Blessed by the Potato

I haven’t talked about the new wave of robo-advisors in large part because I’ve been neck-deep in book stuff, but now that Sandi has her excellent post up, let’s get into it.

Important book notice: there’s less than a week* left to go to pre-order and get free shipping or a special price on the ebook! Read more about the book here.

Not so long ago an article came out by Dan B/CCP concluding that robo-advisors were impossible in Canada. I took it as a challenge and started sketching out the plans for one and lining up programmers to make it happen — but then almost immediately sat back down to focus on the book first (which I was hoping would be successful enough to provide the risk capital to build the Canadian robo-advisor**).

It appears as though I’m not the only one who took the article as a call to arms, as less than 6 months later the robo-advisor invasion began.

It is a very cool concept: for less than the cost of a full advisor you can get access to a passive portfolio that will be automatically rebalanced: low-cost passive investing with the convenience of throwing cheques at your mutual fund salesman. As Sandi points out, not everyone is prepared or cut out to be a DIY investor, so some intermediate-fee, intermediate-service options are very welcome.

I do have a few concerns, however:

• These are almost all new companies.
• They launched within weeks of each other (or, inconveniently, within days of building the comparison spreadsheet).

Combine those two and I have some doubts that they will all still be here 5 years from now***. There are only a few discount brokerages in Canada: those with the big 6 banks, Questrade, Qtrade, and Canadian versions of multinationals (HSBC, VB, IB). That could be because of oligolopistic collusion, or because it takes some scale to survive. I’m not sure ~4 new players will survive — though if they do it will likely be because of a large shift away from high-cost funds, which will be welcome. And given how closely they launched, I have fears that at least a few of the offerings rushed to market not fully formed (though no reports yet of any problems so maybe all is copacetic).

On top of that is the challenge of deciding which one to go with: the fee schedules are like a tax return, with marginal rates and a dependence on which province you live in. Oh, and what exactly you invest in as the fees for the underlying funds are often on top of the headline price, and those vary with your risk tolerance choices. Yes, that helps them keep costs as low as possible, but means Sandi had to make a complicated spreadsheet just to compare the offerings. I have concerns that the complication and multiple layers of fees could turn people off.

Finally, they just aren’t that cheap. Yes, they’re head-and-shoulders better than a high-cost actively managed bank fund, but they can’t even match TD e-series on fees. If TD ever decides to open e-series to their salesforce then these guys could be in trouble. For some people, these offerings will be well worth it (and again, Sandi makes that point much better), with costs well below that of a high-fee mutual fund salescritter and possibly equivalent service. For others, saving a few hundred or even thousands of bucks a year will be worth going the DIY route and investing directly in the same ETFs these services use****.

Which of course brings me back around to The Value of Simple — the how-to guide to for all this ETF and investing stuff. You should at least read it so you know what you’re paying your robo-advisor (or human advisor) to do for you.

* – Why less than a week when the book doesn’t come out for almost two? Because it normally takes a few business days to ship, so if you order after ~Nov 26 it wouldn’t arrive until after Dec 1st anyway.
** – Also, all of the programmers/developers I knew were too busy doing something to try to improve cancer care and research. Priorities, I tell ya.
*** – Not to engage in fear-mongering. There’s no reason to suspect that any of them are on shaky footing, just talking about general competitive pressures. Also, your underlying holdings will be fine even if one does go under or get absorbed — the worst-case is more likely inconvenience and a triggering of capital gains in a non-registered account if funds have to be liquidated and converted to the new custodian’s nearly equivalent offerings.
**** – Of course, I come from the bias that DIY is not so hard and not so scary and lots of people could be doing it. If you’re stuck on the other side of the fence, then a robo-advisor is a much smaller hop from a “full”-service advisor.

I just changed my tires over to the winter rubber. It was a gorgeous day for it, but it made me reconsider what I’ve been doing.

It may surprise you to learn this, but not so very long ago I had something called “free time” — as a grad student (and then post-doc) I had a lot of flexibility in when I could show up to work. I didn’t have a daughter so I could do pretty much whatever I wanted to on the weekends. And I didn’t lose nearly 12 hours out of my week, each and every week, to the ever-fucking TTC. Because I didn’t make much at all, giving up some of my free time to save money was a good, good deal.

Back then I paid $20 each spring and summer to get my tires changed over. Well, the last time I went and had someone else do it they seriously scratched a hubcap trying to use a crowbar to take off a tool-less wheel cover, they said they were upping the price to $30 for a change over, and I had to spend nearly three hours to get it done between the drive there and waiting on-site. I said never again: I’d start doing my own tire change-overs. It’s not mechanically complicated, and a good wrench, jack, and jack stands were only a few hundred bucks — I’d make it back in just a few years. Plus it gave me the flexibility to do it on my schedule (like Sunday afternoons), something that suddenly mattered as I had just landed a “regular job.” An added bonus was that I wouldn’t have to remove the car-seat to fit the tires in, which would add an extra half hour or so to the process of going to a shop. Everything pointed to DIY tire change-overs. That Potatomas the in-laws got me a jack and stand kit and I was in business.

So I’ve done my own changeovers for a few years now. Each year I come out aching because I am too old for this ish. But it counts as exercise, so yay I guess. It takes me way longer than I ever expect — the first two times were nearly four hours, and even now that I’m better and faster it still takes at least two. But I can do it more-or-less on my schedule. And having a proper jack and practice came in handy when I got a flat and had to change it in sub-zero weather. The math has kind of balanced out and I have all the tools now, so I just keep going with it.

This fall’s iteration has changed the equation though: I ruined a pair of perfectly nice pants*. Now that’s partly my fault for not thinking ahead: I have not-nice pants and shirts specifically for tasks like that, so not getting changed into the proper attire was sheer idiocy. I keep thinking that my time is much more valuable these days and I should just pay someone, but it still takes about the same amount of time to go somewhere — and this year I was limited more by the never-ending fall drizzle than by weekend availability. And paying someone would entail a lot less effort and sweating — and I could possibly read or write something useful while in a waiting room somewhere.

Getting the equipment for changing my tires was going to lead me on a whole automobile maintenance self-sufficiency quest: next I would start doing my own oil changes, and well… actually, that was about as far as I ever intended to go. The pros can handle the rest. Anyway, ruining pants that were only a few months old has really thrown a wrench into the frugality aspect of DIY car maintenance — that’s like the cost of two changeovers right there. I like knowing that I can do it myself, and that it’s a minor challenge I have met, but it is not a fun pastime that I would do anyway. If I have to add in the cost of ruining clothing to the DIY column, taking the car to a shop looks a lot more appealing for this spring.

* – if you must know, by being fat and attempting to squat. Riiiiiip…

I have a few posts on the publishing process in the drafts folder, but I don’t plan on getting into that until a month or two after the book is released. However, I did want to talk briefly about pricing because I’m worried about a potential scam and other issues with the retailer listings of The Value of Simple.

The potential scam is that Indigo has a “used and rare” edition of the Value of Simple for sale. Rare is right — there are precisely 8 copies in existence* that are not currently in front of me. However, unless one of three reviewers has decided to flip their copy, the others are either accounted for or are still in the mail. The odds that someone actually has a copy at this point to be selling used is virtually zero — and they’re charging more for the used one than a new one, which also suggests a scam attempt.

The other pricing issue is that I set up the book’s barcode to encode a Canadian price of $16.95. It says in plain text “Canada $16.95” on the back (which you can clearly see in the back cover image on Amazon). It is listed (from what I can see) in Ingram’s distribution catalog as having a Canadian price of $16.95, and the Library and Archives Canada ISBN service has it at $16.95. The price, in other words, is clearly intended to be $16.95 in Canada. Yet Indigo has it at an “online price” of $17.05 (“regular $17.95”) and Amazon.ca at a whopping $19.xx! I’m not too concerned about ten cents at Indigo, so I haven’t been bugging them, but Amazon could make people angry by charging so much more than the clearly labelled price (and I don’t want them angry with me!)

It seems that there’s a behind-the-scenes aspect to Canadian pricing that I wasn’t told and didn’t consider: Amazon, and maybe even Chapters, may not pay the Canadian price when they buy the book wholesale from the distributor. Often, books have what I sometimes call “FU Canada” pricing, where the price is higher in Canada, and by a fair bit more than the fair exchange rate would suggest. I figured this is my book and it’s not for Americans so I wouldn’t set a USD price at all. At the last stage in listing it with Ingram for distribution I found I had to include a US price (their “choose only those markets you wish to distribute to” turned out to mean “choose only those markets in addition to the US that you wish to distribute to”). So, on the fly, I set a price a bit higher than simply the fair exchange rate (also to try to discourage an unwary US bookstore owner who didn’t read the description closely enough from ordering it and disappointing an American buyer). This seems to have backfired as now the Canadian stores (and Amazon.ca) are using prices higher than what’s listed. I’ve tried contacting Amazon. I had a friend try contacting Amazon as a concerned customer, and they told him the “manufacturer” (I thought for books the term was printer or publisher?) set $19.xx as the MSRP and they do not “fix the price.” Retailers are of course free to set their own prices above MSRP if they so choose and can make money doing it, but I don’t like the fact that Amazon seem to be saying that $19.xx** is the MSRP when clearly — clearly — it is not. Update: Amazon has lowered the price to $17.05. Close enough.

Hopefully that will get sorted out after release. And while I will welcome any sale through Amazon, so far I’m only linking to the (correct!) [the Kindle listing was correct out of the box:] Kindle listing because I don’t feel right pointing people to a price that’s incorrect by such a margin.

In the meantime, if you’d like to order a copy at the “proper” price of $16.95 (plus a nickle in rounding fees) there’s always my own store — and pre-orders will get free shipping and no tax. After the pre-order period though, if you have a lot of things on your shopping list (or even just multiple copies of the Value of Simple) it may be better to pay slightly more at the retailers because they’ll give you free shipping if your order is large enough (and through dark magicks and unholy pacts they can make a parcel arrive in a day whereas Canada Post will take at least four to deliver the ones I send).

Finally, a while ago (when I was still pushing Potato’s Short Guide to DIY Investing) I set up an author account at Goodreads. The way they handle common names (like mine) is quite frustrating: neither of my books is actually linked to my profile, and despite submitting two trouble tickets with their “librarians”, I’m still listed as authoring just one work: Is That Cat Dead?: And Other Questions about Poison Plants, which I didn’t actually write. I know what you’re thinking: “but Potato, are you sure you didn’t write that? It does sound exactly like the kind of book you would have written in March 2010 when you were procrastinating on submitting your doctoral thesis and were seriously sleep-deprived. You might just not remember.” And ok, there are blocks of time that I can’t really account for during that period, but I’m pretty sure I lost them to StarCraft 2 and Facebook, not writing a book about cats and poison plants.

* Outside of the Ingram printing facility, as I just got the email that the first print run is done.
** The $*.xx here is because the price is fluctuating ($19.34 one day, $19.29 the next), which also suggests that they are doing some funny conversion and mark-up math on the USD price rather than using the CAD price.

I was on Because Money recently, and the podcast and transcript are now up! We got together to discuss anonymous advice available on many online forums and blogs.

Leading up to the day of the podcast, I started with the assumption that there would be a lot of bad advice and we could spend a half hour lampooning it. But when I started to tabulate it I was amazed at how much good advice was there. These communities are so giving with their knowledge. In some few cases it will lead to sales leads, but mostly not (Reddit, for example, doesn’t even allow signature lines with links back to your website). Yet people with knowledge still give of their time — whether they’re paying it forward from getting helped when they were newbies themselves or just being altruistic, it’s kind of amazing.

There is bad advice too, just not as rampant as we thought it might be. So you have to use anything you read online as a starting point for more research because it’s hard to know whether the advice you’re getting is wrong (or some minor detail of the facts even if the main point is right).

And that leads me to the Paradox of Advice: those most in need of advice least able to discern who should give it.

The other major issue is that if you’re paying a few thousand dollars for a planner or money coach you can just unload everything and let them sort it out. You can’t do that to strangers freely giving of their time on the internet — you need to focus in on what your main question is. And in order to do that, you need to have some idea of the field so you can ask intelligent questions. Good, focused questions are key to getting good advice out of forums. So you have to keep in mind that any question you pose is not going to present a full technicolour image of your situation — it will be a stick figure at best. It’s up to you to make sure the right details are highlighted. As an example of what not to do, back when I was on RFD there was a standard response to questions of the form “what should I do with $X?”: “hookers ‘n blow.” There is no sensible way to answer it otherwise. To a large extent the amount of money a poster has makes very little difference, and “what should I do with it?” is just so open-ended. These blow-off answers were of course reserved for the (many) cases where the poster gave no other details or indication that they had read any of the other thousands of similar questions — or done any other background reading. The unfortunate conclusion is that you need to do some homework on your own before seeking advice.

Another area where anonymous advice can run into problems is the central theme of personal finance: “it depends.” There are so many answers, and none will be precisely right or helpful.

Think of the problem “I’m cold and there are wolves after me.” One very useful, straightforward answer might be to get a house or cabin and go live in there. You’ll be warm and it will keep the wolves out. One that might also work for someone is to get a lightsaber, and pretend it’s a tauntaun. Engineers might then go on a side rant about the R-values the wall insulation should have to properly keep out the cold and the howling, but that debate doesn’t necessarily invalidate the solution.

One point I didn’t think of during the podcast is how anonymous advice can be good: because it’s anonymous, free advice on the internet you should be immediately and automatically critical and skeptical of what is said. Whereas similar advice from a non-anonymous person who doesn’t have your best interests at heart (e.g. a salescritter with conflicting incentives and impressive-looking letters after their name) may not raise any warning flags for you.

“Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.” — Douglas Adams

There is a lot of ‘us’ out there. Amazing and wonderful, the lot of you. Freely giving of time and wisdom to help those with questions and doubts.

For those with questions, do try to make it as easy as possible on the volunteer counselors by doing some research first, and crafting good questions. For complex situations or even simple ones with overwhelming detail where free anonymous advice won’t do, there are always advisors, planners, coaches, educators, and geeks with spreadsheets available for hire.

I provided a table of three great options for index investing in The Value of Simple (excerpt in the last blog post). Why those three? Quite simply because they represent the best options available in the market, at various points of trading off cost and simplicity. Aside from paying an advisor to do it for you, nothing gets simpler than Tangerine’s single fund and super-simple website and tablet app. You don’t even have to call someone to set up a preauthorized purchase plan. Many fund companies have regular (no-load) mutual funds that track the main indexes, which will let you set up a good index portfolio with ~4 funds. However, rebalancing 4 funds is the level of difficultly that TD e-series sits at, and nothing is as cheap as that in the mutual fund game. Beyond mutual funds there are ETFs, which is where it gets as cheap as it possibly can, but at a significant step up in terms of difficultly. Questrade offers no-commission purchases, low commissions for sales, and accounts only have to have $5000 to avoid maintenance/inactivity fees.

Here’s a list of the other options, and why they didn’t make the book:

• BMO: Though BMO offers low-cost index funds traded on the stock exchange (ETFs), and in a quasi-Vanguard manner allows its mutual fund investors to invest in the same indexes, it does not manage to make the offering very attractive. Though you can buy in with as little as $50, the MER on their Canadian equity fund is 1.05% — barely a hair below Tangerine.
• CIBC: Index funds have high minimum purchase ($500) and high MERs — at 1.14% it’s higher than Tangerine’s.
• National Bank: Their index funds are moderately competitive, with MERs of just 0.66%. The funds are a little less diverse than I would like — the Canadian index tracks the TSX 60 rather than the full composite, and the US index tracks the Dow (30) rather than one of the larger indexes like the S&P500. The minimum initial investment is $500.
• PC Financial: It looks like PCF has recently updated their offerings to get closer to Tangerine. Their portfolios are marginally more expensive, and include more asset classes. Their “Balanced” fund, for example, has 50% fixed income, of which 5% (of the total fund) is in international bonds. The international equity component is split with separate European and Asia-Pacific indexes. Each fund “portfolio” has a slightly different MER; the balanced fund is 1.09%. Like their CIBC parent, they require $500 to invest at a time. PCF offers a 0.1% discount to the CIBC MER (it’s not clear from their website whether this is included in the MER listed), but this discount is distributed quarterly as extra units and counts as taxable income in non-registered accounts — a nightmare for bookkeeping in a non-registered account.
• RBC: Their index funds are not outrageous with MERs between TD’s e-series and Tangerine — but at 0.72% it’s still beaten by TD’s e-series.
• Scotiabank: The mutual funds arm of Scotia has high initial investment requirements ($1000) and with an MER of 1.00% on their Canadian Index fund they are not competitive with TD — it’s barely better than the simpler Tangerine.
• Scotia iTrade: Scotia’s discount brokerage arm was one of the first to come out with commission-free ETFs (mere weeks after the release of the first book, I might add). However, only a select list of ETFs are available, and none of them are the mainline ultra-low-cost broad indexes. You can build a decent portfolio from their offerings (e.g. to follow the broad TSX composite you would buy both HTX for the TSX 60, and XMD to cover the rest), but the average MER will be closer to ~0.3%, at which point TD’s e-series don’t look so bad, or for large accounts even paying the commission for XIC will put you ahead of using the list of free-to-purchase ETFs.
• QTrade: (Different from Questrade) has some commission-free ETFs; basically the same list as Scotia iTrade.
• Virtual Brokers: Very competitive with no-commission ETF purchases, but require $15,000 minimum account to avoid fees. This was basically a coin-flip as to whether I wanted to include it or not, and in the end I didn’t see anything from VB that Questrade wasn’t already offering, so I kept the line-up as simple as I could.

I was a little hesitant at first to recommend specific companies, but the fact is that they offer indisputable advantages for the reader, and giving detailed step-by-step instructions is only feasible with a few definite options.

For the average investor, a low-cost index investing approach is the easiest and simplest method available, and also provides the highest chances of long-term success. While there is a lot of material available on why investors should choose passive approaches over high-fee active mutual funds and what passive investing products exist, the average investor is at a loss on how to implement a passive index investing plan. The Value of Simple: A Practical Guide to Taking the Complexity Out of Investing provides a plain-language explanation of how Canadians can implement a low-cost index investing strategy, with step-by-step instructions and a focus on developing good investing processes. Coming December 1st.