The XEQT Payday Playbook: How to Optimize Your Monthly Buying Strategy

I spent an embarrassing amount of time in 2020 trying to figure out the “best” day of the month to buy XEQT. I read academic papers about day-of-week effects. I looked at monthly seasonality data. I built a spreadsheet tracking whether buying on the 1st was better than buying on the 15th. I even briefly considered splitting my monthly investment into four weekly purchases because someone on Reddit said it “maximizes DCA benefits.”

After all that research, you want to know what I discovered?

It doesn’t matter.

Seriously. The difference between buying on the “best” day and the “worst” day of the month is so small over a 20-year investing horizon that it’s essentially rounding error. What matters infinitely more is that you actually buy consistently, month after month, year after year. The timing of your monthly purchase is one of the least important decisions in your investing life.

But I also know that for a lot of people – especially those just starting out – figuring out the logistics of “how do I actually set this up?” is a real barrier. So this guide covers both: why the timing barely matters, and how to set up a system that makes buying XEQT completely automatic and frictionless.

1. Why the Exact Day You Buy Barely Matters

Let me start with the math, because this is where most of the over-optimization anxiety lives.

Over the past 30+ years, the global stock market has returned roughly 8-10% per year on average. That works out to about 0.03% per trading day. So the difference between buying on Monday versus Friday, or the 1st versus the 15th, is measured in fractions of a fraction of a percent.

A study by Vanguard looked at what would happen if you had perfect foresight – if you could magically invest at the lowest point every month versus the highest point every month. Over a 30-year period, the difference was surprisingly small: roughly 0.4% per year. And that’s with perfect timing, which nobody has.

In real dollars: on a $500 monthly investment over 30 years, the difference between perfect timing and the absolute worst timing was roughly $30,000 – sounds like a lot, until you realize the portfolio itself was worth over $700,000. That’s a 4% difference over three decades of investing. You literally cannot time it that perfectly anyway.

The cost of waiting even a single month to invest is typically more damaging than buying at the “wrong” time within a given month. Time in market beats timing the market. Full stop.

2. The Three Common Buying Approaches

Most Canadian XEQT investors settle into one of three approaches:

Approach A: Payday Auto-Buy

You set up a recurring purchase that triggers every time you get paid. If you’re paid biweekly, XEQT gets bought biweekly. If you’re paid monthly, it happens monthly. The money moves from your chequing account to your brokerage and into XEQT without you lifting a finger.

Best for: People who want to completely automate their investing and never think about it.

Approach B: Fixed Monthly Date

You pick a date – the 1st, the 15th, whatever – and that’s your XEQT day. Every month, same date, same amount. Some people tie it to a budget cycle (investing on the 1st after rent is paid, for example).

Best for: People who budget on a monthly cycle and like neat, predictable numbers.

Approach C: Lump It as Soon as You Have It

Whenever money hits your account that’s earmarked for investing, you buy XEQT immediately. Got a tax refund on March 12? Buy XEQT on March 12. Got a freelance payment on the 23rd? Buy XEQT on the 23rd.

Best for: People with irregular income, or anyone who just wants their money working as soon as possible.

3. How to Set Up Recurring Buys on Wealthsimple

Wealthsimple’s auto-invest feature makes Approach A dead simple. Here’s how to set it up:

1. Open your Wealthsimple app and go to the account where you want to buy XEQT (TFSA, RRSP, etc.)
2. Search for XEQT and tap on it
3. Look for the “Recurring buy” option (sometimes called “Auto-invest”)
4. Set your amount (e.g., $250 per purchase)
5. Choose your frequency (weekly, biweekly, or monthly)
6. Pick your start date
7. Confirm and forget about it

That’s it. Wealthsimple will automatically deposit funds from your linked bank account and purchase XEQT on your chosen schedule. You’ll get a notification when each purchase goes through, but you don’t need to do anything.

A few things to know:

• Fractional shares: Wealthsimple supports fractional shares for XEQT, so your full $250 (or whatever amount) gets invested. No leftover cash sitting around.
• No commissions: Buying XEQT on Wealthsimple is free. There are no trading fees eating into your purchases.
• Bank transfer timing: Make sure there’s money in your bank account when the auto-invest triggers. It pulls from your linked bank account a few days before the purchase date.

4. Market Orders vs Limit Orders for XEQT

Some investors, especially those coming from other brokerages, wonder whether they should use limit orders instead of market orders when buying XEQT.

Short answer: market orders are fine for XEQT.

Here’s why:

• XEQT is one of the most liquid ETFs in Canada, with millions of dollars in daily trading volume
• The bid-ask spread (the difference between the buy and sell price) is typically just 1-2 cents per share
• On a $30 share price, a 2-cent spread costs you about 0.07% – totally negligible

Limit orders make sense when you’re buying thinly traded, obscure ETFs where the spread might be 10-20 cents. For XEQT, a market order will execute instantly at essentially the fair price.

If you’re using Wealthsimple’s recurring buy feature, it places market orders automatically. This is perfectly fine.

5. Biweekly vs Monthly: Which Is Better?

If you get paid biweekly (every two weeks), you might wonder whether you should invest $250 biweekly or $500 monthly. Let me break this down:

Biweekly investing gets your money into the market slightly sooner on average, because half your monthly contribution is invested ~2 weeks earlier than it would be with a single monthly purchase. Over a 30-year career, this earlier deployment of capital can add up to a modest advantage.

How modest? Roughly 1-3% more wealth over 30 years, depending on market returns. On a $250 biweekly investment earning 8% annually, that’s roughly $10,000-$30,000 on a portfolio worth $800,000+. Meaningful, but not life-changing.

Monthly investing is simpler to track, easier to budget around, and produces cleaner records for tax purposes.

Here’s the comparison:

One thing people miss: biweekly investing actually results in 26 contributions per year, not 24. That’s two “extra” $250 payments compared to a twice-monthly schedule. Over 30 years, those extra contributions add up to $15,000+ in additional invested capital. This is often a bigger factor than the timing advantage.

If your employer pays you biweekly, just set up biweekly auto-invest. If you’re paid monthly, invest monthly. Match your investment schedule to your pay schedule and stop thinking about it.

6. What About Dollar-Cost Averaging Within a Month?

Some investors take the dollar-cost averaging concept to an extreme: instead of investing $500 on the 1st, they invest $125 every week throughout the month. The theory is that spreading purchases across more days gives you a “smoother” average price.

In practice, this is over-optimization that adds complexity for negligible benefit.

XEQT’s price doesn’t move dramatically within a typical month. The difference between buying once at $30.15 and buying four times at $30.10, $30.20, $30.05, and $30.15 is literally pennies. On a $500 purchase, we’re talking about cents of difference.

Meanwhile, you’ve quadrupled the number of transactions you need to track, you’ve spent four separate sessions thinking about investing instead of one, and you’ve introduced four opportunities to second-guess yourself and skip a purchase.

Analysis paralysis is a real thing. The more decisions you make about your investing, the more likely you are to make a bad one. One purchase per pay period is the sweet spot.

7. How to Handle Months When You Have Extra Money

Tax refund. Work bonus. Birthday money from Grandma. Freelance payment. Sometimes you have more money available to invest than your usual monthly amount. What should you do?

The answer is almost always: invest it right away.

Research consistently shows that lump sum investing beats dollar-cost averaging about two-thirds of the time, because markets go up more often than they go down. If you receive a $5,000 tax refund, investing all $5,000 in XEQT immediately will, on average, produce better results than spreading it out over 5 months at $1,000 each.

The exception is psychological: if investing a lump sum makes you so anxious that you might panic-sell during the next dip, then spreading it out over 2-3 months is a perfectly reasonable compromise. A slightly sub-optimal strategy that you stick with beats an optimal strategy that you abandon.

Here’s my personal rule: any windfall under $5,000 goes straight into XEQT the same day I receive it. Larger windfalls (which have happened exactly twice in my life) I split across 2-3 months, purely for my own comfort. Not optimal, but I sleep fine.

8. The Anti-Optimization Trap

I want to address something directly, because if you’ve read this far, you might be exactly the kind of person who needs to hear this.

Optimizing the timing of your XEQT purchases is one of the least valuable ways to spend your financial energy.

Here’s what actually moves the needle on your long-term wealth, in order of importance:

1. Your savings rate – How much you invest each month matters far more than when you invest it
2. Staying invested – Not selling during downturns is worth more than any timing strategy
3. Keeping fees low – XEQT’s 0.20% MER already handles this
4. Tax optimization – Using your TFSA and RRSP effectively is worth thousands per year
5. Increasing your income – A raise or side hustle that adds $200/month to your investments matters more than perfectly timed purchases

Notice what’s not on that list? The specific day of the month you buy XEQT.

I fell into this trap early in my investing journey. I spent hours optimizing something that was worth maybe $50/year in potential gains, while ignoring opportunities to increase my savings rate by $500/month. Don’t make the same mistake.

The Playbook: Just Do This

If you want the simplest, most effective XEQT buying strategy, here it is:

1. Open a Wealthsimple account (if you haven’t already)
2. Decide how much you can invest per pay period (even $50 is a great start)
3. Set up recurring buys to match your pay schedule (biweekly if paid biweekly, monthly if paid monthly)
4. Choose XEQT as your recurring purchase
5. Make sure your bank account has sufficient funds before each auto-invest date
6. When you receive extra money (bonus, refund, gift), invest it in XEQT within a day or two
7. Don’t check the price before your recurring purchase goes through – it doesn’t matter
8. Review once a year to see if you can increase your contribution amount

That’s the whole strategy. No spreadsheets. No day-of-month analysis. No market timing. Just consistent, automated purchases of a globally diversified ETF.

The best investing system is the one that runs on autopilot so you can focus on living your life, growing your career, and finding ways to invest more – not stressing about whether Tuesday or Thursday is the better day to buy.

Set it up. Forget about it. Let compounding do the rest.