Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for February 17th, 2009

Stats Canada published an interesting set of figures yesterday reflecting that Canadians (as a group) are getting out of and staying away from foreign debt instruments, but also are selling foreign securities.

Foreign equities were also sold, as Canadian investors shed $6.4 billion of foreign securities over the month. This was the fourth month of divestment in foreign securities. In stark contrast to 20 consecutive years of significant portfolio investment abroad, Canadian investors reduced their holdings of foreign securities in 2008, returning funds to the Canadian economy.

So Canadians are taking a “Buy Canadian” policy when it comes to securities, which is interesting, does this mean Canadians don’t trust foreign investments, or simply it is Canadians bailing out of all investments and this is a reflection of the great exodus from the marketplace?

The more interesting remark made at the end of this report was:

Overall, Canadian stock prices retreated 35% in 2008, the largest annual decline since 1931. This translated into moderate net sales for this instrument on secondary markets for the year.

That is a very interesting number, to me, and it makes me ask a few questions of my own investments:

• Did my investments drop by 35% over this year? If it was more then I need to rethink my investments.
• If less then maybe it wasn’t such a bad set of investments.

Some more data to compare your performance against is always useful when you are looking at the performance of your investments.

Why are Canadians investing less in Foreign investment vehicles? Any opinions out there?