There are basically two types of portfolio’s you should look at (unless you’re a sucker and want to try and beat the market.  The finance industry made 650B last year.  Where do you think that came from?  Trading fees and MER.  They took money out of the market.  Good luck with that).

1. Couch Potato – not considered that risky, but you would have been down 50% this year.  Better than choosing yourself and you can sleep at night
   1. Fixed income equivalent to your age (I have 35% of my portfolio in fixed income.  Mike, you’d have more like 25% of your portfolio in fixed)
   2. Index funds (don’t buy sectors.  Buy the whole damn market, like Canada, US, Int’l.)
      1. Cheap mutual funds (if you buy regularly) – I’m talking 0.3% MER (TD Mutual funds, if you’re with TD are this cheap)
      2. Cheap ETF’s if you buy them one-time – I’m talking 0.15% MER (like iShares)
2. Black swan – you cannot lose more than 10% of your whole portfolio with this approach
   1. 90% of your portfolio in fixed income (yes.  I said 90%)
   2. 10% of your portfolio in super risky crazy-ass next-generation technologies that could take off (nano-tech, embro-freezing, weird-ass shit that might multiply 1000x)

So no doubt, you're going to see the press/blogs around the US (+ some other markets) as we launch the new Live Search 2.0 experience and you're wondering what about us canucks?  Well I'm happy to say that this Friday we'll be launching our new search experience for us in Canada (and yes in English and French).  So, what's coming?

Better Performance

• 4X the index size (boo-yah!)
• Much better relevance and query intent
• New results UI (fonts, colours, text, sizes, wording, etc.)
• Better integration with Windows Live and Sympatico/MSN (via the standardized header)
• Faster results
• More images in our sick image search experience

On the horizon

• New homepage for Canada
• More kick-ass relevance improvements (like query refinement!)
• Better integration with Windows Live Translator
• Updated mapping experience

Are you excited?  Try it out at www.live.ca after Friday, and send me your feedback.

Important:  Make sure your browser language (in IE or Firefox) is set to EN-CA/FR-CA to ensure the most relevant and performant (is that even a word?) experience.