I have been on a real book reading mission lately. It just so happens that many of the books that I had ordered at the library all came at approximately the same time! Anyways, instead of doing a book review, I have decided to write some quick comments about how I feel about these books. I do not have any of these books in front of me, so I am doing these comments from memory.

“The Investment Zoo”by Stephen Jarislowsky. I absolutely loved this book (I actually brought this book with me on my cruise!). This book talks about Mr. Jarislowsky’s life, how he feels about the world and its current financial situation, and his techniques for investing money. This book was packed full of good information. I need to go back and reread the section on picking high quality stocks. I will definitely be adding this book to my own personal collection of investment books. I rate this book a 5 star. Continue reading this post…

Pros: Motivational book to prove that you too can buy lots of properties in any real estate market.

Cons: I did not find any information that I would consider useful to a real estate investor.

Rating: * (1 star)

I couldn’t resist picking up a book titled “The Insider’s Guide to 52 Homes in 52 Weeks” (ISBN 0-471-75705-5) by real estate guru Dolf De Roos and his protege Gene Burns.

The purpose of this book was to document Dolf and Gene’s quest to purchase 52 homes in 52 weeks. Do you think they were successful? Of course. And with plenty of months to spare!

Continue reading this post…

It is not the first time that I have been questioned why I have such a high (35%) allocation of fixed income in my portfolio.

I just happened to come across an interesting article (membership required or check this cached page) over at MarketWatch.com. The article talks about the percentage of time that stocks have underperformed riskless Treasury bills over various time lengths in the US.

Holding Period         % of time that stocks outperform T-Bills (1802-2002)

1 yr                           61.5%

2 yr                           65.3%

5 yr                           74.0%

10 yr                         80.1%

20 yr                         94.5%

30 yr                         97.1%

This is a rather interesting table. If you hold stocks for a 10 year period, there is a 20% chance that a Treasury bill portfolio would outperform your stock portfolio. Continue reading this post…

The asset allocation that I had chosen for my retirement account was 65% equities and 35% fixed income. I further broke the equities down to 27.5% Canadian, 22.5% US, 10% International and 5% real estate.

For some (strange) reason, I was managing my taxable and non-taxable accounts separately. Well, that doesn’t make sense since they are all trying to achieve the same goal: my financial independence when I retire.

So, I looked at my whole portfolio together. My current allocation is as follows:

Cash 16.67%

Fixed Income 21.57%

Canadian Equity 25.91%

US Equity 18.29%

International Equity 11.53%

Real Estate 6.03% (does not include my home)

Continue reading this post…

Although the debate over whether a house was considered an asset or not ended with readers on both sides of the fence, I happened to be reading a book that talked about this exact same debate!

The book is called “Protect Your Nest Egg” written by Eric Kirzner and Richard Croft. I am almost done the book and plan on doing a book review on it, but I just had to write about this one chapter.

The authors have 2 conditions that must be satisfied before they consider something a financial asset:

1. The asset must have tangible value - it can be readily exchanged for something else.

2. Your only motivation for holding this asset is to enhance your wealth.

Continue reading this post…