Posts Tagged ‘Portfolio’

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ETFs and Index Funds in Our Portfolio

March 11th, 2010

We have just added a new page in our blog, called Portfolio. You can access it from the links at the top of our blog. This page contains the complete picture of our portfolio. As we mentioned in our previous posting, we use ETFs and index mutual funds. We also use dollar-cost averaging in our retirement account. Lastly, we try to keep our portfolio as simple as possible.

15% US Index

  • PowerShares QQQ Trust, Series 1 ETF (NASDAQ:QQQQ)
  • BlackRock Enhanced Capital and Income Fund (NYSE:CII)

15% Canadian Index

  • CIBC Canadian Index (CIB300)

15% Emerging Market Index

  • Claymore Canadian BRIC ETF (TSE:CBQ)
  • Market Vectors Brazil Small Cap ETF (NYSE:BRF)
  • Claymore/AlphaShares China Small Cap ETF (NYSE:HAO)

30% Fixed Income

  • TD Canadian Bond Index (TDB966)
  • iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bonds ETF (NYSE:HYG)
  • PowerShares Financial Preferred Portfolio ETF (NYSE:PGF)

5% REIT

  • Vanguard REIT ETF (NYSE:VNQ)
  • iShares Canadian S&P/TSX Capped REIT ETF (TSE:XRE)

Notes

  • For the US index, we basically invest in Nasdaq-100 and S&P 500. We use a closed-end funds (CII) for S&P 500 because of its dividend. Check also our posting here for a couple of different closed-end funds that replicates S&P 500.
  • Although Canada represents only 2% of the world GDP, we maintain a pretty high percentage of Canadian index. Why? It’s just because we live in Canada. Our “native” currency is Canadian dollar.
  • We know that CIBC Canadian Index might not be the best mutual funds. However, we have to keep it this way until end of next year.

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How Does Our Portfolio Look Like?

February 22nd, 2010

Log Book

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.)

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How to Display Country Stock Index on Google Docs?

February 18th, 2010

Our previous posting discusses on how to display stock prices on Google Docs. How can we display stock indexes, such as S&P 500? We might need them if we want to compare our portfolio with those indexes, don’t we?

Here is the trick: you can just type the same function as you normally use for stocks, i.e. “=GoogleFinance(index)”. Type without quotes. For example, to display the current price of S&P 500 index, type “=GoogleFinance(“.INX”)”.

google_docs3

How do we find the ticker symbol of popular indexes? There are a couple of places on the Internet that has this information. Yahoo! Finance provides them on their home page; but they use a different convention with Google Finance. Instead of prefixing the ticker with dot, they use ^ symbol.

Here is the list of popular stock indexes around the world.

  • S&P 500 Index: .INX
  • Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) Index: .DJI
  • Nasdaq Composite Index: .IXIC
  • S&P/TSX Composite Index: .GSPTSE
  • FTSE 100 Index: .FTSE
  • Hang Seng Index: .HSI
  • Nikkei 225 Index: .N225

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