CAD ETF Series: "XIC.TO"

The test every fund in this series gets

Reviewing a set of Canadian ETFs, one at a time, with the same test for every fund. Every distribution reinvested. Every purchase made at the closing price on the first trading day of its month. The prices are what a buyer at market actually paid, not the fund's own end-of-day valuation.

$1,000 to start, then $150 every month for five years. The window runs August 18, 2021 to August 18, 2026. This fund was already trading when the window opened, so it took the whole schedule of sixty monthly deposits, $10,000 in altogether.

What XIC.TO is

iShares Core S&P/TSX Capped Composite Index ETF. It tracks the S&P/TSX Capped Composite Index, which is the published list of companies the fund is built to mirror. Tracking means it tries to hold what the index holds, in the same proportions, rather than picking stocks. It has been running since February 16, 2001. The units trading under XIC.TO hold $33.93 billion between them, as of August 24, 2026. That figure is for this listing, not for a family of share classes, which we checked by dividing it by the units outstanding and landing on the published unit value.

The cost is 0.06% a year in total, and two things make it up. The MER is the management fee, taken out of the fund before you ever see a return, and for this fund it is 0.06%. The TER is the trading cost the fund runs up doing it, and for this fund it is 0.00%, which is a measured zero rather than a figure we are missing. Both are as of December 31, 2025, and both come from the fund's ETF Facts document rather than from its product page, which carries no date against the management expense ratio and does not carry the trading expense ratio at all.

It yields 1.92%, as of August 21, 2026, on a twelve-month trailing basis. That is what it actually paid over the last year, not what it promises to pay next. It distributes quarterly, and over our five-year window it paid 20 times, which is what quarterly should look like.

What you actually own

The fund's own holdings file, published for August 20, 2026, breaks down like this.

That is 99.64% of the fund. The remaining 0.36% is cash and futures the fund holds to manage flows, not companies.

A third of it is financial companies, mostly the big banks and insurers. That is not a choice the fund made. It is what the Canadian market weighs, and a fund built to hold the whole list inherits it. Health care is 0.30%, which is a rounding error rather than a sector.

There is no overlap figure here, and there cannot be one. Every other fund in this series is measured against this one, to show what share of it already sits inside the broad Canadian market. XIC.TO is that market, so the comparison would be against itself. The sector table above is data we went and got. This one is not a figure we are missing. It is a figure that does not exist.

The distributions

It paid 20 times in five years, on a quarterly rhythm. The cash rose every year without exception, from $49.48 in year one to $117.74, $171.60, $249.24, and $310.71 in year five. That climb is mostly the position getting bigger as money went in each month, not the fund raising its rate.

The math

That worst stretch is the account's fall rather than the fund's. The fund's own deepest fall over these five years was -17.96%, from March 22 to October 12, 2022. The account barely felt it. Only $3,100 of the eventual $10,000 had arrived by the bottom of it, and the $150 landing every month through that fall was buying at the lower prices. The account's own worst run came later and shallower, in April 2025, by which time there was far more money in it to fall. The gentler number is the one that describes what actually happened to the money.

Reinvesting was worth $460.43. What the test does is buy more units with every distribution on the day it arrives, rather than take the cash. The issuer lists a reinvestment plan for this fund, so a holder can arrange the same thing, though the test buys fractional units and a real plan generally does not. The comparison is against the honest alternative, which is not throwing the cash away but banking it.

Three outcomes, same $10,000 of deposits.

And notice the cash figures differ. Reinvesting brought in $898.77. Taking the cash brought in $853.51. A holder who does not reinvest owns fewer units, so receives less cash, $45.26 less over five years. That $45.26 is distributions earned by units that were themselves bought with distributions. The other $415.17 is those units rising in price. Together they are the $460.43.

Reinvested units make up 7.59% of the shares held at the end.

Fees cost $29.16 over the five years, or 0.17% of the ending value. That is a reveal rather than a second deduction. The fee is already inside the price, and this figure is the same deposits run against a fee-free twin of the same fund to see the gap.

Corrected 3 September 2026: this read $29.01. The twin used to add the fee back once per trading day we hold a price for, which made the figure depend on how complete our own price history was. It now adds the fee back by calendar day, as the fund charges it. Every figure of this kind on both tables moved the same way, upward, by between 12 cents and $2.34. Nothing else in this note changed.

Two rates, and the second one needs its label read carefully. With distributions reinvested, the return was 20.27% a year, counting when each dollar arrived. The 17.31% a year figure is the price-only rate. It holds the same units as the took-the-cash line above, with the distributions ignored entirely rather than banked. That is fewer units than the reinvested run holds, which is the whole reason the two rates differ. It is the closer of the two to what a published price chart shows, though it is not the same thing. A chart follows one dollar left alone for five years, and this follows sixty deposits. It is also not what happens to anyone, because nobody discards the cash. The gap between 20.27% and 17.31% is therefore larger than the benefit of reinvesting, which is the $460.43 above.

Year by year. Invested to date, value, gain that year net of what you put in, distributions, and shares.

The gain column is net of contributions. A deposit is money you added, never money you made.

If you look XIC.TO up, its five-year chart will show a different percentage than the 73.20% above. The chart tracks a dollar invested five years ago. Most of your dollars arrived later, at higher prices, and they earned distributions the chart does not show.

What we refused, and why

On December 30, 2021 the data vendor told us XIC.TO had cut its unit count by 1.3%. That is the kind of adjustment that happens when a fund consolidates its units, and every holder ends up with fewer of them, each worth proportionally more.

The price says it never happened. A real 1.3% consolidation should have pushed the unit price up about 1.3% that day. It went down 0.73%. The check compared it against the 30 other funds in this series that traded that same day. Their median move was down 0.54%. The price moved with the market, and not the way a consolidation moves it.

So we did not apply it. Taking units away without the price rising to match destroys value that never left the account. The cost here would have been about 0.24% of the final total, or $42.29. That is much smaller than 1.3%, and the reason is worth understanding. The cut lands four months into the run, when about $1,600 had been invested. It could only ever touch the units that existed on that one day. Every $150 that arrived in the years after it is untouched. An error in the unit count early in a long run of deposits stays small, because most of the money has not arrived yet. An error in a price would not, because every purchase after it would be made at the wrong number.

Fund data comes from vendors, and vendors are sometimes wrong. This one was checked.

One thing worth knowing about XIC.TO

It is the whole list, which is its strength and its limit. Holding 217 companies means no single decision about any one of them can help much, and none can hurt much either. The -10.98% stretch in April 2025 was the market falling, not a holding failing. There is nothing in here to pick badly, and nothing to pick well.

The issuer's own page

https://www.blackrock.com/ca/investors/en/products/239837/ishares-sptsx-capped-composite-index-etf

Tomorrow, a fund that holds a fraction of these companies rather than all of them.

This is a review of the past five years, and not a forecast of future performance.