Episode
Bonds In Canada: Seven Ways To Own Them, And Whether You Should?
- Podcast
- Calm Money Coach
- Published
- Sep 18, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 693
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/calm-money-coach-7769257/episodes/bonds-in-canada-seven-ways-to-own-them-and-whether-you-should/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/calm-money-coach-7769257/bonds-in-canada-seven-ways-to-own-them-and-whether-you-should.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
A bond matures. A bond fund never does. Almost everything confusing about owning bonds in Canada comes out of that one line. This is three pieces in one. The research on whether you should own bonds at all, the seven ways you can actually own them here, and the inflation-indexed floor most Canadians already own without seeing it on a statement. Part 1. The paper that says own zero bonds. Anarkulova, Cederburg and O'Doherty. 39 countries, 1890 to 2023, a million simulated lifetimes. All stocks, all the time, a 7 percent chance of running out of money against 19.7 percent for the funds that get more conservative as you age. They publish the price too: the average worst drop along the way is 55 percent, and 1 lifetime in 20 drops 76. Which models home bias for each coutnry. Then the part that rarely gets quoted. When they let the model pick the mix at every age instead of holding one for life, it buys 27 percent short-term government bills at 65, and by 68 it's back above 90 percent equity. So the argument was never whether. It's how many years, and when. It's a working paper rather than peer reviewed, and Emory funded it, not Dimensional. Both worth saying out loud. Part 2. Seven ways to own bonds in Canada. GICs, individual bonds, ladders, bond ETFs, all-in-one funds, target maturity funds, private credit. RBC alone runs 21 target maturity bond ETFs, so the menu is bigger than the decision. One question sorts all of it, and it isn't cost or yield: does the thing have an end date? Something that matures walks its price risk down to zero on a day you knew going in. XBB carries 6.73 years of duration today and will carry about 6.7 in 2041, because it sells bonds as they age out of the index and buys new ones. It isn't a bond, it's a permanent claim on the bond market. The…