Studies have shown that women make good investors. What's more, a study released by Fidelity Investments in 2021 found that investment accounts controlled by women outperformed those controlled by men by an average of 40 basis points over a 10-year period.
Yet the same study found that only 9% of women thought they made better investors than men.
Young people are often said to be the target market for ETFs, and many of them will have questions about this investing vehicle. For example, Meghan McCarthy, a third-year finance student at Bishop’s University, interned for me in Summer 2022. She had so many great questions about ETFs that we made our conversation a two-part series.
As young people embark on a lifetime of saving and investing, they need to understand the role of ETFs in the investment landscape. If we want to serve our clients’ children, we must be comfortable teaching the basics of investing.
I had the opportunity over the summer to hire Meghan McCarthy, a third-year finance student at Bishop’s University, as an intern. She told me she was curious about ETFs and didn’t really understand how they differed from mutual funds.
Here, I share her questions and my answers to help you understand what young investors need to know about ETFs.
The RESP my husband and I set up over 25 years ago has been instrumental in funding my children’s school expenses, in no small part thanks to my ETF portfolio investment strategy.
When I created my portfolios over 10 years ago, I used them across my family accounts for our investments. The children were still young and I adopted a dynamic investment profile for their RESPs. Since it would be several years before I intended to withdraw money from the account and I had the flexibility to wait out any market corrections, I was comfortable using a 100 per cent equities portfolio.
In my own money management practice, I experimented with many investment styles over the years before adopting an ETF strategy following the great financial crisis. As I explained in my last article, I found the simple fact that most active managers do not outperform their benchmark index very compellingly. From that point on, I worked with unwavering conviction to build portfolio models based on an ETF strategy.