Increased My XIC Position

After Canadian equities fell a lot on Monday (followed by some big losses the week before) I was curious to see how far out of balance my portfolio was. So I plugged my portfolio’s numbers into a spreadsheet I use to balance my portfolio (I would share that spreadsheet but it’s a bit hard to use). It turned out that Canadian equities were the furthest out of whack in percentage terms. The portion of Canadian equities in my portfolio was 20% less than what it started out as (and what I intend it to always be at). I checked out how much cash I had in my RRSP and it was about $1,700. I normally wait until I have $2,000 and just buy something as soon as I notice that my cash balance has exceeded that target. Anyways, I bought $1,700 worth of XIC when the TSX was down about 600 points and got lucky because the next day it was up again and now it’s up over 2.5%. It’s hard to say if this is market timing or not (when I was going to buy some XIC anyways as soon as I had over $2,000 in cash, which would be by February 1, 2008). The one thing I am disappointed about is the fact that I bought and ETF with less than $1,700 and paid a $19.99 commission. I had set a threshold for myself of $2,000 to help minimize transaction costs. In hindsight one could argue that the gains I made offset those costs, however, hindsight is 20/20, and on Monday no on could have predicted what was going to happen on Tuesday. How do I know this? Well everyone would be buying on Monday but they weren’t.