Why I Want My Investments to Be Boring
At some point in the last several years, someone in your congregation told you about an investment opportunity. Maybe it was crypto. Maybe it was a friend's real estate play. Maybe it was a specific stock that was definitely going up. Maybe it was silver, or oil, or a small-cap biotech company, or some fund a guy from the men's group was quietly excited about.
I know this happened because it happens in every congregation. I know it because it's happened to me.
There's something seductive about the exciting investment. It promises not just returns, but a story. You didn't just put money in an index fund like everybody else — you saw something. You acted on it. You're going to tell a good story about this one.
Here's what I've come to believe: that story almost never goes the way you're imagining, and the desire for it to be a good story is one of the most reliable ways to lose money.
What an Index Fund Actually Is
An index fund is a fund that holds a proportional slice of every company in a given market index — the S&P 500, or the whole Canadian market, or the entire world stock market, depending on what index it tracks. When you buy one, you're not betting on a company. You're buying the whole market.
The price goes up when the underlying market goes up. The price goes down when the market goes down. There's no manager making active decisions about which companies to hold. A computer tracks the index. The fund's expenses are extremely low because there's not much human labour involved.
That's it. It's genuinely that simple.
A Canadian investor building a long-term portfolio can do it with one or two Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs — funds that trade on the stock exchange like a stock). XEQT (iShares Core Equity ETF Portfolio) and VGRO (Vanguard Growth ETF Portfolio) are commonly recommended all-in-one Canadian ETFs that hold thousands of stocks from around the world in a single purchase. You put money in regularly. You don't touch it. You hold it for decades.
(This is general information, not investment advice. Speak with a financial advisor about what's appropriate for your specific situation.)
Why Boring Beats Exciting Over Time
The evidence on this is not ambiguous.
Decades of data on actively managed funds — funds run by professional stock-pickers paid to beat the market — show that the majority of them underperform their benchmark index over periods of ten, fifteen, twenty years. Not because fund managers are incompetent. Because markets are remarkably efficient at pricing in available information, and consistently extracting more value from that information than the market has already priced in turns out to be very difficult.
Individual investors fare even worse. The average investor earns below-average returns because they tend to buy high (when things feel exciting) and sell low (when things feel terrifying). The investing mistakes that cost ordinary people money are almost never caused by a bad index fund. They're caused by abandoning the plan during a downturn, or chasing a trend, or doing something exciting.
The boring strategy works not because passive investing is theoretically elegant — though it is — but because boring is easy to stick with. You don't check it obsessively. You don't have a story to maintain. You don't have any decision to make except whether to keep contributing. The cost of the strategy is boredom. The cost of the exciting strategy is usually something higher.
The Behavioural Problem
If boring investments are better, why doesn't everyone just buy an index fund and leave it alone?
Because leaving it alone is genuinely hard.
When markets drop — and they will drop, significantly, multiple times over any long investment horizon — the numbers in your account get smaller. The news coverage is terrible. People around you are panicking. The boring strategy requires you to do nothing while looking at a number that represents your family's financial future declining by fifteen or twenty or thirty percent. That is not nothing. That is psychologically very difficult.
And when someone tells you about a great opportunity — when the exciting story arrives, and it feels like everyone else is getting in while you're sitting on the sideline with your boring ETF — the temptation to act is real. The story is compelling. The FOMO is genuine.
The research on investor behaviour consistently shows that the gap between an investment's return and the average investor's return in that same investment is largely explained by the investor's own behaviour — buying and selling at the wrong times, chasing performance, abandoning strategy. The portfolio isn't the problem. The behaviour is.
The boring strategy works because it has no movable parts. You can't time an index fund. You can't pick the right moment to get in or get out. You just contribute regularly and let compounding work over decades. The strategy's simplicity is not a feature to overlook — it's the core of why it works.
The Christian Angle
I want to make an honest observation, and I say it gently because I'm as susceptible to this as anyone.
The desire for the exciting investment is often a desire for a shortcut. It's the hope that there's a way to get ahead without the slow, patient, decades-long discipline of consistent saving. That hope is understandable. It's also one of the oldest traps in the book.
Proverbs 13:11 says it plainly: "Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it." This is not a theological statement against investment. It's a practical observation about how wealth actually builds — incrementally, patiently, and in ways that resist the compelling narrative of the quick win.
The Christian virtue at stake here is patience. And patience is hard when the market is down, when someone is describing an exciting opportunity, when you're comparing your quiet RRSP to a colleague's recent win. But patience, here, is also just math. Compounding works over time, not over quarters.
A man who contributes consistently to a diversified, low-cost index fund inside his RRSP and TFSA, starting in his twenties or thirties, who doesn't panic and sell during downturns, and who adds to it steadily over decades — that man will, barring genuine catastrophe, end up in a sound financial position. Not because of genius. Because of patience and discipline.
That's boring. It's also about as reliable a financial strategy as exists.
What to Actually Do
For a Canadian investor getting started:
Use your registered accounts first. The TFSA and RRSP are tax-advantaged — contributions to the RRSP reduce taxable income, and growth inside a TFSA is completely tax-free. Fill these before investing in a taxable account.
Choose a low-cost all-in-one ETF. A globally diversified, low-expense-ratio ETF (look for MER — Management Expense Ratio — below 0.25%) gives you the market without the management fees that drag on returns. The iShares XEQT and Vanguard XGRO are commonly discussed options; there are others. This is not a specific recommendation — it's an illustration of the kind of product to research.
Contribute regularly. Not when it feels right. Regularly. Monthly contributions that you automate and then ignore tend to outperform lump-sum decisions made based on how the market feels.
Don't look at it too often. This is not financial advice; it's behavioural advice. The more frequently you check a long-term investment, the more tempted you'll be to react to short-term noise. Quarterly is plenty. Annual is fine.
Ignore the story. When the exciting investment arrives — and it will — remember that everyone who tells you about a good investment is telling you because they got in early. You're hearing it when the story is good. You're rarely there for the end of the story.
The Virtue of Patience Here
There's a version of financial management that looks for elegance, complexity, and cleverness. There's another version that does the simple thing with discipline over a long time.
For most of us, in most of our financial lives, the second version wins. Not just in returns — in peace of mind, in time not spent obsessing over the portfolio, in freedom from the anxiety of a financial strategy that requires constant management.
Faithful stewardship doesn't require sophistication. It requires consistency. The slow, patient accumulation of Proverbs is not glamorous. It's also, in the long run, genuinely good.
Author: Dan Taylor
Site: Wise and Faithful
Published: April 9, 2026
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