In addition, Pat thinks then beginner investors should cultivate two important qualities: a healthy sense of skepticism and patience.
Investors should approach all investments with a healthy sense of skepticism. This can help keep you out of fraudulent stocks that masquerade as high-quality stocks. It will also keep you out of legally operated, but poorly managed, companies that promise more than they can possibly deliver.
If you are a new investor, you should also realize that losing patience can cause you to sell your best choices right before a big rise. All too often, investors buy a promising stock just as it enters a period of price stagnation. Even the best-performing stocks run into these unpredictable phases from time to time. They move mainly sideways in a wide range for months or years before their next big rise begins. (Stock brokers often refer to these stocks as “dead money.”)
If you lack patience, you run a big risk of selling your best choices in the midst of one of these phases, prior to the next big move upward. If you lose patience and sell, you are particularly likely to do so in the low end of the trading range, when stock prices have weakened and confidence in the stock has waned.
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The $45-million purchase will boost the speed and capacity of the company’s wireless networks.
Manitoba Telecom is a hold.
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The company didn’t say how much it received, but the sale will let it focus on its main media businesses, including CTV Television, specialty channels, radio stations and their related websites.
In the second quarter of 2015, the media division’s earnings rose 2.4% from a year earlier and accounted for 9.8% of BCE’s total.
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The bonds in the index are 71.3% government and 28.7% corporate.
The fund yields 2.8%, compared to the Short-Term Bond Fund’s 2.4%. Its yield to maturity is 1.93%, 0.85% above the Short-Term Fund. That reflects the added risk of holding long-term bonds.
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The iShares Canadian Short-Term Bond Index Fund yields 2.4%, but this high yield is due to the fact that some of the fund’s bonds pay above-market interest rates. As a result, they trade above their face value. When these bonds mature, holders will only get the bonds’ face value, meaning the portfolio will incur predictable capital losses. These losses will offset some of the appeal of the above-market yields.
The key figure when looking at the long-term return of this fund is yield to maturity. This yield takes into account the series of capital losses the fund will experience as its above-market-rate bonds mature. The iShares Canadian Short-Term Bond Index ETF’s yield to maturity is around 1.08%—less than the 2.4% yield but still higher than the 0.42% you’d earn by investing in, say, a one-year T-bill.
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The company’s regulated utility businesses now provide water, electricity and natural gas to over 489,000 customers, up sharply from 120,000 three years ago. Its hydroelectric, thermal energy, solar and wind facilities now generate 1,050 megawatts, up from 460.
Emera (Toronto symbol EMA), a recommendation of The Successful Investor, our conservative growth advisory, owns 20.9% of Algonquin.
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