Hey, I’m Kar Yung Tom
Friends and viewers call me KYT. I run this site and a YouTube channel with one goal: make evidence-based investing understandable for regular Canadians. No jargon, no products to sell, just what the research actually supports.
Before investing content, my background was competitive strategy games: chess, Magic: The Gathering, and poker. That path taught me the skill that matters most in investing, which is making decisions with incomplete information and sticking with good decisions through bad short-term results. Add a software engineering degree from McGill, and you get someone who reads academic papers for fun and builds calculators to test what they claim.
What I do with my own money
I think anyone sharing investing opinions should show their hand. I held XEQT, a single all-in-one index ETF, for about five and a half years. In 2026 I moved my portfolio to CAGE, a factor-tilted all-in-one from Avantis and CIBC, after following the research behind it for years. I share my reasoning openly, including the trade-offs and the honest possibility that it underperforms for long stretches.
And to be clear: if a close friend asked me where to start today, my answer would still be a plain all-in-one like XEQT. That’s what my Investing for Beginners Cheatsheet is built around.
What you’ll find here
The cheatsheet is the heart of the site: a free, continuously updated guide to starting out as a Canadian investor, distilled from academic research and the work of licensed professionals I respect. Around it are tools I built myself, including a safe withdrawal rate calculator, a retirement withdrawal visualizer, an amortization-based withdrawal calculator, and a dice game simulator that shows why positive expected returns still feel bumpy. My YouTube channel is where I put these ideas into practice with my own real portfolio.
Full disclosure
This is a hobby project, and it earns close to nothing. The full picture: the cheatsheet has referral links for Questrade and Wealthsimple, which give you a signup bonus and pay me one if you use them. That’s it. Nobody sponsors my content, no fund company pays me, and I have nothing to sell you. If any of that ever changes, this page will say so.
The obvious disclaimer: I’m not a financial advisor, and nothing on this site is financial advice. It’s education, written so you can make your own informed decisions. For decisions specific to your situation, especially around retirement, talk to a qualified professional.
Questions or pushback? I’m active in the comments on YouTube and on Blossom. Some of the best improvements to this site started as someone disagreeing with me.