Buying and selling stocks without having to pay any trading commissions is a relatively recent innovation. One one hand, it’s increased financial inclusion: more people have access to invest their hard-earned money because the barrier to investing is lower than ever. On the other hand, it’s also increased access to bad investing behaviour for the same reason. Investors on Robinhood (free trading app) traded stocks 40 TIMES as much per dollar invested compared to investors at Charles Schwab. And they traded options contracts (which can be incredibly risky) 88 TIMES MORE. NYTim ..read more

Dan Bortolotti is the creator of the Canadian Couch Potato blog, and host of the Canadian Couch Potato podcast. He is THE authority on index investing in Canada and has just written a new book, Reboot Your Portfolio (Amazon affiliate link). Dan joined me to explain what the book promises readers, and to discuss his journey from before knowing anything about investing himself, to becoming the writer behind the incredibly popular Canadian Couch Potato blog, and then eventually becoming a portfolio manager and financial planner. We cover a range of topics in this interview, including ..read more

Welcome to the 100th and final episode, at least for a while, of Mostly Money.  I wanted to have a special guest for this send off show, and I don’t think I can top who offered to help me out. You know when people say, our next guest needs no introduction? That is actually true in this case. He is a Canadian icon. A broadcasting legend. This guy walks into a room and time stops. And let me tell you, it really is an honour that the one and only Peter Mansbridge is my special guest today. With 50 years at the CBC, culminating in the top job, anchor of The National for many of those years ..read more

Timea Nagy (@timeascause on twitter), joins me on the podcast to talk about how she turned her first-hand knowledge of being a human trafficking survivor into an asset to help financial institutions and law enforcement agencies investigate similar crimes. She explains the financial transactions that can help piece together the red flags, recounts stories of how she sometimes had to transport rescued victims from assailants with firearms, and more. You can listen to the episode here. You can learn more about Timea on her website here. Visitors to the blog can also used the embedded player belo ..read more

Andrew Kirkland is the CEO of Justwealth, a Canadian robo-advisor. He swung by the Mostly Money studio to explain their offering and to compare it to the other options available to investors in Canada. Andrew very kindly brought some “mushroom coffee” for me to try, and I have to say it was quite an interesting taste. It tasted mostly like a very smooth coffee, with a bit of an essence of mushroom. That may or may not sound appetizing, but it was quite nice. You can click here to access the podcast on your podcasting service of choice. As always, ratings on iTunes are appreciat ..read more

Neil Pasricha is the New York Times bestselling author of ‘The Book of Awesome’, and his new book ‘You Are Awesome’ hits stores on November 5th, 2019. Neil dropped by to have a fascinating chat about resilience, intentional living, and to share his philosophy on life and happiness. You can buy his new book on Amazon (affiliate link) or anywhere books are sold ..read more

Good friend of the show, Ben Rabidoux, returns to share his insights into what’s been happening in Canadian real estate in 2019 so far. You can follow Ben on twitter: @BenRabidoux You can learn more at his website: www.NorthCove.net ..read more

Jamie Mason Cohen is a friend of mine that I met in the last few years on the professional speaking circuit. He is a certified grapho-therapist and leadership strategist whose TEDx talk on how to spot a leader through their handwriting has been viewed more than 1.6 million times. His unique and unusual ability to analyze people’s handwriting in less than 60 seconds has been called “impressive and a bit frightening” by Forbes Jamie and I thought it would be fun to talk about handwriting analysis and specifically in relation to money personality traits. In our conversation, he analy ..read more

I spoke with David Bach about his latest book, The Latte Factor. David has written nine consecutive New York Times bestsellers, with over seven million copies in print collectively. He popularized The Latte Factor as a concept many years ago, so I was actually surprised that a book by that name didn’t already exist. I remember first learning about him from his appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show maybe 15 years ago or so. In our conversation, we talk about the core themes of the story in this book. We talk about how people quibble with the 10% rate of return projections, fintech ..read more

Have you ever heard of someone use the phrase, “free money”? They may have a tendency to freely spend that “free money” because they see it as somehow different than any other type of money. Money is fungible (meaning $1 in income has the same value as $1 in inheritance). But we humans may not see it as such. In my latest column for The Globe and Mail, I spoke with Professor Dilip Soman, the director of BEAR (Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman) at the University of Toronto* about “mental accounting”, a topic that he has studied extensively over his career that can help explain this p ..read more