An anniversary to remember

"Economics as a subject matter is normally lacking in drama; change for better or worse is incremental and often discovered in a scholarly way only after the fact."

And so the brilliant John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in his book, A Journey Through Economic Time, then going on to name one notable exception: Black Tuesday.

Today is the 79th year anniverssary of the infamous stock market crash of 1929, that sparked the Great Depression. If the great Galbraith had lived, he would now have two exceptions as we are in the midst of a similar historic economic time, the credit crisis of 2008.

It's important to pay tribute to this significant moment in world history. The lessons learned during that time has given us great insight to deal with our present day problems, while serving as a precendent regarding how weak the economy can get.

79 years ago.

Got to be...Are you underperforming or outperforming your relative benchmark?

Wow, so sorry fans, it has been ages, since I've written....The last couple of months have been incredibly intense, and while I've been tempted to write on several occasions, the dynamic at the office has been such that's it has been hard to tear myself away from the day-to-day. Very unwise, said the incredibly helpful SEO consultant, I met at an expo a couple weeks back.

"You got to be blogging at least 2 or 3 times a week," he said.
"But..."
"Got to be."
"But, the purpose of us having a corporate blog was to give Canadians insight regarding our thoughts in improving the retail investment industry, giving them a pulse for the way our company thinks and believes. We weren't really thinking about search engine results."
"Got to be."

Okay, with "Got to be" the theme for this blog entry, I will proceed. Obviously, writing a blog entry once every month is a little too infrequent. I acknowledge that.

Anyway, if you are a subscriber to this blog, you are fully aware of the state of the economy. Many of you have probably inundated yourselves with all sorts of commentary about what's going on. You can pretty much find a pundit point in every direction. Up...down....sideways.

As horrific as this loss of wealth has been for Canadians, for the first time since Onus was founded, people are engaged. They are conscious of what's going on. This concern, although it has come with a cost, should be cause for victory in the sense that many Canadians are no longer taking anything for granted and are asking the right questions.

Listen, people, there's no sugar coating it. A financial advisor that says that his clients are completely unscathed is either inaccurate or lying (for me to say which would be inappropriate, for I would have to qualify their intentions). If you have any exposure to the markets, your portfolio has suffered. The relevant question is: By how much? Was your asset allocation appropriate?

If you have questions regarding your current situation, allow me to outline an important one and give you the tools to answer it: How is your porfolio doing compared to your relative benchmark? A relative benchmark tells you the performance of your investment portfolio relative to a market index (for example, the Dow Jones Industrial Index). Money managers and investment analysts are evaluated by their ability to outperform their relative benchmark. As a client paying active management fees (assuming you're not employing indexing strategies), you're paying for your investments to be able to do better than the respective index. Otherwise, you could seriously reduce your fees by investing in index funds or ETFs while getting better returns then an active manager.

How do you calculate the return of your relative benchmark?

If your advisor and you have not predetermined the benchmark that will be used to evaluate your returns (material that should be in your Investment Policy Statement), visit www.showmethebenchmark.ca set up by my hero, Warren MacKenzie, and other fee-based financial advisors. Calculate your relative benchmark using the Benchmark Calculator and compare them to your returns. It is an excellent way of judging your financial advisor's (or, for that matter, your own) performance.

It's safe to say if you underperform your relative benchmark once over the last five years, it isn't grounds alone to conclude unsatisfactory financial advice. However, if year after year, you're underperforming your relative benchmark, you should take more than a moment to evaluate your current situation.

Do you know the answer to this question? Got to be.