Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of April 14, 2015

Article Excerpt

To deal with the fragmented-portfolio syndrome, you need to look at all your holdings as if they were in one big account. Today, many households and even some individuals have five or 10 separate investment accounts. These accounts may include RRSPs (regular and spousal), TFSAs and other registered accounts, personal and joint accounts, corporate accounts, LIRAs from past employment, children’s accounts, trust accounts and so on. In addition, some investors have one or more of what you might call “legacy” accounts. These are accounts with brokers you no longer do business with, but you never quite get around to transferring. This fragmented-portfolio situation is more common than you’d guess. Many investors deal with it by adding up the total value of their accounts from time to time, to calculate their net worth. Most also look for performance discrepancies among accounts. But all too many take little more than an occasional glance at the relative weight of the various securities they own. They…