Q: I am 72 and retired. I have been building a part of my portfolio (58.4%) for the last three years with ETFs. Current holdings are (% weight of portfolio in brackets): zwh (10.5), zwu (9.1), zwc (8.5), mft (5.9), xtr (5.3), xhy (5.2), zwe (4.7), cdz (3.2), zdh (3.2) & zre (2.9). With 24.2% cash, I plan on slowly adding to these etfs. How would you do this? The remainder of my portfolio is in dividend paying Canadian large caps.
Thanks, Jim

Q: Last year, I purchased ZDH in my mother's retirement account. She is close to 80. It has been a very poor performer, significantly underperforming the international indexes. Performance seemed to be reasonable prior to the market drop in the last few months. Morningstar now rates both ZDI (unhedged) and ZDH (hedged) as two stars, and it now falls to the 4th quartile for most time periods.

I would appreciate your views about ZDH. Would you continue to hold this ETF expecting that it will start to outperform the market, or would you sell it? Do you feel that it has dropped a lot since January due to its sector composition, and will bounce back? If you would sell it, what would you recommend? Dividends are not a priority, but looking for low to medium risk.

Thanks for your excellent advice.

Q: I am retired and hold the above ETFs in my RIF, TFSA accounts. Please advise which ETFs you would hold in this environment and which are duplicated. I am looking for stability and safe dividends. Thanks for your input.