XEQT Turns 7: Every Lesson From Seven Years of Canada's Most Popular All-Equity ETF

Seven years ago this summer, BlackRock Canada launched a little ETF called XEQT – the iShares Core Equity ETF Portfolio. I remember buying my first shares in the fall of 2019. It was an unglamorous moment. No fireworks, no “I’m going to be rich” excitement, no screenshot posted to Reddit. Just a quiet purchase on my phone, sitting on the couch, wondering if I was making the right call.

At the time, I had doubts. Was a single all-equity ETF really enough? Should I be picking individual stocks instead? Was it too simple? Too boring? Was I just being lazy?

Turns out, boring was exactly right.

Seven years later, XEQT has become the most popular all-equity ETF in Canada. Its assets under management have grown from a few hundred million dollars to billions. It has survived a global pandemic, an inflation crisis, the fastest rate-hiking cycle in a generation, a meme stock mania, a crypto boom and bust, and an ongoing trade war. Through all of it, the people who did best were the ones who did the least – they bought XEQT, set up automatic contributions, and got on with their lives.

This post is a look back at those seven years. What happened, what we learned, and why I’m more convinced than ever that XEQT is the single best investment most Canadians can make.

1. A Timeline of XEQT’s Life So Far

Before we get into the lessons, let me walk through what actually happened – year by year – since XEQT came into the world. If you’ve been holding since the beginning, this will be a trip down memory lane. If you’re newer, this context is invaluable for understanding why long-term investors think the way we do.

Note: These are approximate total returns in CAD including dividends. Actual returns vary slightly depending on measurement timing and dividend reinvestment.

Here’s the headline number: if you invested $10,000 when XEQT launched in August 2019, that investment is worth roughly $20,000-$21,000 today. You doubled your money in seven years, with zero stock picking, zero market timing, and zero effort beyond clicking “buy.”

That’s not some hypothetical backtest. That’s real money, earned by real people, using the simplest possible strategy.

Now let me tell you what I think the most important lessons are from living through all of it.

2. Lesson 1: The Boring Strategy Won

I’ll never forget the winter of 2021. My coworker was up 400% on GameStop. A friend had tripled his money on Dogecoin. Another friend was loading up on ARK Innovation ETF because Cathie Wood was “the next Warren Buffett.” Everyone was making money hand over fist – or at least that’s what their Instagram stories suggested.

And there I was, sitting on my XEQT position, watching it go up a perfectly respectable 22% for the year. It felt… inadequate. Boring. Like I was bringing a bicycle to a Formula 1 race.

But here’s what happened next.

GameStop collapsed. Dogecoin collapsed. ARK Innovation lost over 75% of its value from peak to trough and never recovered to its highs. The meme stock traders who didn’t sell at the top – and almost none of them did – gave back all their gains and then some. The crypto boom turned into a crypto winter that lasted years.

Meanwhile, XEQT just kept going. It had a bad year in 2022 like everything else, but it recovered in 2023 and then some. By 2024, it was hitting new all-time highs. The boring bicycle finished the race while the Formula 1 cars crashed into the wall.

Let’s put real numbers on it. Imagine three investors, each with $10,000 in January 2021:

• Investor A put $10,000 in XEQT and held. By mid-2026, that investment is worth roughly $15,000-$16,000.
• Investor B put $10,000 in ARK Innovation (ARKK). By mid-2026, that investment is worth roughly $4,000-$5,000.
• Investor C put $10,000 in Bitcoin at the 2021 highs. The ride has been wild – massive crashes, massive recoveries, regulatory uncertainty. Even if they held through everything, the experience was a rollercoaster that most people could not stomach.

The boring strategy didn’t just win on returns. It won on sleep quality. I never once lay awake at night worrying about my XEQT position. I cannot say the same for people who were checking crypto prices at 3 AM.

There’s a famous quote in investing circles: “The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.” XEQT is a patience machine. It forces you to be boring, and boring is what works.

3. Lesson 2: Crashes Feel Awful But Don’t Last

March 2020 was the most scared I’ve ever been as an investor. The world was shutting down. COVID-19 was spreading uncontrollably. Businesses were closing. People were losing jobs. The stock market dropped roughly 30% in a matter of weeks.

I watched my XEQT position lose thousands of dollars in value. Every day was worse than the last. The headlines were apocalyptic. “Is this the next Great Depression?” “Should you sell everything?” “Markets in freefall.”

I want to be honest with you: I almost sold. I had my finger on the button. I had a conversation with my partner about whether we should move everything to cash and wait for things to “settle down.”

But I didn’t sell. Not because I had some brilliant insight about the pandemic or the recovery. I didn’t sell because by that point, I had read enough about market history to know one thing – every single crash in stock market history has been followed by a recovery. Every one. The Great Depression. The dot-com bust. The 2008 financial crisis. Every time, markets came back.

And COVID was no different. From its March 2020 bottom, XEQT recovered all its losses within about five months. By the end of 2020, it was positive for the year. By the end of 2021, it was up massively. The people who survived their first market crash and stayed invested were rewarded with one of the best buying opportunities of a generation.

The math is brutal for people who sold. If you sold near the bottom and waited for things to “feel safe” before buying back in, you locked in a 25-30% loss and then missed a significant chunk of the rebound. That double penalty – selling low and buying back high – is the single most destructive thing a retail investor can do.

The lesson isn’t “don’t be scared during crashes.” You will be scared. I was scared. The lesson is: have a plan that doesn’t require you to make decisions when you’re scared. XEQT with automatic contributions is that plan. When the market crashes, your automatic buy goes through at lower prices. You don’t need to decide anything. You don’t need to be brave. The system does the right thing for you.

That 2020 crash, as horrible as it felt in the moment, was responsible for a massive portion of the gains XEQT holders have enjoyed since. The shares you bought at $18-$19 during the crash are now worth $28-$30. Your worst moment as an investor turned out to be your best opportunity.

4. Lesson 3: You Don’t Need to Understand Markets to Build Wealth

Over the past seven years, I’ve watched pundits, analysts, and financial “experts” get almost everything wrong.

Nobody predicted COVID-19. Nobody predicted the speed of the recovery. Nobody predicted that inflation would spike to 40-year highs in 2022. Nobody predicted that the Bank of Canada would raise rates from near-zero to 5% in barely a year. Nobody predicted the AI boom that would send tech stocks soaring in 2023 and 2024. Nobody predicted the tariff escalations of 2025. Nobody predicted how 2026 would unfold.

And yet, through all of this unpredictability, XEQT holders built significant wealth. Not because they predicted any of it – but because they didn’t need to.

That’s the magic of owning the entire global stock market through a single fund. When the world zigs in ways nobody expected, XEQT adapts automatically. When US tech boomed, XEQT was there – it holds all the major tech companies through its US allocation. When international markets outperformed, XEQT captured that too. When Canadian energy stocks surged with oil prices, the Canadian allocation benefited. When emerging markets had their moments, you participated.

You didn’t need to rotate out of value into growth. You didn’t need to overweight AI stocks. You didn’t need to buy Canadian banks before they rallied or sell them before they dipped. You didn’t need to have an opinion on the Canadian dollar, the price of oil, or the Federal Reserve’s next move.

You just needed to own XEQT and keep buying.

I think this is the most liberating lesson of all. Investing doesn’t have to be intellectual. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t require a finance degree or a Bloomberg terminal or hours of research every week. The people who spent hundreds of hours analyzing stocks and reading market commentary over the past seven years did not, on average, outperform the people who spent zero hours on it and just bought XEQT automatically.

Time is the most valuable thing you have. XEQT gives you all of it back.

5. Lesson 4: The AUM Growth Tells the Story

When XEQT launched in August 2019, it was a small fund. Assets under management were modest – a few hundred million dollars at best. It was new, unproven, and unknown to most Canadian investors.

Fast forward to 2026, and XEQT’s AUM has grown to well over $6 billion. That’s not a rounding error. That represents hundreds of thousands of Canadian investors who have looked at all their options – individual stocks, mutual funds, robo-advisors, crypto, real estate, GICs – and decided that a single all-equity ETF was the smartest choice.

Why does AUM growth matter to you as an investor?

• Liquidity. With billions in AUM, XEQT trades with extremely tight bid-ask spreads. You’re not losing money to transaction costs when you buy or sell.

• Lower costs. Scale allows BlackRock to keep the MER at 0.20% – one of the lowest in Canada for an all-in-one ETF.

• Validation. When billions of dollars flow into a fund, it’s not because of marketing. It’s because the product works. XEQT’s AUM growth is the Canadian investing community voting with their wallets.

• Stability. Large, well-established funds are less likely to be closed or merged. When you’re investing for 20 or 30 years, you want to know your fund will still exist when you need it.

The AUM story also reflects something bigger happening in Canadian investing culture. We are in the middle of a quiet revolution. Canadians are moving away from expensive mutual funds, away from stock picking, away from the idea that investing needs to be complicated. They’re embracing simplicity, low fees, and evidence-based investing. XEQT is both a product of that revolution and a driver of it.

6. Lesson 5: Simplicity Is the Ultimate Edge

If I had to distill everything I’ve learned from seven years of holding XEQT into a single sentence, it would be this: the people who did best are the ones who did least.

That sounds like a paradox. We’re taught that success requires effort and active decision-making. But investing is different. Every decision you make is an opportunity to make a mistake. Every time you check your portfolio, you risk emotional decision-making. Every “optimization” adds complexity, cost, and the chance of getting it wrong.

The XEQT investors who have done the best over these seven years share a strikingly similar profile:

• They set up automatic contributions – weekly, biweekly, or monthly – and left them running.
• They didn’t check their portfolio every day, or even every week.
• They didn’t panic sell during COVID, during the 2022 downturn, or during the tariff scares of 2025.
• They didn’t chase performance by switching to hot sectors or trending stocks.
• They didn’t try to time when to buy more or when to hold off.
• They didn’t overthink their allocation between TFSA and RRSP (though if you’re curious, we’ve covered XEQT in TFSA vs RRSP).

Their entire investment strategy fits on an index card: Buy XEQT. Set up automatic contributions. Don’t sell. Repeat until retirement.

That’s it. No spreadsheets. No rebalancing. No sector rotation. No options strategies. No crypto allocation. No “alternative investments.” Just one fund, bought consistently, held indefinitely.

I know how this sounds. It sounds too easy. Surely the people making real money are doing something more sophisticated?

They’re not. The vast majority of professional fund managers – people who do this for a living, with teams of analysts and proprietary data – fail to beat a simple index over any meaningful time period. If the professionals can’t beat the market by being clever, what chance does the average retail investor have?

The edge isn’t cleverness. The edge is simplicity. XEQT gives you that edge.

7. What the Next 7 Years Might Look Like

I’m not going to make predictions. That would contradict everything I just said about the futility of forecasting. But I can share some principles that I think will hold true regardless of what happens in markets between now and 2033.

The global economy will continue to grow. Not every year, and not in a straight line, but the long-term trajectory of human economic output has been upward for centuries. Population growth, technological innovation, productivity gains, and the relentless drive of billions of people to improve their lives – these forces don’t stop because of a recession or a trade war or a political crisis. They slow down sometimes, but they don’t stop.

New technologies will emerge that we can’t imagine today. Seven years ago, almost nobody was talking about ChatGPT, generative AI, or the massive reshaping of industries that AI would trigger. What’s the next paradigm-shifting technology? I have no idea. But XEQT will own the companies that create it, because XEQT owns basically everything.

Some countries will rise and others will stumble. Maybe India becomes the world’s next great growth engine. Maybe Europe has a renaissance. Maybe the US tech dominance fades. Maybe Canadian resources become more valuable than ever. With XEQT, you don’t need to guess. You own all of them. When the leadership rotates, your portfolio automatically rotates with it.

There will be more crashes. I can guarantee this with near-certainty. At some point in the next seven years, markets will drop 20-30% or more. It will feel terrible. The headlines will be scary. People will say “this time is different.” And then markets will recover, as they always have. The investors who stay the course will be rewarded, as they always are.

Fees will continue to matter. If you’re paying 2% per year in mutual fund fees versus 0.20% with XEQT, that 1.8% annual drag compounds into an enormous difference over decades. On a $500,000 portfolio over 20 years, the fee difference alone could cost you over $200,000 in lost returns.

The simplicity of XEQT will remain its greatest feature. As markets evolve, as new products launch, as financial influencers promote the next shiny thing, the fundamental value proposition of XEQT won’t change: one fund, global diversification, automatic rebalancing, rock-bottom fees, and a track record that speaks for itself.

8. It’s Not Too Late

If you’ve read this far and you’re thinking, “I wish I had bought XEQT seven years ago,” I have good news: you don’t need a time machine.

Yes, buying in 2019 was great. But the people who bought in 2020 did great too. So did the people who started in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, or 2025. The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is today.

Here’s what I want you to understand about “too late.” When XEQT launched in 2019, some people thought global stocks were too expensive. Surely it was “too late” to buy. Those people, if they waited, missed a doubling of their money.

The same concern exists now. Markets are higher than they were in 2019. Doesn’t that mean it’s “too late”?

No. Because the companies inside XEQT are earning more than they were in 2019. The global economy is larger. Profits are higher. The price is higher because the underlying value is higher. That’s how markets work – they go up because the economy grows and businesses earn more money.

If you’re a young Canadian just starting your career, you have 30 or 40 years of compounding ahead of you. Thirty years from now, today’s prices will look like a bargain, just as 2019’s prices look like a bargain today.

If you’re in your 30s or 40s and feel like you’ve fallen behind, you haven’t. You still have decades of investing runway. Even starting at 40 with consistent XEQT contributions can build serious wealth by retirement.

If you’ve been sitting in a high-fee mutual fund or a savings account earning 3%, every month you wait is a month of potential growth you’re leaving on the table.

Here’s how to start:

1. Open a commission-free brokerage account. We recommend Wealthsimple for most Canadians – you can learn more in our guide on the best platform to buy XEQT in Canada.
2. Open a TFSA, RRSP, or FHSA depending on your situation.
3. Buy XEQT. If you need a walkthrough, we have a complete how to buy XEQT step by step guide.
4. Set up automatic contributions – even $50 or $100 per paycheque.
5. Stop checking. Seriously. Close the app. Go live your life.

That’s the whole strategy. It worked for the last seven years. It will work for the next seven. And the seven after that.

Happy Birthday, XEQT

Seven years isn’t a long time in the grand scheme of investing. But it’s long enough to learn some important truths. Long enough to live through a crash and a recovery. Long enough to watch hype investments flame out while the boring strategy quietly won. Long enough to see a small ETF grow into a Canadian institution.

When I bought my first shares of XEQT on that quiet evening in 2019, I didn’t know any of this would happen. I didn’t know about COVID, about inflation, about meme stocks, about AI, about tariffs. I didn’t know my investment would double. All I knew was that owning the entire global stock market for 0.20% per year, in a single Canadian-dollar fund, seemed like a sensible idea.

Seven years later, it still does.

If you want to see the full track record in detail, check out our XEQT performance history page. And if you’re ready to start your own seven-year journey, the only thing standing between you and your future self’s gratitude is a few minutes and a buy button.

Happy birthday, XEQT. Here’s to the next seven.