Loonie Doctor 2025 Highlights

This past year was a busy one for us personally. I had a big, round-number birthday and a milestone wedding anniversary, bought a cottage, and we added a second puppy to our pack.

Having a puppy is like an accelerated trip through the infant, toddler, and teenager phases of having a kid. Minus the protection of diapers, and with sharper teeth.

Despite the sleep deprivation and constant supervision requirements, I made progress on The Loonie Doctor’s mission to empower, inspire, connect, and collaborate. Thanks for being a part of that!

In this post, I’ll put some numbers to that. I will also highlight my most popular posts & some of my less viewed but very valuable ones (in my opinion). Plus, I’ll outline my plans for 2026.

The Blog Numbers

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Blog Traffic

I think that the blog is maturing. Don’t worry, I am not. This year saw the traffic plateau. However, traffic remains excellent for a Canadian finance blog. Particularly a niche one that targets obscure topics in detail and isn’t very click-baity.

Importantly, my ranking for some of my most important keywords rocketed this year (according to Wincher). I spent most of the year in the top 10 for “DIY Investing”. The Loonie Doctor also hit the top 20 for “corporation investing” and The Money Scope Podcast episodes about corporate investing have also been floating around in the top 10. Only some large banks, firms, and regulatory bodies had higher-ranking pages.

Most (93%) of my traffic came from Canada. Engagement remained high, with an average of 2-3 pages per visit and an average time on site of 2-4 minutes per visit (an eternity in Internet Time).

This was the first year that most of my traffic (52%) came from people who went directly to Loonie Doctor. That suggests that www.looniedoctor.ca is in people’s bookmarks. If not, you might want to reflect on your life choices. Better yet, take corrective action. For the rest of my traffic, about 38% was organic via Google searches, and 10% from social media. My guess is that the FB traffic came primarily from the private Physician Financial Independence (Canada) Group with ~41K members and the Index Fund & ETF Investing for Canadians Facebook Group, which has grown to 13.4K members. I am active in those groups, alongside many knowledgeable people who offer different perspectives.

Empowering Investors

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DIY Investor Hub

My DIY Investor Hub has proven popular and helpful for those seeking education, a step-by-step guide, and mentorship for making the move to DIY ETF investing. The screenshots and details use Qtrade Direct Investing, but should be generalizable to other platforms. If you use my affiliate link by clicking any of the Qtrade banners on the site, then I can better coach you if you get stuck. You also get Qtrade’s best promotional offers, and I get a small fee at no cost to you. This year, Qtrade also agreed to give Loonie Doctor-affiliated investors access to their Investor Plus premium support email and phone number (on my Investor Hub page). That usually requires $500K invested, but if you are linked to The Loonie Doctor, you can use it right away.

If taking control of your investing or even dipping your toes in the water of DIY investing is part of your New Year’s resolutions, please consider using the material and support here to help you make it a reality. It doesn’t cost you anything and is backed by the best evidence, plus my human mentorship as needed. It is probably the best return on investment available, even without considering the usual incentive offers.

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Annual Six-Figure Impact?

This aspect of my mission has made a quantifiable difference. I get access to aggregate information (no individual or identifiable data) about those who invest using my Qtrade link. I am happy to say that this paints a nice picture and makes the hours spent developing material and answering emails feel worth it. There are now roughly 250 people affiliated and roughly $63 Million invested. If people save 1%/yr in fees by DIY ETF investing, that would be about $630K/yr! Compounded over a 30-year investment horizon, that could be a $100MM difference. Hopefully, that will grow as more people take the leap.

The largest group was those just starting out (<$25K invested), but by watching the shifts over the year, many don’t stay there. There is a meaningful shift up the food chain due to people adding money and asset growth. Staying motivated to invest regularly and staying invested to ride the markets are key to success, and this suggests that the DIY investors affiliated with me are doing so.

It is also key to choose low-cost and diversified investment vehicles. The top 5 traded securities for affiliated accounts were >90% all-in-one asset allocation ETFs. An approach supported by good evidence. The other 10% was dominated by ZMMK, a money market ETF that is a good way to hold cash equivalents for near-term needs.

Using a well-designed ETF does not protect you from being naughty. Their convenience is a boon, but can also be a problem if you trade them in attempts to market time. The average number of trades per client was 1.1 trades per month, and the buy-to-sell trade ratio was 5:1. This suggests that people are buying and holding. Some of the people that I help are in the decumulation phase, and along with some rebalancing, there will always be some selling. Notably, there was no spike in selling during the Feb/March market drawdown. If anything, buying accelerated – part of how I make the most of market corrections. Way to behave and remember that whatever terrible story you are hearing is already priced in!

Inspiring Books

This year, I added a new section to the site called The Loonie Doctor’s Bookshelf. It is an organized, curated collection of some of my favorite personal finance, career, and investing books.

There are summaries and direct links to the books on Amazon. I get a small commission when people use those links.

So far, I have made approximately negative one hundred dollars. Since publishing the bookshelf, I keep getting suggestions for other inspiring reads. I can’t help but buy them and read them. I love books. A couple have even been added to the list (I am pretty selective to avoid overwhelming people).

Collaboration & Connection

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Speaking Engagements

I was quite busy speaking with different physician groups this year. I do charge a speaker fee to keep it from overwhelming my time, but that is also in constant tension with my desire to reach more colleagues. Zoom has really helped with that, but I did get out to chat with many of you in person.

Some highlights for me this year were speaking to my home hospital staff association, a lively debate about DIY vs Advisors at my OMA District, and speaking at the Women in Academic Medicine Conference in Toronto. I even met a fun group of brain surgeons! I basically have to be dragged out to travel and present in person, but it was worth it. Maybe it will get easier when our puppy gets older.

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Collaborative Sponsors

I carefully chose to work with a few sponsors who add value to my mission. This has really worked out well. In addition to providing financial support to improve and expand the resources here, we have collaborated directly to develop great content.

PWL Capital Inc.

For those who need a full-service firm, the answer is easy for me. I have been sending people to PWL Capital Inc. They are one of the few sponsors that I have allowed on the blog, and we continue to collaborate on making evidence-informed content together. They practice aligned with that: low-cost funds and a focus on planning. Most importantly, the feedback from those whom I have pointed in PWL’s direction has been universally positive.

We are still collaborating on The Money Scope. The pace at which we can produce episodes is much slower because we are getting into complex topics, often involving opaque products. We managed to crank out two episodes about pensions for incorporated business owners. The illustrative cases episode required building a model from scratch and testing it within planning software. Fortunately, our nerd-herd is large, and we enlisted our friend Aravind Sithamparapillai from Ironwood Wealth Management to help us.

BMO ETFs

BMO ETFs is the second-largest ETF provider in Canada and the largest Canadian-focused provider. That focus and their efforts in producing Canadian educational content and promoting DIY investing are what attracted me. This year, we made a video about asset allocation ETFs together. I have received numerous comments about the high quality of the material we produce together.

BMO ETFs have also been great supporters of our community, sponsoring our annual Canadian Physician Financial Wellness Conference (open to anyone). Plus, they donated $100K to support medical student research experiences. You can still sign up to join us in opening the Toronto Stock Exchange on Jan 27th to celebrate that significant donation!

Most Popular Posts of 2024

You can click the pictures below to open the article link.

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#1 Comparison of All-in-One Asset Allocation ETFs

I originally did this deep-dive article into the most commonly used Canadian asset allocation ETFs as part of my DIY basic training section several years ago. However, it underwent some updates this year as companies competed by lowering fees. The first and most aggressive was BMO ETFs. Vanguard (finally) and BlackRock made some trims too.

BMO ETFs also changed their bond allocation to discount bonds using ZDB (for ZGRO, ZBAL, ZCON). That further boosts their tax efficiency in tax-exposed accounts. I updated my comparison of fee and tax drag across different account types for the ETFs. The ETFs are all very similar, and no one knows which slight allocation difference will matter, but fees and taxes are predictable.

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#2 My Wealth Journey Part 4: Tax Planning

I share parts of my personal wealth journey. They are in the “About” menu, or the “Dad Overshares” section, according to my kids. Those posts are always popular. This year, I shared my tax planning. Initially, I largely ignored taxes (shocking, I know, given my current tax-nerd status).

There is a chart showing how my tax bill shrank relative to my income, spending, and giving when I started paying attention. That was despite Federal tax increases, which sparked me to learn how a corporation works (and blog about it). I highlight some of the big things I’ve learned and illustrate how I planned for our recent cottage splurge.

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#3 Making The Most of Market Corrections

Whenever the market goes down, I see a lot of posts on social media from people worrying. Same when the market reaches all-time highs, as people anticipate the next correction. That is followed by questions or opinions about what to do in response.

Market turbulence is normal and inevitable. I wrote the post to describe how I prepare and respond, backed by the data that underpins my opinion. ETFs make buying investments easy, but managing how we interface with markets is hard. Hopefully, the post helps. Read it whenever you are worried and wondering where the market will go next.

Most Under-Rated Posts

These posts weren’t my most viewed, but I think that they are important.

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Different Budgets for Different Reasons

Budgeting is often touted as one of the first things to do when taking control of your finances. It was in part 1 of my wealth journey. However, how we use a budget has really changed over time. It is much less of a survival issue at this point, and more of a tool to make sure that we are using our financial power effectively.

This post goes through how to make some different types of budgets that are meant to serve different purposes as your financial position changes. It is much more fun now than it used to be.

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Six Part Dividend Investing Series

I spent more time surfing social media feeds this year and was struck by the passion and pervasiveness of dividend investing influencers and followers. A purist will just dismiss dividends as irrelevant, but that is at odds with how popular a focus they are. That psychology makes dividends relevant. So does their tax treatment in personal taxable account at different income levels. Dividend investing also has major interactions within a corporation.

Dividend payers have also outperformed historically. I take a deeper dive into why that is. Then, are there ways that we can use that information to implement an investing strategy. Dividend stock picking is troublesome, but could dividend ETFs be effective? The crown jewel of this series is a deep analysis of the factors and performance of Canadian Dividend ETFs. This is a unique article for the internet because it required professional analysis for which I enlisted the help of Andrew Jones, CFA who runs the Verified Beta site that does factor analysis of Canadian and US funds.

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Pensions for Incorporated Professionals

One hot topic amongst physicians this past year was pensions because of promotion of the Medicus^TM and HOOPP (in Ontario) multi-employer pension plans. I did a review of pension basics for incorporated professionals a couple of years ago.

This year, I did a deeper dive into HOOPP vs Medicus and who should consider buying into a group pension.

I finished the year collaborating on two Money Scope episodes on pensions. A deep dive into how pensions work and a cases episode to illustrate.

Plans for 2026

Looking back on my plans for 2025, I followed through on most of them. I still haven’t completed my Core Financial Curriculum yet, but I continue to make progress. For 2026, I plan to flesh out the real estate section. I started with a post about the FHSA and what to buy in it. More is in the pipeline.

One of my goals for 2025 was to expand some of my financial calculators. I did make some improvements, and the CCPC Salary/Dividend optimizer is still my most popular one. You can enter your investment and spending plan, along with corporate information, and it spits out a salary and dividend plan to fund it tax-efficiently. It is great for initiating a discussion with your accountant if they have not invested the time to learn more about optimal corporate compensation. Many have not.

I invested a lot of time putting together some of my calculators into a financial planner, but I decided to change course. Instead, I have been collaborating with a financial planning software maker to incorporate some of my algorithms into their corporate planning module as they build it out. They share my goal of providing affordable, high-quality planning software for DIY investors and are already running miles ahead of me in that regard. Hopefully, some big news later this year.

Thanks for joining me on The Loonie Doctor this past year, and I hope you’ll learn and grow with me again in the year ahead.