First Portfolio Update Since Starting at Clearsight

It was quite a while ago, in March of this year, when I completely switched to my advisor at Clearsight and left the self-directed RRSP days at TD Canada Trust behind. I just realized looking back at that article that I never actually gave the final portfolio that my advisor and I decided on. At least I couldn’t find the post. Well here’s what I initially bought back in March (book value from middle of March):

I just visited my advisor last week and he updated me on the performance of all the funds/ETFs and his thoughts on how they had all done. He had printed charts from Morningstar’s website and we mainly just looked at the 3-month performance figures to get an indicator of how they had done since I had bought them. Normally I woould not care about something like that but after not having looked at my portfolio at all since I invested, I was very curious. It turned out that all of the funds lost out to their respective indexes (I think). Here is the picture now (market value as of June 30, 2006):

Ok, so that barely changed. And those numbers no longer add up to 100% due to round-off error. The value of my portfolio has dropped by 2.8%. It could have been a lot worse if it was not for the 25% I have allocated in bonds and the 11% I have in cash (I have left cash out of the picture in the above).

Anyways, I have about $2962 in cash built up from monthly contributions and my wife has $4165 built up. Our advisor though it would be a good idea to put my wife’s cash into more of TD Canadian Bond Fund. It is a little bit strategic on our part but I will never complain about having lots of fixed-income conservative investments in my portfolio. On the other hand, what we are doing might be akin to what I talked about in a previous article called “How Not to Rebalance.” Let me know what you think.