My New Passive Index ETF Portfolio

Unfortunately this is the second time my portfolio has changed in the past two years. The first change was when I moved from a TD Mutual Funds account to Clearsight last year. My advisor had great plans for my portfolio. He wanted to eventually have me primarily invested in low-cost ETFs and we were going to have a 25-25-25-25 split between Canadian bonds, Canadian equities, international equities, and US equities. Due to the high commissions ($75) charged by Clearsight we bought one ETF and the rest was in mutual funds. Anyways, before we got very far Clearsight was acquired by Wellington West and my advisor was let go, so I began the transition to E*Trade where I could manage my portfolio on my own. I learned a lot from my advisor at Clearsight, like what an ETF is, and importance of lowering cost. I have come a long way since just owning just TD mutual funds and eFunds through a TD Mutual Funds account back in 2005. So before I introduce you to my new portfolio at E*Trade, here’s what my portfolio looked like when I was with Clearsight:

Some of the things I did not like about my old portfolio are:

• High cost – Too many mutual funds with high MERs. I checked all of these funds’ performance again and for the most part they didn’t seem to be capable of beating their benchmarks in the past. The Growth Opportunities has not beaten the S&P/TSX Venture Composite Index in the range I looked at. CI Value Trust (clone of Legg Mason Value Trust) has not been impressive of late, but even worse, it has assumed far more risk than an index, with its investments in Google and other high-tech stocks. The Templeton International Index fund (last time I checked) had not beaten the MSCI EAFE index over the long term. Also, the TD Canadian Bond fund is not all that spectacular compared to ETFs like XSB.
• No emerging markets – I wanted some emerging markets to provide increased diversification and greater risk-adjusted return due to their low correlation with other markets. The fact that emerging markets have done very well of late is of no concern to me, I realize if I buy emerging markets equities now I might suffer a bit in the near future.
• No real return bonds, or inflation-sensitive assets – I looked at the Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan and the CPP Investment Board and both have significant real return bond holdings. The former has 11.1% and the latter has 3.5% in real return bonds.
• Huge domestic bias – Although I had originally wanted 25% in Canadian equities my advisor had me at 40% because he had concerns about the US dollar, so we weighted Canadian equities more. This is way too much allocated to a handful of Canadian companies that make up a large part of the TSX/S&P 60 Index.
• No foreign currency exposure – Foreign currency exposure can be a good thing. If inflation is high in Canada, our dollar will decrease in value relative to other currencies. More importantly, some of my investments, such as the CI Value Trust were hedged versions of USD mutual funds so I was paying extra management expense when I could have just owned the USD version and possibly reduced my total risk at lower cost.
• Lack of US exposure – I only had something like 11% of my assets in US equities. This is extremely underweight for such a large market like the US. My advisor was planning to “ease in” to US equities (he had some issue with the falling US dollar) but I would prefer to just go with some desired allocation and re-balance when necessary rather than thinking one can be smarter than the market.
• Lack of broad US exposure – Bill Miller’s Value Trust is invested in relatively few investments compared to the size of the US market. He also invested a lot in high tech companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, etc… I wanted to own more blue chips/boring companies, mid-caps, small-caps, etc…

So based on some of the things I did not like about my old portfolio, and some information that I gleaned from various blogs and internet sources, here is my new portfolio that I have putting together for the past couple months:

Now I’ll expand on some of the reasons why I chose the above asset allocation as well as the reasons why I chose each investment in my new portfolio. This portfolio is inspired primarily by Martin Gale, Canadian Capitalist, Dan Solin (author of The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read), and Burton Malkiel (only part way through his book right now).

NOTE: I am under 30, I am looking for long term growth only, I am not planning to take out any of this money until I retire at age 55-65, and I can handle some short-term swings in the market.

ETFs vs. mutual funds
Using ETFs instead of mutual funds was a no-brainer for me. I have come to the realization that beating the market is virtually impossible for all but a few very talented people, and that passive investing can yield greater returns with less risk due to its lower costs. For more information, read my recent blog post “Malkiel, Bogle Argue Against Non-Market Capitalization Weighted ETFs” or read “A Random Walk Down Wall Street.” I can also give credit to the Canadian Capitalist and his blog for convincing me of this fact. He has been tracking a “sleepy portfolio” for a while now, consisting of a few ETFs and it seems to do pretty well.

Bonds
It was clear to me that I was not going to have a 100% bonds portfolio, nor was I going to have a 100% equities (as my advisor wanted me to have last year). Benjamin Graham is very clear in The Intelligently Investor page 56-57 about his opinion on this issue when he says “just because of the uncertainties of the future the investor cannot afford to put all his funds into one basket–neither in the bond basket, despite the unprecedentedly high returns that bonds have recently offered; nor in the stock basket, despite the prospect of continuing inflation . . .” There is much more discussion about this in the book. Martin Gale also has an excellent article about stocks vs. bonds. He says,

Many investors make the mistake of thinking that the least risky portfolio is one containing just cash and short-term bonds; or that the most aggressive portfolio is one containing only equities. Somewhat surprisingly, that is false. The safest portfolio contains a mix of stocks and bonds, as does the most aggressive. For any portfolio containing all bonds there is a less risky portfolio with a better return that contains some stocks. This is counter-intuitive because in and of themselves bonds are safer than stocks.

I saw some similar arguments in a Powerpoint presentation from an investment advisor recently, that basically said, no matter how risky you want to be, at least hold some bonds (like at least 10%). It is pretty widely accepted that you should have some bonds and some equities. How much of each is up to you. I followed Martin Gale’s advice on short vs long term bonds, and decided to stick to buying short-term bonds, because “whatever risk/return ratio you achieved by buying longer duration bonds, you could achieve by holding fewer bonds and more equities. In general I think the equities have the better risk/return ratio. That could always change–but at least historically, it’s been the case that equities have been a better investment than long-term bonds.” This backs up what I was told by my ex-advisor at Clearsight; stick with short duration bonds and avoid long duration bonds.

So, to minimize cost I see only two options. Buying iShares Short-term Bond Index Fund (XSB), or buying individual bonds and making my own bond ladder. I decided to buy XSB since the commission costs of making my own bond ladder would be prohibitive at this point, although when my nest egg is larger this might be more cost-effective because it would eliminate the MER.

Real-Return Bonds
As I said above, one of the disadvantages of my old portfolio was that I had no real-return bond component. Real return bonds are resistant to inflation because the interest is set to be x number of points above the inflation rate. I looked at the Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan and the CPP Investment Board and both have significant real return bond holdings. The former has 11.1% and the latter has 3.5% in real return bonds. I decided to have 1/4 of my bond portfolio invested in real-return bonds which amounts to 5%. I might re-evalute this allocation later (in about 5 years).

Canadian Equity Component
Now that the foreign content limits are removed we are starting to see more and more people suggesting that Canadians hold somewhere around 3-10% Canadian equities in their equity portfolio, rather than the insane 25-70% allocations we used to see. At the Canadian Capitalist, Dan Solin comments on why investors should have no more than 10% Canadian equities in the equity portion of their portfolio. There is also a good article by Martin Gale here about domestic bias and foreign asset allocation. Finally, according to Carl Spiess at Scotia Macleod, “over the last 20 years, international markets have outperformed Canadian markets by almost 2% a year.” We have had some excellent years in the Canadian equities markets recently as well as in the late 1990s thanks to Nortel so people often forget that Canadian equities have historically underperformed against international markets. If you looked at the risk-adjusted return, the picture would probably be even worse. He continues, “it makes sense to invest globally not only based on historical returns, but also because many economic sectors (eg. Healthcare) are not significantly represented in Canadian markets. In addition, despite several good years recently, Canada only represents 3% of world stock markets.” He’s right; The Vanguard Total Stock Market Index has 12% in healthcare, for example, while the TSX Composite contains less than 1% in healthcare as it is dominated by financials and energy.

Another article here gives “10 key reasons for going global in your RRSP.”

US Equity Component
I relied heavily on Martin Gale’s advice on his Efficient Market Canada website. Specifically, his “Building A Globally Efficient Index ETF Portfolio (updated)” article (and it’s predecessor) and also “Foreign Asset Allocation in your RRSP.” I ended up making US Equities 40% of the equity portion of my portfolio, which corresponds to 32% of my total portfolio. The obvious choice here was some sort of S&P 500 Index, like XSP or SPY, but instead I went with the lowest-cost option out there, which is probably the Vanguard Total Stock Market Fund (VTI). It is even more diverse than the S&P 500 in that it currently holds 3692 different stocks. The US market is huge and this is a great way to own it all without having to purchase both the S&P 500 Index ETF (SPY) and the S&P Mid-Cap Index ETF (MDY) for example.

International Component
Again, as above, I looked at the global market capitalization and decided to put 50% of the equity portion of my portfolio into international stocks. This corresponds to 40% of my overall portfolio. Since Vanguard does not really have much for international index ETFs, and the iShares $USD MSCI EAFE Index ETF (EFA) has the same cost as the iShares $CAD MSCI EAFE Index ETF (XIN), the best option was to go with XIN (see “Exchange Traded Funds: Recommendations“).

CAD vs. USD
I was worried that with my much lower Canadian equity component that I would end up having a lot of US dollar investments in my RRSP. As I mentioned above, since Vanguard does not really have much for international index ETFs, and the iShares $USD MSCI EAFE Index ETF (EFA) has the same cost as the iShares $CAD MSCI EAFE Index ETF (XIN), the best option was to go with XIN, which is traded in Canadian dollars. So now my only USD holdings are the Vanguard Emerging Markets Fund (VWO) and the Vanguard Total Stock Market (VTI) which take up about 37% of my total portfolio. Having less than 50% of my RRSP assets in USD seems alright to me. When I get older and closer to retirement I could move more of my money into CAD investments if I feel the need.

Emerging Markets
There are two emerging markets funds to choose from, the iShares one (EEM) and the Vanguard one (VWO). After much searching on Google for “EEM vs. VMO” and reading many articles I could not discern much difference between the two. The Vanguard one uses a slightly difference underlying index as I discussed in my previous blog post entitled “Foreign Exchange Costs Associated With USD Investments in an RRSP” and, like most Vanguard funds, has a much lower cost than its competitors. So I went with the Vanguard fund. Because of the high risk associated with emerging markets and because of their recent stellar performance, I put only 5% of my total portfolio in emerging markets, even though emerging markets make up about 9% of the world market capitalization. I may increase my desired allocation of emerging markets later, relative to my other international holdings.

REITs
REITs are a good addition to the fixed-income portion of a portfolio and they provide good negative correlation with other asset classes. Most of the large pensions funds hold a significant amount of REITs. XRE is the iShares offering and I will probably be adding this in eventually. I don’t want to do too many things at once. I need to decide if I should reduce my bond allocation from 20% and add in the REITs or if I should reduce my equities from 80% and add in REITs. Or lower both? My original thought had been to have 20% bonds, 5% REITs, which is why I went with 20% bonds rather than 25% bonds as I had before.

Please let me know if you have any comments and I will add any details to this article that I may have left out.