There are a couple of Canadian index mutual funds from major institutions in Canada, e.g.:

• CIBC Canadian Index
• RBC Canadian Index
• Scotia Canadian Index
• TD Canadian Index

If we use chart comparison from The Globe and Mail, the chart of those funds in the last 10 year looks like the following:

The chart above assumes that we invest $10,000 in January 2000.

As we can see here, the four funds above have different result. CIBC Canadian Index has the lowest return, i.e. $15,713. Meanwhile, RBC Canadian Index has the highest return, i.e. $16.529.

There is more than 6% difference between the return of CIBC Canadian Index and RBC Canadian Index. We are not really sure why. We are also not sure why the gap between S&P/TSX total return and those funds are quite significant.

Link

• Funds Filter from The Globe and Mail
• Searching for Good Canadian Mutual Funds
• Searching for Low Cost Emerging Market Funds

Although we move to Ontario, we still keep our town-house. The property market in Vancouver area was really bad when we left. We didn’t want to sell it below our purchase price. So, we decided to rent it out.

A couple of days ago, we received an assessment letter from BC Assessment. Our town-house is assessed with the value of $336,000. It is far below our purchase price, $382,000. We were a little bit shocked for a moment. As we wrote a couple of weeks ago, Canadian housing price seems to have recovered from its low.

Then, we checked MLS listing to see if any of our neighbours are selling their houses. Yes…, there is one neighbour who is selling their house. Their model is pretty much the same to ours. Their assessment value is also the same to ours. Guess what, they’re listing it for $469.000! We had another shock. Why is it far above our purchase price now?

We checked another source of data, i.e. Plunge-O-Meter. The chart below shows the average house price in Vancouver area since 1999. As you can see, there is a significant dip in late 2008 and early 2009. Then the market recovered quickly starting in mid-2009 to continue its long-term trend, moving even higher.

It makes more sense now. BC Assessment assessed our property value on July 1, 2009. This is where the market is bottoming. Since then, the price has gone up significantly, it’s now even higher than the previous peak in early 2008.

So far, we’ve been talking about our stock picks (see also here), but we never disclosed our portfolio. Now, we’re going to disclose our real portfolio.

First of all, we use a couple of different strategies in our portfolio. For example, we use dollar-cost averaging in our retirement account. We use a combination of fundamental and technical analysis in our short-term trading account. Having said that, we try to keep our portfolio as simple as possible.

How does our portfolio look like?

• 15% US index
• 15% Canadian index
• 15% Emerging market index
• 30% fixed-income, which includes government bonds, corporate bonds and preferred shares.
• 5% REIT
• 20% speculative stocks, long-term options and currency speculation

As we mentioned in our previous posting, we use mostly ETF and index mutual funds (we always prefer “no-load” mutual funds). We’ll discuss about which ETF/mutual funds issuers that we use in future posting.

(Picture is from stock.xchng.)

A couple of days ago, someone posted a question at Canadian Money Forum about Canadian ETF screener. The good news is that there are only four ETF issuers in Canada, i.e.:

• iShares Canada
• Claymore Canada
• Horizons BetaPro
• BMO

So, as mentioned by Canadian Capitalist, we can just visit the web site of those companies and see what they have.

Alternatively, GlobeInvestor.com also provides a stock filter that can be used to search for ETFs. Go to the following URL

http://www.globeinvestor.com/v5/content/filters

and then select “ETF” in the “Security” box. Also make sure that “Toronto Stock Exchange” is selected in the “Exchange” box.

Links

• High Paying Dividend ETFs in Canada
• High Paying Didend ETFs in NYSE

If you are interested running this filter yourself; go to Globe Investor’s stock filter. Select Security type as “ETF”. When you get the result, click on “$ Change” or “% Change”; and you’ll get Dividend Yield column.

Are we recommending those ETFs? Some of them, yes. In fact, we currently own iShares S&P/TSX REIT ETF. Do your own research and consult your financial advisor before buying any of these ETFs.

We don’t recommend iShares S&P/TSX Income Trust ETF for now since there’ll be a new regulation regarding income trusts starting next year (2011). They’ll be taxed in the same way as corporation. So, we can expect the dividend yield might go down significantly.

The yield of BMO Emerging Markets ETF looks suspicious. Emerging markets don’t normally pay high dividends. When we checked BMO web site about this ETF, the fact sheet says the dividend yield for this ETF is only 1.70%. It looks like Globe Investor has the wrong data here.

We don’t recommend buying any long-term bonds right now, such as iShares Canadian Long Bond ETF. There have been rumours that Bank of Canada will hike interest rates soon.

Also note that iShares has just released a couple of new ETFs recently. There is no dividend distribution history for them yet. I believe a few of them, such as iShares US High Yield Bond, has the potential to be in the list above.

Update (19-Feb-2010): The data are coming from GlobeInvestor.com web site as of the date of this posting. There might be differences as the stock prices move up/down or because of dividend raise/cut.