investment advice

I hope you are enjoying and profiting from our free TSI Network daily updates. Our dailies aim to educate you on best practices in investing. They cover a wide range of investment topics, and explain conservative strategies you can use to build the best portfolio for you, and expand your wealth with less risk. The advice you get in our daily updates, as well as our investment newsletters and services (more on these below) is based on the experience I’ve built up in more than three decades in the investment business (starting with a part-time job in high school)....

Every Wednesday, we publish our “Investor Toolkit” series on TSI Network. Whether you’re a new or experienced investor, these weekly updates are designed to give you specific advice on successful investing. Each Investor Toolkit update gives you a fundamental piece of investment strategy, and shows you how you can put it into practice right away. Tip of the week: “Cut risk in your aggressive portfolio with our ‘sell-half’ rule.” Our “sell-half” rule says that if a stock you own has doubled, you should sell half so you get back your initial stake. Once you’ve recovered your initial investment, you’ll be able to think more clearly about the stock....

Members of our Inner Circle service often ask for our advice on stocks they are thinking of buying that we don’t cover in our newsletters. These companies range from the most speculative penny mines to large multinational growth stock picks. For example, an Inner Circle member recently asked for our advice on hotel and casino operator Las Vegas Sands Corp. The growth stock pick’s shares have risen sharply over the past year, and it is opening new resorts in Asia and the U.S. To give you a sense of how my Inner Circle service works, I’d like to share this question, and our answer, with you. I hope you enjoy and profit from it....

Every Wednesday, we publish our “Investor Toolkit” series on TSI Network. Whether you’re a new or experienced investor, these weekly updates are designed to give you specific advice on successful investing, including tax shelters. Each Investor Toolkit update gives you a fundamental piece of investment strategy, and shows you how you can put it into practice right away. Tip of the week: “These 3 powerful strategies will help you make the most of your RRSP tax shelters” Registered Retirement Savings Plans, or RRSPs, are the best-known and most widely used tax shelters in Canada....

When investing in the stock market, as in life, it pays to remember that most things we worry about never happen. It’s in our nature. As humans, we are bred to overreact to, dwell on or even brood over any hint of risk. Today’s common investment-related worries include the possibility of Japanese–style deflation in North America, currency wars, the threat of war on the Korean peninsula and the potential need for more European bailouts.

Why we’re hardwired to overreact to unseen threats

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Every Wednesday, we publish our “Investor Toolkit” series on TSI Network. Whether you’re a new or experienced investor, these weekly updates are designed to give you specific advice on successful investing. Each Investor Toolkit update gives you a fundamental tip and shows you how you can put it into practice right away. Tip of the week: “2 risks of following a sector rotation investment strategy” Some investors follow a “sector rotation” approach to investing. That’s when you try to hop from sector to sector, underweighting or overweighting your holdings in certain sectors of the stock market depending on a forecast of the stage of the economic cycle, or other factors....

Every Wednesday, we publish our “Investor Toolkit” investing advice series on TSI Network. Whether you’re a new or experienced investor, these weekly updates are designed to give you specific advice on successful investing. Each Investor Toolkit update gives you a fundamental piece of investing advice and shows you how you can put it into practice right away. Tip of the week: “Sometimes it pays to pay a little extra and get a vote.” Some Canadian companies, such as Bombardier and Teck Resources, have two classes of common shares: voting and non-voting (or multiple voting and subordinate voting)....

Every Wednesday, we publish our “Investor Toolkit” series on TSI Network. Whether you’re a new or experienced investor, these weekly updates are designed to give you specific advice on successful investing, including Canadian real estate investing. Each Investor Toolkit update gives you a fundamental tip and shows you how you can put it into practice right away. Tip of the week: “Buy a house that suits your needs, and let Canadian real estate investing profits take care of themselves.” A house is the biggest investment and consumer purchase most of us ever make. The house itself is the consumer purchase; the land underneath is the investment. Your house depreciates as surely as your car, but more slowly. Eventually, a house reaches the end of its economic life. But the land it sits on is as functional as ever....

We advise most investors to confine their Finance-sector investments to Canada’s five big banks and other recommendations in our Conservative Growth Portfolio. However, if you can accept more risk, we also like Home Capital and Dundee. HOME CAPITAL GROUP INC. $48 (Toronto symbol HCG; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 34.7 million; Market cap: $1.7 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 3.3; Dividend yield: 1.5%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.homecapital.com) is a mortgage lender that serves borrowers who don’t meet the more stringent criteria of larger, traditional lenders. In the three months ended September 30, 2010, Home Capital’s earnings rose 18.8%, to $45.4 million, or $1.31 a share. A year earlier, the company earned $38.2 million, or $1.10 a share. Low interest rates continue to fuel strong demand for residential mortgages and other loans. That lifted Home Capital’s revenue by 6.7%, to $133.8 million from $125.3 million. The company issued 17.8% more residential mortgages than in the year-earlier quarter. Non-residential mortgages rose 10.9%....

Every industry and group has its own special jargon. This specialized language always has the same purposes. It simplifies communications within the industry, and helps make insiders feel they are part of a tightly knit community. It also helps the group pursue its goals. It does that by shaping concepts so that they facilitate lines of thought and discussions that match the industry’s view of the world. This natural human tendency has probably been going on ever since language began. You may recall George Orwell’s classic Cold War novel, 1984. In the book, the totalitarian government that rules the English-speaking world has decided to replace English with an invented language called Newspeak. This new language uses lots of English words, but it defines concepts in such a way that forbidden ideas are clumsy, if not impossible, to express....