green

I recently decided that I wanted to make some major changes to my RRSP, which I manage myself with a Scotia McLeod Direct Investing account. I've been dabbling in the stock market for about 10 years now, and fully managing my own investments for about the last 5 of those. And in general have done pretty well with it and beat the market average by a fair bit. Recently I decided that I should put my money where my mouth is, regarding green investing, so I went on the search for green investments. What I was primarily looking for was Canadian investments, which turned out to be a lot more challenging than I'd originally hoped because I had to limit myself to companies that were publicly traded on the stock markets - due to the nature of my Self-Directed RRSP with Scotia McLeod. But in the end, I did find some promising investments and shifted my money around accordingly.

One quick comment I have about investing in general, concerns the common advice you hear to "diversify your investments". There are actually 2 schools of thought on this matter, and I happen to adhere to the other school. Yes, diversified investments can help shield you from huge losses in one particular investment, but on the other hand they can also help shield you from huge gains in one particular investment. Let's just say for the sake of argument that a good diversified portfolio contains 20 different investments. And let's further suppose that one of those investments experiences huge gains, and doubles in value in a very short period of time. That's awesome! But given that it is only 1/20th of your entire portfolio, it will only produce a relatively small gain for you. This is why I personally generally keep my portfolio fairly small - sometimes with as few as 2 or 3 investments, but typically with 5 to 7. This may be considered higher risk, but it has served me well so far.