Portfolio

Your portfolio is everything you own as an investor, taken together. It includes all the stocks, bonds, ETFs, GICs, and cash sitting across your various accounts. Whether you have a TFSA, an RRSP, and a non-registered account at two different brokerages, your portfolio is the full picture.

Why thinking in terms of a portfolio matters

It’s easy to manage each account in isolation. You might check your TFSA at one brokerage and your RRSP at another without ever looking at them side by side. But your asset allocation only makes sense when you look at everything together. You might think you’re well diversified, only to discover that three accounts are all holding the same Canadian bank stocks.

Building a portfolio

There’s no single right portfolio. The mix depends on your goals, your timeline, and your risk tolerance. Someone in their 20s saving for retirement might hold mostly equities. Someone approaching retirement might shift toward more bonds and cash.

A simple starting point is a single all-in-one ETF that handles diversification and rebalancing for you. As your investments grow and spread across more accounts, keeping track of the full picture becomes more important. That’s what tools like Greenline are built for.

A concrete example

Say you have $45,000 in a TFSA at Wealthsimple, $30,000 in an RRSP at Questrade, and $12,000 in a non-registered account at your bank. Your portfolio is all three combined: $87,000. Looking at each account separately, you might not realize that 60% of your total holdings are in Canadian bank stocks. Seeing the full picture in one place is how you catch overlaps like that.