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portfolio strategy

How you judge your investing results this year as a user of exchange-traded funds will depend in large part on what Canadian-market ETF you use. There are 10 that will give a broad exposure to the Canadian stock market and there's a huge gap of 20 percentage points between the best and worst performers for the year to date. These returns don't tell you anything about where these ETFs are headed from here, but they do highlight the important differences in the way all of these funds go about their business.

Here's a close-up look at your Canadian market ETF choices, ranked by year-to-date returns.





ETFs that the experts choose
We asked some money managers who use ETFs to tell us their go-to fund for the Canadian stock market. The virtually unanimous reply: the iShares CDN LargeCap 60 Index Fund (XIU-T), which tracks the S&P/TSX 60 index. Here are their comments on this ETF

Jeff Black, Crestridge Asset Management: "Few large-cap active equity managers have outperformed the S&P/TSX 60 over the long term on a consistent and reliable basis."

Vikash Jain of archerETF Portfolio Management "Its 60 stocks cover three-quarters of total market cap … there's also BCA - BMO's new replica of the XIU. But why bother when it costs the same and all the liquidity is in XIU?"

Adrian Mastracci of KCM Wealth Management (Uses XIU, with a sprinkling of CRQ) "They represent some of the biggest Canadian companies and are core holdings."

Tyler Mordy of Hahn Investment Stewards
"Low cost, highly liquid and broadly diversified."

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