Use Portfolio to Diversify your Investments

This video will show you how to use Portfolio to Diversify your Investments and ensure your holdings are diversified across the various metrics.

In this video I will show you how I use the portfolio functionality. Of course, you can use it any way it makes sense to you.
I will be using the premium site and the sample portfolio Geremy. Let’s get to it.

An aside here. Notice this timestamp – it will indicate when the reports were produced and how up to date the market data is. It’s available on most pages in the system.

The portfolio functionality was designed to answer this very basic and highly important question. How does my next purchase or sale position my portfolio better? Say you have 10K to invest – how do you know where is it best to invest it in?

Before the portfolio functionality you could just look for the highest yielding preferred with the best rating, or any of the other metrics we provide. Making a decision of what to buy, separate from what your portfolio needs are, works great if you have only a few holdings.
When you already have a portfolio with substantial holdings, getting the highest yielding security is not what you might want. This new portfolio functionality helps you consider the following:

• Summary of holdings by account type and account groups.
• Overall portfolio
• Registered group
• TFSA group
• Investment group.
• And at the lowest level, the account itself.

Within each reporting group you can see the following information:

By Holding:
Sort by “Current Market Value”. Now you can see what issues you hold the most of. Maybe you should be keeping this percentage to a level that makes you feel comfortable. Let’s say this is 5%.
Look at column “As a % of Current Market Value”. Now you see the first 5 holdings are above this limit. You should consider reducing these positions, or at the very least, do not add to them. Also, how did you get to this point. Using the portfolio, you can avoid similar situations in the future.

By Issuer:
Again, here we see a similar situation. The top 7 are more than 5%. And the top 3 are more than 10%.

By Share Type:
Breakdown by share type is also valuable when repositioning or fine tuning the portfolio. In this view after sorting by “Market Value”, you can see that 50% is 5 year resets, followed by perpetuals at 30%.

By credit rating:
Sort by “Current Market Value”. Now you see the quality of your holdings as evaluated by the standard – DBRS Morningstar – Dominion Bond Rating Service. Are you happy with what you see? Do you want to reduce or increase risk? Do you have a goal in mind of how to position your portfolio by credit rating? This report should help.

By sector:
This is a difficult category since 70% of preferreds fall within the financial sector. I have taken Insurance and Banking out for better visibility. I hope this breakdown helps some of you. Also if you have any ideas on how to further defined the sectors please send me a note.

By Dividends:
The last section for now is the dividends. As with most of these reports I will adding further information.
Here, you see where the dividends are coming from. Sort on “% of total dividend” to put these amounts in context.

We try to provide you with information we believe will help you navigate the Preferred shares market.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have contacted us with questions, corrections and suggestions. You have helped shape the format and functionality of this website.

Till our next video, thank you for watching!