How Canada’s Banks Let Canadian Investors Down: Part 2 of 7

Most Canadian investors don’t realize that their banks walk all over them—hanging heavily weighted costs on their investment products which can hamper would-be flourishing nest eggs.

We’ve learned the importance of fighting for great mortgage rates, understanding that our banks don’t usually offer competitive rates unless we barter for them.  And we’re starting to learn, slowly, that the same rule applies with our investments.

When it comes to the performance of an overall portfolio, the lower the fees, the higher the long term returns for investors.  The higher the fees, the larger the long term returns for the banks.  It’s our choice.

Today, I’m going to focus on Toronto Dominion Bank. 

And over the course of this series, I’ll examine the comparative returns of what the banks want you to buy, juxtaposed with the lower cost alternatives that you could be buying instead.

Here are two of the most important investment rules:

1. Diversify your investments
2. Keep your costs low

Many representatives at the Canadian banks do a fine job diversifying the investment products of Canadians.  But they don’t generally like selling you low cost products.  And not doing so can be highly detrimental to investors.

Assume an equal allocation between the following markets:

1.  The Canadian stock market
2.  The U.S. stock market
3.  The International stock market
4.  The Canadian bond market

In other words, imagine that your portfolio was split evenly between the above stock and bond markets.  Assume $10,000 invested in each, for a $40,000 portfolio.

Let’s also assume that you invested this $40,000 ten years ago (December, 2001)

Here are the results of the following funds, as they would have performed from December 2001 to December 2011, if $10,000 were invested in each fund.  But remember, it’s the bottom line that we’re interested in.  We’re not supposed to get wrapped up in the performance of a single fund versus another single fund.  We want to know how the total high-cost portfolio will perform, versus a total low cost portfolio invested in the same asset classes.  Here’s the high cost portfolio below.  And it’s the kind of portfolio that the banks like putting together.

 Above, you can see that some of the funds have performed better than others over the past decade.  This is simply because certain markets have outperformed others during the past ten years.  For instance, you can see that the TD  Canadian Equity  fund has easily beaten the TD International Value fund.  This doesn’t mean that you should pile your new money in the funds that have done the best, geographically.  Many people fall into this trip.  The decade that follows could see a reversal in the fortunes of these funds.

There are two important rules in investing:

1.  Diversify your investments (as we did with the above portfolio)
2. Keep your investment costs low (which the above portfolio fails to do) 

Now let’s invest in the same geographical asset classes (giving us diversification) while buying funds with lower fees through TD Bank.  These funds are called Indexes.  They’re cheaper, and reams of academic evidence suggest that over an investment lifetime, they will make you much more money than you would otherwise make with a portfolio of the banks’ favorites—the actively managed funds that they wish you would buy instead.

Overall, you can see that this lower cost portfolio outperformed the higher cost portfolio:  $48,154 for the higher cost portfolio versus $51,221 for the lower cost portfolio.

Sometimes, an expensive fund can beat a cheaper fund.  You can see an example with $10,000 invested in the TD Canadian Equity Fund and the TD Canadian Index Fund:  December 2001 to December 2011

The more expensive fund actually came out ahead.  Professional fund managers took greater risks to achieve higher returns, and it paid off.  But over a long period of time, it’s very difficult to know which funds will outperform others over the long haul.  And the winning TD fund above is very likely to get caught (and passed) by the lower cost example.

As Princeton University Economics professor Burton Malkiel suggests, the only clear determinant of high performance over time is low fees, not high historical performance.  Looking in the rear-view mirror at yesterday’s winners, as he suggests, is a poor investment strategy.

If it’s unlikely that a high cost fund (in the same asset class) will beat a low cost fund, then the unlikelihood compounds further when we compare an entire high cost portfolio with an entire low cost portfolio.

What if we invest in the same asset classes as above, but we lowered the fees still further?  Yes, my hard bargaining mortgage buyers.  You can do this.

Here’s the same kind of portfolio, with even cheaper TD funds.  These are the funds they really don’t want you buying.  But as mentioned, I’ll eventually show you (in my follow-up articles) how you can do it.

TD’s lowest cost funds are the e-Series funds—the Jedi Knights of the Canadian fund industry.  Build a portfolio with these funds, and you will very likely double the long term returns of the average Canadian over your lifetime.

Let’s have a look at the bottom lines of the comparative portfolios:

• Portfolio 1 (High cost, actively managed): $48,154
• Portfolio 2 (Lower cost, indexed): $51,221
• Portfolio 3 (Lowest cost, indexed): $53,285

For larger portfolios—those exceeding $120,000–you can find an even lower cost option than portfolio 3.  And yes, the returns would be even higher.

But this series is based on building portfolios from scratch, or with less than $120,000 to invest.

Stay tuned, I have other eye-opening data to share in my series.

And of course, much more detail can be found in my book, Millionaire Teacher. It can be ordered on Amazon Canada here,  or on Amazon USA here.