what Chromebooks run. “Chrome OS Flex” is what I’m talking about. Similar, but different. Google carefully. ↩︎
  6. You’re probably not editing your Hollywood movie on a Chrome OS Flex machine. ↩︎
  7. Google’s instructions say 5. I think it took me that long to remember how to get into the BIOS so I could boot from the USB stick. ↩︎
  8. Full disclosure, I own shares in Alphabet, Microsoft and 10000 other companies. ↩︎
  9. A most excellent place to get vintage hardware. ↩︎