New investors certainly have a lot to consider before jumping into this market. They need goals, a budget, a meeting with their financial advisor, all before sinking a penny into their Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA) or other investment account.
But let’s say you’ve done the heavy lifting and you’re now ready to start looking into investing. That means choosing something easy that can create a safe base for your portfolio. And if so, then I certainly have the one for you.
Choose an Index ETF
If you’re new to investing with zero experience, an index fund exchange traded fund (ETF) can be a great option. These funds provide several reasons to get into them, so we’ll first go over a few before getting into one particular option.
An Index ETF provides investors with diversification. You can hold a number of securities, all in one basket, spreading out your investment risk across multiple companies and sectors. This can help mitigate the impact of a single company’s performance, and keep your overall portfolio going upwards.
What’s more, these ETFs are low cost. Their expense ratios are paid out as fees charged by the fund, but are quite minimal, usually around 0.5% or even lower! This is a major advantage over actively managed funds, which can have far higher fees.
And again, ETFs are great to create a base for your portfolio. They can provide investors with long-term performance, and an index tends to perform well over the long term, with smaller increases in the short term as well. In fact, they can even match or indeed exceed actively managed funds.
One to consider
If you’re a new investor, then one I would consider is the Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap ex Canada Index ETF (TSX:VXC). Some of the reasons are listed above. The company offers a diverse strategy, tracking the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) Global All Cap ex Canada China A Inclusion Index.
This means it holds a variety of stocks around the developing and emerging markets around the world, but not Canada. This helps to spread your risk outside of Canada, reducing exposure to this market where investors tend to invest heavily.
And again, it has a very low management expense ratio (MER) at just 0.27% as of writing. So you’re boosting your long-term income, while keeping costs very low. Especially considering it also provides you with higher returns and a dividend yield currently at 1.66%.
What you could get
So let’s look at historical performance to see what investors could achieve over the next several years. VXC ETF has grown shares from $36.50 to $56 over the last five years. That’s compound annual share growth (CAGR) of 8.93% in that time! And a total of 53%. That’s incredible growth for a passive investing Index Fund.
So let’s say you were to invest $5,000 and see that income rise again. Here is what that could achieve in the next five years.
| COMPANY | RECENT PRICE | NUMBER OF SHARES | DIVIDEND | TOTAL PAYOUT | FREQUENCY | PORTFOLIO TOTAL |
| VXC – now | $56 | 89 | $1.10 | $97.90 | quarterly | $5,000 |
| VXC – 5 years | $85.60 | 89 | $1.10 | $97.90 | quarterly | $7,618.4 |
Now you have a total of $2,618.40 in returns, as well as dividend income of $97.90 per year. After five years, that’s $489.50! In total, you’ll then have created passive income of $3,107.90 from this one incredibly safe investment.
