As part of my RRSP, I recently opened a stock trading account.  I’m in the process of seeding this account with a relatively small percentage of my total combined RRSP+LIRA.  It’s a small enough number that it is noise in the big picture, but still enough that it satisfies the minimum amounts for high fee avoidance.
I like to spend my time thinking about math, physics, coding, and building stuff, and don’t find investing intrinsically interesting whatsoever.  Because of that lack of interest, mutual funds have made a lot of sense for my retirement savings.  I can use dollar cost averaging to buy into those funds, and forget about them after that.  However, in the interest of diversification, I thought I should finally bite the bullet and at least set myself up to buy some stocks should I want to.
Having done so, I am left with the annoying problem of figuring out what specific stocks to include in my retirement savings.
Considering what I might potentially buy, it makes sense not to buy stuff that I already own indirectly through various mutual funds.  It’s slightly non-trivial to figure out what those indirect holdings actually are, but I downloaded the end of year “holdings CSVs” for all the funds I own, and did some data manipulation after that.  I determined that (not counting crypto, nor real estate equity) these are my current effective top holdings, as percentages of total:
Microsoft Corp 3.06
NVIDIA Corp 2.99
Apple Inc 2.44
Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd 1.90
Royal Bank of Canada 1.62
Amazon.com Inc 1.51
Alphabet Inc – Class A Shares 1.35
Broadcom Inc 1.30
Enbridge Inc 1.27
Wheaton Precious Metals Corp 1.25
Shopify Inc 1.22
Exxon Mobil Corp 1.11
Meta Platforms Inc – Class A Shares 1.09
Kinross Gold Corp 1.00
Barrick Gold Corp 1.00
Canadian Natural Resources Ltd 0.96
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd 0.94
Toronto-Dominion Bank 0.90
Unknown 0.89
Shell PLC 0.83
Chevron Corp 0.82
Brookfield Corp 0.79
TC Energy Corp 0.70
Netflix Inc 0.70
Alamos Gold Inc 0.68
Suncor Energy Inc 0.68
Bank of Montreal 0.67
ConocoPhillips 0.67
Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd 0.65
Bank of Nova Scotia 0.63
TotalEnergies SE 0.58
Constellation Software Inc/Canada 0.58
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce 0.58
Franco-Nevada Corp 0.57
Salesforce Inc 0.53
Canadian National Railway Co 0.53
JPMorgan Chase & Co 0.52
Procter & Gamble Co 0.52
Manulife Financial Corp 0.52
Home Depot Inc 0.51
K92 Mining Inc 0.51
Intuit Inc 0.51
RBC Canadian Short-Term Income Fund – Series O 0.50
The full list is about 1000 rows long, with non-zero dollar amounts going as low as $2.30 per holding.  The data manipulation and visualization possibilities are much more interesting than the investments themselves, and I’d like to play with that more.
As for what to incorporate into the stock account, I think that I’m heavy on the equity side of the story, so some stable dividend producers might be a good way to round things out.