diversification

MENTOR GRAPHICS CORP. $24.33 (Nasdaq symbol MENT; TSINetwork Rating: Extra Risk) (503- 685-7000; www.mentor.com; Shares outstanding: 116.1 million; Market cap: $2.9 billion; Dividend yield: 0.9%) makes hardware and software for improving the design of electronic products and speeding up their development. For example, Mentor’s software lets automakers use less wiring in a car, identify potential safety issues and minimize electromagnetic effects on sensitive components. In the quarter ended January 31, 2015, Mentor’s revenue rose 9.5%, to $439.1 million from $401.0 million a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, earnings per share gained 18.5%, to $1.09 from $0.92....

Getting back to industrial basics, General Electric shrinks GE Capital and finalizes its big deal with French nuclear power giant Alstrom.

ATLANTIC TELE-NETWORK $70.10 (Nasdaq symbol ATNI; TSINetwork Rating: Speculative) (340- 777-8000; www.atni.com; Shares outstanding: 15.9 million; Market cap: $1.1 billion; Dividend yield: 1.7%) owns wireless and wireline telecom operations in the U.S. Southwest, New England, New York State, Guyana, Bermuda and parts of the Caribbean islands.

The company continues to improve its technology and expand its wireless capacity and coverage. That’s paying off as customers use more mobile data for profitable services like music downloads and gaming.

Big departure from telecom

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Every Thursday we bring you one of our best U.S. stock picks. You will read about stocks making moves you should know about, most often from our newsletter on U.S. investing, Wall Street Stock Forecaster.

On Tuesday, we profiled a Canadian company in the chemical waste business with a high dividend yield (see the article here). Today we report on a U.S. chemical stock that’s not widely known, but also has an admirable record with dividends.

QUAKER CHEMICAL CORP. (New York symbol KWR; www.quakerchem.com) began operating in 1918 and currently operates 34 plants in 21 countries. These facilities make lubricants and chemicals that keep mechanical parts from rusting.

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PLEASE NOTE: Due to the Good Friday holiday, our next Hotline will go out on Thursday, April 2, 2015. ATLANTIC TELE-NETWORK, $70.37, symbol ATNI on Nasdaq, owns wireless and wireline telecom operations in the U.S. Southwest, New England, New York State, Guyana, Bermuda and parts of the Caribbean islands. The company continues to improve its technology and expand its wireless capacity and coverage. That’s paying off as customers use more mobile data for profitable services like music downloads, mobile gaming and e-books....

Every Thursday we bring you one of our best U.S. stock picks. You get our specific recommendation on the stocks we profile, with a full explanation of how we arrived at our opinion. You will read about stocks making moves you should know about, most often from coverage in our newsletter on U.S. investing, Wall Street Stock Forecaster.

WAL-MART STORES INC. (New York symbol WMT; www.walmart.com) gets about 60% of its sales from its 4,516 stores in the U.S., including 3,407 supercentres, which sell both groceries and general merchandise. Groceries now supply 56% of Wal-Mart’s U.S. sales.

In 1991, the company opened its first store outside of the U.S. through a joint venture with a Mexican retailer. Its international division (29% of total sales) now operates 6,290 stores in 26 countries.

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iShares Canadian Financial Monthly Income ETF, $6.99, symbol FIE on Toronto (Units outstanding: 45.0 million; Market cap: $314.6 million; www.blackrock.com), is a balanced fund with 16% of its assets in bonds and 16% in preferred shares. The other 68% is in common stocks. We don’t generally recommend balanced funds, as bonds are unlikely to perform well over the next few years, if only because interest rates will likely hold steady or rise. That means the fund would only earn interest income on its bonds; instead of capital gains, its bond holdings could produce capital losses. The iShares Canadian Financial Monthly Income ETF holds mostly corporate bonds, which expose you to varying levels of risk. Some are almost as safe as government bonds and offer only slightly higher yields. Others offer higher yields but are much riskier....

SCITI Trust, $9.13, symbol SIN.UN on Toronto (Units outstanding: 30.3 million; Market cap: $276.6 million; www.scotiamanagedcompanies.com), first issued units at $10 and began trading on Toronto in April 2003. The trust was scheduled to wind up on April 29, 2008, but unitholders voted to keep it going for another five years in March 2008 and again in March 2013. It’s now scheduled to wind up on April 30, 2018, though it could be extended again. The trust’s portfolio is based on the Scotia Capital High-Yielding Equity Index, which tracks the highest-yielding stocks (including many real estate investment trusts and former income trusts) on the Toronto exchange. SCITI Trust now holds the top 50 highest-yielding issues in the index, on a roughly equal-weight basis....

Dun & Bradstreet’s has kept its credit report business thriving with its ability to harness new technologies like cloud computing.

Here’s the text of the quarterly letter I recently sent to our Portfolio Management clients: “A client of mine, Dr. J., recently said, “Pat, you advise investors to spread their money out across most if not all of the five main economic sectors. Why not just leave out the resource sector?” I think that’s a bad idea. It disregards the one key contribution that resource stocks make to a sound portfolio, as you’ll see below. But I’m sure many investors agree with Dr. J. After all, the weak performance of the resource sector goes back much further than the recent plunge in the price of oil (from $110 U.S. a barrel last July to a recent low near $45 U.S.)....