Last week I put numbers on what a 2% fee costs over an investing lifetime, and the fix I pointed at was a low-cost index fund. That leaves the question I get asked most, which is which one, and how many of them a person needs. For most people the answer is one.
A one-ticket ETF, also called an asset allocation ETF or an all-in-one fund, is a single fund that holds an entire diversified portfolio inside it. You buy one thing. Underneath it you own stocks and bonds from around the world in a set ratio, and the fund keeps that ratio for you. Nothing to assemble, nothing to maintain.
What sits inside one
The fund I own is XEQT, and its official page says it holds five things, which sounds like nothing until you look at what the five are. They're other iShares funds: one for Canada, one for the United States, one for developed markets outside North America, and one for emerging markets. Look through to what those funds hold and you get 8,381 underlying holdings, checked on the fund page this week. It manages about $21.8 billion and has been running since August 2019. A one-ticket fund is a fund of funds, and the diversification you'd spend a weekend building yourself is already sitting inside it.
For years I did the opposite, picking individual stocks, Canadian banks and oil and a few tech names, reading everything I could find about which one to buy next. Buying a single fund would have felt like giving up back then. It turned out to be one of the better decisions I've made with my own money.
What the letters on the label mean
Every provider runs the same ladder, and the last few letters of the ticker tell you the stock-and-bond split. EQT means all equity, so 100% stocks and no bonds. GRO is growth, roughly 80% stocks and 20% bonds. BAL is balanced, about 60/40. CNS is conservative at 40/60, and the income versions sit lower still. Swap the first letter for the provider, where X is iShares, V is Vanguard and Z is BMO. XBAL, VBAL and ZBAL are the same idea from three different companies.
The split between stocks and bonds is the decision that matters here, and which brand you land on barely moves your result. I own XEQT mostly because it had the lowest fee on the day I bought it, and ZEQT carries a slightly lower headline fee now, so I'd be perfectly happy holding that instead. If you want to see the whole ladder in one table, with each fund's current fee and a link to its official page, it's on my asset allocation page.
The rebalancing you never have to do
Say you build a 60/40 portfolio yourself, with $60,000 in a stock fund and $40,000 in a bond fund. Stocks have a good year and bonds don't, and by December you're at 68/32 without having done a thing. Your portfolio is riskier than the one you chose. Putting it back means selling some stock and buying some bonds, which is the one trade nobody feels like making, because it means selling the thing that just went up.
A one-ticket fund does that inside itself, continuously, at the trading costs a very large fund pays rather than the ones you would, and it never shows up on your statement as a trade or a taxable event. The research on rebalancing frequency suggests that checking once a year with a small tolerance band is plenty, so this doesn't beat the market for you. What it does is remove a job that most people, me included, would put off.
What it costs
XEQT charges a management fee of 0.17%, and its most recently published MER, the all-in yearly cost, is 0.20%. On a $50,000 balance that's about $100 a year. The same $50,000 sitting in a 2% mutual fund costs $1,000 a year, a difference of $900 for a product that holds fewer companies and, on the evidence, tends to do worse. Across the rest of the ladder the published MERs run about 0.17% to 0.25% depending on the provider, and all three sponsors cut the management fees underneath them in 2025, down to roughly 0.15% to 0.17%. A published MER is struck at each fund's year end, so it lags a fee cut by up to a year and then drifts down to meet it. You can run your own balance through the fee calculator.
It will still go down
XEQT lost 10.93% in 2022, which turned $10,000 into about $8,900 over a single calendar year. It then returned 20.45% in 2025. Someone who bought at the start of 2021 and sat through all of it, drop included, turned $10,000 into roughly $18,700 by the end of 2025. The drop was the price of admission, not a sign something broke.
I raise this because a fund that rebalances itself can start to feel like a fund that protects you, and it doesn't do that. It handles the maintenance. You handle the part where you leave it alone.
When one fund isn't the answer
Money you'll need soon shouldn't be in a 100% stock fund, no matter how well diversified that fund is. My own FHSA is the example. We're looking at buying a house in about five years, and there have been plenty of stretches in history where stocks fell and took five years or more to climb back, so most of that account sits in a short-term bond fund rather than an all-equity one-ticket. Same investor, same beliefs, different job for the money.
A workplace plan is the other case, since you're stuck with whatever list your employer offers and a one-ticket ETF may not be on it. Pick the cheapest broad index option available there and keep the one-ticket for the accounts you control.
What to do with this
Owning one fund often gets treated as the beginner version of a proper portfolio. It's closer to what a professional would build for you, minus the fee for building it. Pick the mix that fits your timeline, pick any of the three providers, and put your energy into contributing regularly instead of maintaining the thing.
If you already own five or six funds you assembled over the years, you don't need to fix that today. Just know that the simpler version exists, and that it's cheaper and less work than what you're doing now.
What's next
The mix is the one decision left, and it shapes your results more than anything else covered here: how much of your money goes in stocks, and how much goes in bonds. Next up we'll work through how to land on your own number, and how to move it as your life changes. That one is coming soon.
This is general financial education, not individual advice. I personally hold some of the funds mentioned, and fund fees and holdings change over time, so confirm the current figures on the provider's page before you buy. For advice specific to you, talk to a qualified professional.
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