investing

A: VanEck Vectors Social Sentiment ETF, $14.14, symbol BUZZ on New York (Units outstanding: 4.1 million; Market cap: $58.0 million; www.vaneck.com), holds 75 stocks, each with a market cap of $5 billion or more; each of these stocks also generates social media attention.

The fund tracks the BUZZ NextGen AI U.S....

Most of our readers are familiar with our three-part Successful Investor investment strategy, which goes like this:

1. Invest mainly in well-established, dividend-paying companies.
2. Spread your money out across most if not all of the five main economic sectors (Manufacturing & Industry; Resources & Commodities; Consumer; Finance; and Utilities).
3. Downplay or avoid stocks in the broker/media limelight.

Rule #3 would also apply to investment ideas that are getting a lot of media attention....

Our WSSF Portfolio for Income-Seeking Investors gives recommendations on stocks with a history of dividends, plus dividend growth potential.


In addition to yield, earnings and p/e ratios, we show you how much each company has raised (or cut) its dividend in the past five years in the third column from the right in the table below.


Please note that among our Utility recommendations, we indicate with footnotes which of three main utility industries each company operates in: Telecommunications, Electric or Pipeline.


Each segment faces its own challenges....

Visa’s shares fell below $135 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. However, the stock quickly recovered as lockdowns prompted a surge in online shopping and lifted the company’s revenue from processing credit and debit card payments.


We feel the stock will continue to move higher, particularly as global travel volumes return to pre-pandemic levels....

Investing in the best Canadian stocks to buy right now will lead you towards dividend-paying blue chips, bank stocks, and more

Drugmaker Eli Lilly has two potentially huge blockbuster drugs on the horizon—one for obesity, the other for Alzheimer’s. But even without these two, the company’s future is bright given the strength of its existing roster of drugs plus new drugs in its pipeline.

The stock is up 108.4% since we first recommended it in our June 2020 issue of Power Growth Investor at $157.19....

A: Many thanks—it’s always a pleasure to hear from a long-time happy subscriber!

I’ve heard good and bad things over the years about investment clubs. First off, you need to keep in mind that the term “club” can be misleading. For many people, it conjures up the image of a non-profit, co-operative affair, run by and for the members....

Commodities are the raw materials that production and manufacturing rely on. Investing in them can help investors diversify their portfolios and win greater protection from inflation. However, commodities as a group can be both cyclical and volatile, and investors might rightly question the wisdom of either directly holding commodities or the commodity producers themselves in their portfolios.


Long-term gains with more risk


Over the period since 2002, an investment in a basket of physical commodities delivered a return of just 5.4% per year, while commodity producers returned 9.5% per year; this compares with the 9.5% per year return of the S&P 500 index (see table below).


The IMF All Commodity Index provides a good measure of the performance of physical commodities as a group....

Most commodity production is capital intensive with long development times. Producers face considerable costs to establish or replace mines, oilfields, and so on, or to build processing, storage and transportation facilities. This means that the selling prices of their products can vary significantly from the time of their initial investment decisions....

In February 2018, Becton Dickinson acquired rival medical device maker C.R. Bard (old New York symbol BCR), one of our early Wall Street Stock Forecaster recommendations.

Under the terms of the deal, Bard investors received $222.93 in cash plus 0.5077 of a Becton share for each BCR share they held....