Mutual Funds

Here are 4 rules we stick to when we’re researching mutual funds to include in our newsletters and investment services. While there is never any guarantee of a mutual fund’s performance, following these rules should help you avoid making poor choices.

(For more on our fund-picking strategy, including our top ten fund picks, be sure to download our new special …read more »

When investing in mutual funds, all too many amateur and professional investors and advisors try to take the easy way out. Instead of looking at the hard stuff — company fundamentals, industry trends, business plans and so on — they try to profit with a strategy called “momentum investing.”

You might think of momentum investing as a mutation of growth-stock investing. …read more »

Recently, we’ve heard from some investors who sold most or all of their stocks and mutual funds during the recent downturn.

Now, a number of these investors want to get back in, and many are considering Canadian mutual funds. But they wonder whether they should buy now or wait to see if the TSX, which has climbed over 40% from its …read more »

A number of months ago, a friend’s son was considering joining his employer’s group RRSP, and his father asked us to glance through the list of mutual funds the son had to choose from.

We went through the list and treated it the same way we do when we consider new mutual funds to follow in our Canadian Wealth Advisor …read more »

A good stock broker (the brokerage industry prefers the term “investment advisor”) can provide a cost-effective way to manage your investments. However, a good stock broker has always been hard to find. We mainly hear about them after they’ve retired, when investors complain about the bad brokers who have taken over their accounts.

As any good stock broker or experienced investor …read more »

We’ve always believed that investors should sell a stock if they have any doubts about the integrity of the people who are in charge of the company. In other words, if you think a company is run by crooks, you should sell the stock right away, no matter how attractive it seems as an investment. As the Madoff scandal so …read more »

Manulife shares dropped 14% recently after the Ontario Securities Commission began looking into whether it fully informed its shareholders late last year of the business risks of a market downturn.

MANULIFE FINANCIAL $20.19 (Toronto symbol MFC; Shares outstanding: 1.6 billion; Market cap: $32.5 billion; SI Rating: Above Average) sells life and other forms of insurance, as well as mutual funds and …read more »

HARBOUR FUND $17.42 (CWA Rating: Conservative) (C.I. Mutual Funds, 151 Yonge St., 7th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5C 2W7. 1-800-268-9374; Web site: www.cifunds.com. Load fund: available from brokers.) invests in only 25 to 40 high-quality mostly Canadian stocks, and it may hold stocks for four or five years to realize their value.

The $5.3-billion Harbour Fund’s top holdings include Canadian National Railway, …read more »

BMO DIVIDEND FUND $37.58 (BMO Mutual Funds, 77 King Street West, Suite 4200, Royal Trust Tower, Toronto, Ont., M5K 1J5, 1-800-665-7700; Web site: www.bmo.com. No load — deal directly with the bank) (CWA Rating: Conservative) currently holds about 43.3% of its portfolio in the Financial services industry. Its next-largest holding is Energy at 23.1%.

The $3.7 billion BMO Dividend Fund’s largest …read more »

Given their attractiveness, it’s a wonder why brokers so rarely recommend closed end mutual funds. However, there’s a simple reason for this: while closed ends benefit individual investors, brokers benefit more by putting their clients in conventional, open-ended funds.

Closed end funds are a lot like conventional, open-ended funds. They hold a diversified portfolio of stocks, chosen by a fund manager …read more »