Canadian Wealth Advisor
Canadian Wealth Advisor is an eight-page newsletter, published monthly. The newsletter deals with 'safe money' investments: mutual funds, income trusts, conservative large-capitalization stocks, RRSPs, RRIFs, GICs, and tax-advantaged investments. The newsletter also looks at financial planning, tax planning, investment bargains (and rip-offs, too) and many other issues for safely making more money. You can subscribe on-line at www.canadianwealthadvisor.ca, or by calling 1-800-270-0287.
At one time, mutual funds within a particular ‘fund family’ often shared some key investment characteristic, such as a conservative or aggressive investment approach, or a stress on value as opposed to growth.
However, due to trends in the mutual-funds industry such as corporate mergers and takeovers, and more aggressive marketing, a fund’s membership in a fund family now has little …read more »
Stock market indexes in Canada and the U.S. are up only 4% or so this year. But that disguises the underlying strength of the global economy.
U.S. growth was an annulized 2.5% in the second quarter of this year. While that’s down from 5.6% in the first quarter, it’s still strong considering that the U.S. Federal Reserve has continued to raise …read more »
Income trusts as a group are more speculative than most investors realize. They carry a lot of hidden risk, due to the way they are organized as investments, and to the way they are valued by investors.
Share prices of many companies rise in price when they announce plans to convert into income trusts. But that leaves a lot of room …read more »
We’ve recommended a select number of closed-end mutual funds over the years in Canadian Wealth Advisor as a great way to buy high-quality assets at a discount.
As we’ve said, many closed-end funds eventually liquidate, or transform themselves into open-end funds. When that happens, much of the discount disappears overnight. The fund’s shares may then jump up to 30% or more.
A …read more »
IVY ENTERPRISE FUND $4.55 invests in smaller and medium-sized companies. The $240.5 million fund has an MER of 2.46%. The fund’s overall choice of stocks doesn’t inspire our confidence. Its top holdings are RONA Inc., Winpak, Richie Brothers Auctioneers, National Instruments, Canadian Western Bank, Saxon Financial, Brown & Brown, Henry Schein and Robert Half International.
We think investors can do better …read more »
At one time, mutual funds within a particular ‘fund family’ often shared some key investment characteristic, such as a conservative or aggressive investment approach, or a stress on value as opposed to growth.
However, due to trends in the mutual-funds industry such as corporate mergers and takeovers, and more aggressive marketing, a fund’s membership in a fund family now has little …read more »
In evaluating investments, many investors focus on what we’d call ‘investment outputs’, such as earnings, dividends, cash flow, return on equity, sales growth and so on. These are all important, of course, but you shouldn’t focus on them to the exclusion of what you might call ‘investment inputs’, such as the factors we use in assigning our Successful Investor quality …read more »
The Bank of Canada raised interest rates in March by 0.25%, to 3.75% from 3.50%. That was the fifth consecutive monthly increase.
The increase was largely in response to rising inflation. The consumer price index or “All-items” index was up by an annualized 2.2% in February, down from a 2.8% rise in January. The index includes 600 items.
There are other measures …read more »
The S&P/TSX composite index closed at all-time high of 11,441.58 on the first day of trading in 2006. The index rose 169.32 points, or 1.5%. The previous record high of 11,388.80 was reached in September, 2000.
The 2000 high came on the strength of peaking technology and Internet-related stocks, including Nortel shares trading at $122.
The latest record high was largely due …read more »
