Spring clean your portfolio — here's how

Spring cleaning is as important for your financial situation as it is for your closets and drawers. Most investors don’t keep the same financial goals or strategies forever. If you haven’t checked up on your portfolio in a while and then decide to change course, your new goals may not be compatible with your existing investment strategy, which could lead to inefficiencies that drag on your returns.

We’ve written a lot about the importance of basic portfolio maintenance and why you should regularly rebalance your portfolio to adjust for changes in market returns, reassess your financial capacity and emotional tolerance for risk, reflect on your financial goals, check your emergency fund, and audit your investment fees to make sure they’re worth the service you’re getting. We harp on this advice for good reason: it’s proven useful to investors, both new and experienced, in a wide range of financial situations.

But if you’re looking for more of a financial deep-clean, there are some lesser-known steps you can consider to help get the most out of your portfolio in the coming year. None require any drastic action on your part. Taken together, they’re the kind of deep clean that keeps a portfolio working the way it's supposed to: quietly, efficiently, and in line with your financial goals.

1. Consolidate where it makes sense

Over time, a lot of investors end up with accounts scattered across multiple institutions — an old employer RRSP here, a self-directed account there — without any real benefit to their overall financial strategy. Consolidating your accounts under one institution’s proverbial roof can help you avoid paying the same fees, such as trading commissions, in several places at once. It also makes your investments easier to manage and ensures that on April 30, you aren’t hunting for tax forms from a bunch of different places.

2. Check your cash drag

Financial success is more likely when investments have time to grow. While uninvested cash can be useful for an emergency fund or a major near-term purchase, having it sit idle without a clear or immediate reason can quietly cost you. If you have $10,000 on hand, hopefully in a high-interest chequing or savings account, you’re potentially earning around 2% - 3% interest a year — maybe enough to keep pace with inflation. If you were to invest that $10,000 in equities or other higher interest products, for example, you could earn an average of 7% to 10%. That’s anywhere from $400 to $700 more per year than a savings account.

3. Look for tax-loss harvesting opportunities

Most investors think about tax-loss harvesting in December, if at all. But markets move throughout the year. If some of your assets are now worth less than you initially paid for them, consider realizing your losses now. The opportunity to do so may not present itself later. For instance, if you suffered losses shortly after the Liberation Day slump in early April 2025, you might not have been able to take advantage of tax-loss harvesting on those assets if you’d waited until after the markets had recovered.

If you do decide to engage in tax-loss harvesting throughout the year, be mindful of Canada’s superficial loss rules: buying back into the same, or a similar, security within 30 days of selling it to realize a capital loss will void the tax benefits.

4. Think about your currency exposure

​This one gets less attention than it deserves, especially for Canadians. When you invest heavily in U.S. assets, your portfolio's value moves not just with the market — it also moves with the exchange rate between the USD and CAD. For most of the past decade, that was a good thing: the USD outperformed the CAD, giving Canadian investors a quiet bonus on top of their returns.

But exchange rates can shift at any time. You might have bought U.S. investments last year expecting to benefit from AI-driven growth in the American economy, only to find that tariff uncertainty weakened the USD and with it, the value of your portfolio.
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​It can be worthwhile to hold assets in CAD and USD (or other currencies) to balance out your currency risk, so we’re not saying you need to hit the eject button. Just make sure your global currency exposure fits your long-term goals and you understand any downsides.

5. Ask yourself: is this complexity actually helping?

Some investors build portfolios comprising a multitude of ETFs, niche holdings, short options, or other similarly complicated strategies. But a complex portfolio isn’t the same as a diversified portfolio, and complexity doesn’t always mean a higher return. If your portfolio has grown unwieldy, it's worth examining your assets to ensure they’re each pulling their weight in your overall financial strategy. Simple, well-constructed portfolios are typically easier to manage, easier to rebalance, and often just as effective as a more-complicated option.

What do I do if I’m still confused?

Follow these steps and your portfolio should be all spruced up and ready for the rest of the year. If you’re stuck, not to worry. We've designed our Managed Portfolios to handle most of these hassles for you, ensuring you stay fully invested, rebalance in line with your asset allocation, and appropriately handle complexity.