iShares Core Growth ETF Portfolio (XGRO.TO)

A fund of funds, which he's not a fan of. He'd rather go with just one fund. Fee is OK at 0.2%. His biggest issue is how it allocates by country -- 56-60% is exposed to NA, not the rest of the world. 

The split is ~80% equities, 20% fixed income. Taking on above-average risk, so the range of returns might be +/- 30%. Performance YTD is a bit below average. Last year was great. But 5-year average only ~10%.

Instead, the place to go would be with an all-world ETF that's equally balanced. Make sure it's not heavily weighted to tech or the flavour-of-the-month. (He's not an ETF expert.)

80% equity, 20% fixed income. Great for the average investor. The one you want when you're bullish on equities. When you're defensive, you go into the balanced or conservative version which brings you down to 60/40 or 40/60 equities to bonds.

Right now, way too early to be bullish on equities. At some point in the next 6 months (ballpark: below 5000 on the S&P 500, and maybe even below 4500), it will be time to be much more growth oriented. Now is not the time.

VGRO and XGRO are going to give you broad, market-cap-weighted exposures. 

The Fidelity factor-investing ETFs are going to get rid of some of the companies that they believe are going to underperform. In theory, the Fidelity ETF should give you a better longer-term outcome. He likes factoring a lot.

The problem with all of them is the bond side. Helpful that interest rates have normalized. But, going forward, fixed income is just not going to give the average investor the best risk mitigation. He encourages people to look at the BMO line of buffered ETFs, which give you the potential of equities with the risk mitigation that most are looking for.

For an RESP, you would want to be more aggressive. He recommends VXC, which is a multi-asset ETFs. They are 60-40 allocations. He likes XGRO as well. He uses these funds for his clients for their children. VXC is more aggressive and it also gets rebalanced quarterly.