Coreen T. Sol, CFA

Home
Canada
Vancouver, BC
Coreen T. Sol, CFA

Call Directions Website Contact the business

Coreen T. Sol, CFA, Senior Portfolio Manager, CIBC Private Wealth
Author - Unbiased Investor: Reduce Financial Stress & Keep More of Your Money (Wiley, 2022)

Through the course of my practice over the last 30 years, I have refined a process to reduce stress by limiting the impacts of naturally occurring biases present in complex financial decisions, life’s inflection points, and during volatile markets. By building and maintaining passive income and matching income needs with planned liquidity, we create long-term financial security for our clients and their families. My passion to understand bias in financial decisions provoked my books, Practically Investing, Smart Investment Techniques Your Neighbour Doesn’t Know (2014) and Unbiased Investor: Reduce Stress in Financial Decisions and Keep More of Your Money (2022). I was also fortunate to research curriculum for the Faculty of Management at UBC Okanagan where I lectured in behavioural finance in 2015 as part of their undergraduate program. I credit my experience as a professional ballet dancer at Ballet British Columbia for my dedication, drive, and curiosity, while the years building a practice and raising three teenagers has provided some insights into my client’s own priorities and objectives. When away from my office, I can be found on my yoga mat, a golf course, gnu snowboard, or my road bike. I also feel passioned to support our community and the arts including Ballet B.C., Ballet Kelowna, the Vancouver Art Gallery, CIBC Run for the Cure, and other vital organizations.https://www.cibc.com/content/dam/pwm-public-assets/documents/pdfs/social-media-disclaimer.pdf

11/02/2026

Overconfidence in investing is rarely a matter of believing the impossible. It shows up instead as ranges that are far too narrow.

Alpert and Raiffa asked people for ranges wide enough to be right 98% of the time, and the true answer fell outside those ranges roughly 40% of the time. The estimates were not wildly wrong, though the confidence attached to them was.

The financial version appears whenever a plan rests on a single figure: an expected return, a retirement date, a sale price for a business.

Consider a household planning to sell a business in five years at a particular valuation. A plan built on a range, with a stated response at both ends, survives being wrong.

Write the prediction down with a date and a range rather than a point, then keep the page.

Where in your plan does a single number carry more weight than the evidence behind it?

For more on planning with ranges rather than single figures, visit Solinvest.ca.

11/02/2026

Can artificial intelligence outperform an experienced portfolio manager?

We're putting it to the test.

Starting today, November 2, I'm going head-to-head with ChatGPT in a three-month investment competition. We'll each manage a hypothetical equity portfolio under the same investment constraints, with a benchmark of 50% S&P/TSX Composite and 50% S&P 500.

ChatGPT will select and manage its own investments, including deciding when to buy, sell, or simply do nothing. I'll manage my portfolio using the systematic, behavioural-bias-aware investment approach I've developed over more than 30 years.

We'll compare more than just returns. We'll examine volatility, drawdowns, trading activity, and after-tax performance, all measured in Canadian dollars.

The question isn't simply who wins. It's what we can learn about investment decision-making, human judgment, and the role of AI.

This is an informal, real-time experiment, not a scientifically controlled study. But with clearly established rules and independently tracked results, it should provide some interesting insights.

We'll share the results, including what worked, what didn't, and what surprised us, in the new year.

Human experience versus artificial intelligence. Let the experiment begin!

11/01/2026

In this week’s Week Ahead, Avery Shenfeld points to an unusually information-rich stretch for markets and central banks, with the U.S. election, Middle East developments, and Canada-U.S. trade risks all set to shape the rate outlook.

He notes that the path for both the Fed and the Bank of Canada could shift quickly depending on whether geopolitical tensions push energy prices higher or diplomatic progress eases inflation pressures.

10/30/2026

The Canada Pension Plan contains one of the few decisions in Canadian retirement planning where the arithmetic is published in advance.

Starting after 65 increases the pension by 0.7% for every month deferred, reaching 42% more at 70. Starting before 65 reduces it by 0.6% a month, reaching 36% less at 60.

Those adjustments are permanent and indexed to inflation for life.

The decision is rarely arithmetic alone, since health, employment, other income and a spouse's pension all matter. What the numbers show is the size of the choice, and the behavioural difficulty is that the smaller payment arrives now while the larger one requires waiting.

Obtain your CPP statement of contributions before year-end, then model the same retirement starting at 60, 65 and 70.

Which start date have you assumed, and was it ever actually calculated?

For more on timing government pensions inside a wider plan, visit Solinvest.ca.

10/28/2026

Most retirement planning concentrates on whether there is enough. Rather less attention goes to whether the household will be able to spend it.

A portfolio built over three decades has trained its owners to add, and retirement asks them to reverse a habit rewarded their entire working life.

Benartzi and Thaler showed in 1995 that the more frequently a portfolio is evaluated, the more painful it feels and the more conservatively it tends to be held.

Structure helps more than resolve. Income arrives on a fixed date, a cash reserve covers a year or two of spending, and the portfolio is reviewed on a schedule rather than after an unsettling week.

Consider a couple who planned carefully for twenty years and then underspent their first five years of retirement, measuring the cost in trips not taken.

Does your plan describe how the money will be spent, or only how much there is?

For more on turning a portfolio into reliable income, visit Solinvest.ca.

10/26/2026

Building a portfolio and spending one require the same arithmetic and produce entirely different feelings.

Loss aversion, described by Kahneman and Tversky in 1979, is the finding that a loss weighs roughly twice as heavily as an equivalent gain. During the income years that becomes a monthly experience.

Every withdrawal registers as a loss, even when it is precisely what the plan intended, and the instinct is to hold more cash than the plan requires.

Repeated across a decade, that caution quietly rewrites the retirement the household spent thirty years funding.

Set the withdrawal as a scheduled transfer, hold a cash reserve covering a year or two of income, and review the rate annually rather than monthly.

Is your withdrawal plan set by a schedule, or by how the last statement felt?

For more on drawing income from a portfolio with confidence, visit Solinvest.ca.

10/25/2026

In this week’s Week Ahead, Avery Shenfeld looks at the unusual policy split taking shape, with markets expecting the Fed to pause while the Bank of Canada leans toward another hike.

He argues that U.S. inflation may still warrant tighter policy, while in Canada, softer core inflation and growing economic uncertainty suggest there may be more value in waiting.

10/23/2026

A pattern that arrives in practices every autumn, usually attached to a difficult year.

A portfolio is inherited and nobody changes anything. The holdings were chosen carefully by somebody who understood them, and the person who could explain them is gone.

What follows is a decade of respectful inaction. Nothing is sold, because selling feels like a judgement on the person who bought it.

Meanwhile the portfolio suits the risk tolerance of someone who has died rather than the timeline of the person now holding it.

The respectful step is not to preserve the holdings. It is to preserve the intention, which was to look after the people who came next.

If the portfolio you hold today had arrived as cash, would you have built the same thing?

For more on reviewing an inherited portfolio thoughtfully, visit Solinvest.ca.

10/23/2026

I just finished running a 6-months investment experiment. Here are the surprising results:

I created an 'experimental investment portfolio' with my own money to see what would happen if I only bought the top 20 ranked securities across my quantitative models, rather than a structured approach that I use in the Defensive Growth equity mandate --our core equity model.

The difference being that the Defensive Growth mandate is distributed across all sectors of the market, relatively in-line with market weights and I use a Brinson Attribution to determine what is driving performance within each sector.

The 'experimental investment' only invested in top ranked securities regardless of the sector.

The result was fascinating. Most months, the experimental mandate underperformed the Defensive Growth, but jumped disproportionately erasing earlier losses on certain months, only to underperform again.

I have ideas on what I attribute this behaviour, but curious to hear other viewpoints on what may be driving this significant difference in experience when the market sectors are taken out of the equation.

Share your thoughts below.

10/21/2026

Complicated portfolios are rarely designed. They accumulate, one reasonable addition at a time.

Each holding arrived with a justification that made sense on the day: a recommendation, an inheritance, a tax idea, a product that solved a problem which no longer exists. Nothing was obviously wrong, and nothing was ever removed.

Complication of that kind is expensive in ways that do not appear on a statement, including overlapping positions, higher costs, tax reporting that consumes an accountant's afternoon, and a plan that only one person in the household can operate.

Take any single holding and defend it in one sentence, stating what it is for and what would cause it to be sold. Positions that survive that sentence belong, while positions requiring a paragraph of history usually do not.

Which holding in your portfolio would be hardest to justify in a single sentence?

For more on simplifying a portfolio without weakening it, visit Solinvest.ca.

Address

2434/1055 Dunsmuir Street
Vancouver, BC

Telephone

+18773315122

Website

https://woodgundyadvisors.cibc.com/web/solinvest/, https://unbiasedinvestor.org, https://unbiasedinvestor.org/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Coreen T. Sol, CFA posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.