Quick note before we start: this article shares general ideas about investment simplicity, consistency, and portfolio management. It's not personal financial advice.
This is Part 3 of a series on simplicity in investing. Read Part 1: Less Is More; Read Part 2: The Search for the Perfect Portfolio
Parts 1 and 2 of this series were about ideas. This one is a story. Mine.
It starts, like most of these stories do, with wanting to be good at something.
I’d learned the basics — diversification, asset allocation, index funds — and it felt like I’d found something solid. So naturally, I kept going. I found factor investing next: value, small-cap value, momentum. Suddenly investing wasn’t just sensible, it was interesting. I wasn’t chasing hot stocks. I was reading research, understanding why certain factors were supposed to outperform over time, and trying to build something smarter than “just buy the whole market.”
Every step made sense on its own. A factor with a reasonable theoretical basis. An ETF that implemented it efficiently. An account with a specific tax treatment that seemed to deserve its own strategy. One decision led to the next, and each one felt like progress.
It took about three years for me to look up and realize what I’d actually built.
Thirteen ETFs. Eight in U.S. dollars, five in Canadian. Five separate accounts, spread across two brokers — a Questrade TFSA, an IBKR TFSA, an IBKR margin account, a Questrade RRSP, an IBKR RRSP. Every one of them holding a slightly different piece of a strategy that existed mostly in my head.
I hadn’t made my portfolio better. I’d made it complicated. Those turned out to be two very different things.
The shift started at the beginning of 2025, and it wasn’t dramatic. There was no crash, no bad year, no single ETF that let me down. It was smaller than that — just the slow, accumulating weight of maintenance. Rebalancing meant touching five accounts instead of one. Tax season meant untangling foreign withholding tax across two currencies and trying to remember which fund lived where, and why.
I started consolidating. Fewer brokers. Fewer accounts. Fewer tickers.
It cost me something to do it — literally. Moving out of positions I’d held for a while meant realizing gains, which meant a real tax bill, not a hypothetical one. I paid it anyway. Simplifying isn’t always free, and I think it’s worth saying plainly: I paid to walk away from a system I’d spent three years building. It was still the right call.
The moment it actually clicked came about a year later, in early 2026, and it had almost nothing to do with the markets.
I changed jobs. Took on a more senior role. And somewhere in the adjustment that comes with that — more responsibility, less spare bandwidth, a different relationship with my own time — something reorganized itself in how I thought about my portfolio.
I remember the thought arriving almost fully formed: attention is the scarce resource here. Not returns.
I’d spent three years treating my time and focus as if they were free — as if the only real cost of a more sophisticated portfolio was the effort of building it once. But effort doesn’t stop at the build. It shows up again every rebalance, every tax season, every time a new factor or fund caught my attention and I felt obligated to go compare it. I’d been paying that cost quietly for years without ever putting it on the ledger.
And once I actually looked at the ledger, the other side of it became obvious too: how much I was able to invest every year was doing far more work than any amount of portfolio optimization ever would. If my savings rate was the real engine, squeezing another fraction of a percent out of factor tilts and tax-location gymnastics wasn’t nothing — it just wasn’t worth what it was costing me to chase it.
That reframe changed the question I was asking. Not “how do I make this portfolio better?” but “is this the best use of my attention?” Once I asked it that way, the answer wasn’t close.
Today, the whole thing is almost boring to describe.
Everything sits on a single platform now. My core holding is one broad, all-in-one fund — nothing exotic, nothing that needs tinkering, nothing I have to think about twice a year, let alone twice a month. I don’t check it. I don’t compare it. I don’t wonder if something else out there is doing better. It just runs.
I kept one small space for the parts of investing I still genuinely enjoy — a separate RRSP account I think of as a sandbox. I built the allocation once, and I let myself revisit it under a single rule I set in advance, back when I wasn’t in the middle of deciding anything: one day, once a year, to review the sandbox and rebalance if it needs it. That’s it. That account runs on automated investing too, so even there, the actual mechanics are just a button, or a deposit. The core portfolio doesn’t need automation at all — there’s nothing left in it to automate.
I don’t regret the three years I spent going deep on factor investing. I understand markets better because of it, and that knowledge wasn’t wasted just because I don’t act on most of it anymore.
What I’d change, if I could go back, is the assumption that every new thing I learned had to turn into a new decision. You can read about a factor without adding it to your portfolio. You can find a slightly cheaper ETF without switching to it. Learning and acting are not the same thing — I just didn’t see the difference clearly until I’d already built a five-account, two-broker, thirteen-ETF system to teach it to myself the hard way.
The takeaway
I didn’t simplify because my strategy was failing. I simplified because I finally noticed what it was costing me to keep improving something that didn’t need improving — and because how much I invested mattered more than how cleverly I invested it.
There’s nothing wrong with learning, researching, or optimizing. But all of it has a price, paid in attention. At some point, the best decision isn’t to find a better portfolio.
It’s to stop looking for one, and get back to your life.
Build a good portfolio. Make it simple. Stay consistent. And let investing become boring enough that you can get on with everything else.
Related articles
- Part 1: Less Is More: Why Simplicity Works in Investing
- Part 2: The Search for the Perfect Portfolio: Why Good Enough Can Be Better
- Investing for Beginners in Canada: A Step-by-Step Guide
Sources and further reading
Disclaimer: This article is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial, investment, tax, legal, or other professional advice. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results. The examples and opinions presented are general in nature and may not be appropriate for your individual circumstances. Before making investment decisions, consider your own financial situation, objectives, risk tolerance, time horizon, tax situation, and investment knowledge. If you are unsure about what is appropriate for you, consider consulting a qualified financial professional.