Top pick Barrick Mining just raised its dividend a whopping 140% as it generates record earnings and continues its strategic asset reorganization.
Warner Music Group Corp. is well-positioned for higher-margin catalog revenues, added streaming adoption, and new AI monetization opportunities.
ARC Resources keeps returning its cash flow to shareholders through a growing dividend and substantial share buybacks.
Become a Successful Investor
Investing in high-risk investment opportunities may look like a quick way to supercharge your portfolio gains—but it’s more likely to kill those gains
Understanding the difference between aggressive and conservative stocks will help you invest more safely with a well-diversified portfolio
Human nature puts the odds against you when you invest in new stock issues (also known as IPOs or Initial Public Offerings). Insiders decide when to bring a new issue to market. They mostly do so only when it’s a good time for the company or its insiders to sell stock to the public. That means new issues tend to come to market when the company or its industry is enjoying what may be a temporary improvement in business or profit. If the improvement is only temporary, this generally isn’t a good time for you to buy. Investment industry practice makes things worse. Financial institutions know how to package a new issue to make it seem like a great deal. This tends to raise the price that you pay for a new issue, compared to a stock that is already trading in the market. That’s a second reason why new issues tend to be overpriced in relation to a balanced assessment of their prospects. In addition, the underwriting process adds costs, for commissions (usually 5% to 7% of the funds raised), plus legal and accounting expenses....
Kinaxis Inc., $47.86, symbol KXS on Toronto (Shares outstanding: 24.1 million; Market cap: $1.1 billion; www.kinaxis.com), provides cloud-based software that big companies use to manage their supply chains. The business concept is SaS—software as a service. Subscribers pay a monthly or yearly fee for software implementation, support and upgrades. This provides the software company with steady income, rather than series of larger one-time payments for the initial sale and upgrades. Kinaxis’s main product is RapidResponse. Applications include matching functions like production and inventory to demand, analyzing sales patterns and forecasting. This Ottawa-based company has a much longer history than most new issues, and is much more mature as a business. It was founded in 1984. It operated under the Webplan Inc. name until May 2005, when it changed its name to Kinaxis. It first sold shares to the public at $13 and began trading on Toronto in June 2014....
LendingClub Corp., $12.34, symbol LC on New York (Shares outstanding: 375.2 million; Market cap: $4.5 billion; www.lendingclub.com), operates an online marketplace that matches borrowers with potential lenders. The company’s software automates the application process, quickly determines a borrower’s creditworthiness and sets the interest rate on the loan. This method keeps LendingClub’s costs down, so its rates tend to be lower than bank lending rates. The company receives fees for originating loans, collecting payments from borrowers and passing them on to lenders. It doesn’t provide loans or assume any credit risk. Since it started up in 2007, Lending Club has helped more than 1.1 million borrowers get $13.4 billion worth of loans....
Vogogo Inc., $0.81, symbol VGO on Toronto (Shares outstanding: 35.0 million; Market cap: $35.5 million; www.vogogo.com), makes software that helps financial firms and merchants process electronic payments that use cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Its products aim to cut fraud and make it easier for bitcoin transactions to comply with banking regulations. Bitcoin is a digital currency invented in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto (possibly a real person, possibly a pseudonym for one or more hackers). It isn’t the first digital currency, but Nakamoto’s innovation was to use math-heavy coding techniques that allow bitcoins to be exchanged without the need for a central authority or a physical standard, like gold, to deter counterfeiters and regulate the supply. Right now, supply is limited to about 12.2 million bitcoins....