Episode summary
Answering Your Financial Questions | Rational Reminder 414
The Rational Reminder Podcast
· · Hosts: Benjamin Felix, Ben Wilson
Summary
The episode is an AMA focused on practical investing and planning questions rather than market news. The host says the old Rational Reminder model portfolio still makes sense conceptually, but new Canadian products like CAGE make it easier to implement a similar factor-tilted portfolio in a single ETF. Simplicity is a recurring theme: the host and a guest argue that all-in-one funds reduce rebalancing friction and are often a better fit for DIY investors with busy lives.
The discussion also challenges some common assumptions about home-country bias, currency exposure, and retirement decumulation. For a U.S. investor, the host does not see a strong case against underweighting the U.S. below market cap, but cites Ken French’s argument that local investors may reasonably overweight home assets because of spending currency, taxes, and other frictions. On decumulation, they argue that using an asset-allocation ETF is not meaningfully different from managing stocks and bonds separately if the target mix is maintained.
Other questions cover leasing versus buying cars, whether USD-listed ETFs add currency diversification in an RRSP, which widely used ETFs to avoid, and why DCF valuation work often feels like noise. The most important thread is that PWL’s value proposition is planning-centric: portfolio management is only one part of helping clients make better long-term decisions.
Key takeaways
- The host still thinks the old Rational Reminder portfolio is reasonable, but says CAGE makes implementation much simpler for Canadian DIY investors.
- For a U.S. investor, the host does not think a 50% U.S. allocation is obviously wrong and says the case for home bias depends on taxes, spending currency, and local-market frictions.
- The host and a guest say asset-allocation ETFs are not a meaningful disadvantage in retirement decumulation if the investor keeps the target stock-bond mix.
- The host says leasing is usually a luxury, but can be financially close to buying if someone wants a new car every three to five years.
- The host argues that DCF outputs are often too sensitive to small assumption changes to be very reliable for stock selection.
Notable quotes
“there are now funds like Cage available in Canada, which is an asset allocation ETF using Avantis funds to build a single ticker ETF”
“I don't have great arguments against that. So if someone says I want to be 50% instead of like okay that's sure it's fine”
“I think you're just as you're in a very similar position if you're selling slices of V-Bell versus managing a 60 60% stock ETF and 40% bond ETF portfolio”
“my target price would swing wildly around uh with small changes to things like future revenue growth, steadystate revenue growth, uh, and the discount rate”
How the episode opens
This is the Rational Reminder podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making from two Canadians. We're hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, chief investment officer and portfolio manager, and Ben Wilson, head of M&A at PWL Capital.
Yeah, this is episode 414. We're doing another AMA. I think it's actually the first one of the 2026 calendar year. So excited to to get back into some questions, — Which means it's been like 6 months. — Yeah. — Is since we did an AMA. Um, a lot of people ask for more AMA episodes. People seem to like them a lot. Uh, we do still have a I mean, I was going through the questions to choose them for this episode. There's like over 300 in the bank.
Oh, wow. And that's from what I downloaded uh in December, I think. And so there's probably a bunch more that if I reopen the the form, there will be more AMA questions.
So, we're working through them slowly. Um but it's just, you know, between interesting guests that come up and timely topics that come up. Uh which just I don't know, we we fell out of the cadence of doing an AMA.
We were doing them very intentionally every third episode for a bit. We'll try and get back into it. Now, uh I do think we have some good questions.
We have some on the on the old rational minder model portfolios. An interesting question on what popular ETFs we would avoid, which is kind of hard to answer actually, but I tried to work through it. Uh, someone asked if we were wrong about Warren Buffett's long-term performance back in episode, I think it was 335
Where we talked about just Berkshire Hathaway's long-term performance relative to index funds and the implications of that.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- portfolio construction
- home-country bias
- currency exposure
- etf selection
- retirement decumulation
Companies and tickers mentioned
- VT
- PWL Capital
- Vanguard Balanced ETF
- Vanguard Total World Stock ETF
- Avantis Investors
- Dimensional Fund Advisors
- CAGE
Watch the episode
Watch “Answering Your Financial Questions | Rational Reminder 414” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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The Ethics Problem in Financial Services (Dr. Moira Somers & Philippa Hann) | Rational Reminder 425 -
50 Years of Evidence-Based Investing (with David Booth) | Rational Reminder 424 -
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The Rational Reminder Podcast, this episode and its artwork belong to Benjamin Felix, Cameron Passmore, and Dan Bortolotti. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; this page is an independent summary.
