best stocks

Buying high-quality blue chip shares will maximize investor returns—but you also need to know when sell them
Sometimes it’s better to just pay the Canadian capital gains tax, which can actually save you money and make your investments more profitable.
Vanguard EFT
We recommend that investors diversify up to 30% of their portfolios into U.S. stocks and as much as 10% into international securities. One attractive way for safety-conscious investors to do this is with exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Today we look at several ETFs from a U.S. firm that offer a low-fee way to achieve this diversification. We profile two Vanguard ETFs that track a U.S. large-cap index and an emerging market index.

Pennsylvania-based Vanguard Group is one of the world’s largest investment management companies. In all, it administers almost $3 trillion U.S. in 170 mutual funds.

Vanguard, which went into business in 1975, offers low-fee index mutual funds. Generally speaking, Canadians can’t buy units of mutual funds that are registered in the U.S., because they aren’t registered with provincial securities commissions. For that matter, some Canadian funds aren’t available in all provinces.

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Learn when to sell stocks at the right time. Here’s our advice.
Our view on two international ETFs—one for Emerging Markets, one for South Korea—as a way to diversify your portfolio in today’s markets
One of the least useful investment sayings you’ll ever hear is the oft-repeated “the secret of profitable investing is to buy low and sell high.” It can lead you to waste years in a costly search for a magic way to figure out where “low” is, and how to tell when a price has gone up to “high”. One obvious but erroneous answer to the first question is that a low price per share, particularly less than $1, is a good place to buy. This lures many beginning investors into penny stocks. After all, a winning penny stock can go from under $1 to several dollars. However, zeroing in on that rare event, much less making money at it, is a lot harder than many investors realize. Although the price may seem right, the average penny offers a poor long-term return. After all, it’s hard to create a successful business. It’s much easier and cheaper to set up a company and sell stock to the public. That’s why bad penny stocks always outnumber good ones. ...
The more brokers and the media praise popular stocks, the higher investor expectations are raised—and the farther they have to fall.
Here’s the text of the quarterly letter I recently sent to our Portfolio Management clients:

“The subject of interest rates comes up regularly these days, in the news and in investor conversations. U.S. Federal Reserve Board members see a need for rates to move up. Prior to the recent market downturn, they were still undecided on ‘how soon’ and ‘how much’.

If stocks remain weak into the fall months, the Fed is likely to leave interest rates unchanged. However, now is still a good time to review the role of bonds as an alternative to stocks.

Bonds have been rising for 35 years

Interest rates have generally been going down, and bond prices have been going up, since 1980. That year, the yield on 10-year U.S. government bonds peaked at around 16%. Currently they yield around 2%.

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Follow our stock market investment advice and be a worry-free investor.
Because it’s always important to diversify beyond Canada, a look at two Vanguard ETFs that offer a low-fee way to achieve diversification.