investment advice
You’ll find our mutual-fund ratings (Aggressive, Conservative or Income) displayed next to every fund we recommend in our Canadian Wealth Advisor newsletter. They’re key to helping us find top-performing funds, including those that are suitable for income investing. (To show you how our system works, we’d like to share one of the income investing fund buys we recently recommended in Canadian Wealth Advisor. Please read on for full details.) Rating mutual funds is more complex than rating individual companies. When we judge a company’s investment quality, we take nine key factors into account....
No matter whether you are a new investor or a seasoned veteran, these four key tips can help you learn how to trade stocks and make greater profits with less risk. They’re at the core of the advice we give in our investment services, including Canadian Wealth Advisor, our newsletter for more conservative investors.
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Successful Investor Tip #1: Hold mainly high-quality, dividend paying stocks or mutual funds that hold those stocks
We think investors will profit most — and with the least risk — by buying shares of well-established companies with strong business prospects. These are companies that have strong positions in healthy industries. They also have strong management that will make the right moves to stay competitive in a changing market....
When you join my Inner Circle service, you get to ask me your own personal investment questions, plus you get to see what other Inner Circle members have asked, along with our answers. So you can see how the service works, and get a sense of how it might help your portfolio, I’d like to share just a couple of member questions about stock market trading strategy and stock ideas. I hope you enjoy and profit from them. Q: Dear Pat: My 79-year-old aunt has inherited $250,000 and has asked me to invest the money on her behalf. She is in good health, has pensions that cover her routine expenses, and two financially independent children who will inherit her estate. My thoughts are to invest half the money in about 10 high-quality stocks, as per your long-standing investment advice (essentially on behalf of her children), and leave the other half more liquid to cover contingencies, such as the possible need for in-home care....
Perhaps the most fundamental piece of investment advice you will ever receive is to make sure you carefully read a contract and get clarification of anything you don’t understand before you sign. Most investors are familiar with this investment advice, of course, but it’s important to keep in mind, especially when doing things like opening an investment account, or transferring investments from one brokerage to another. It’s something we take very seriously when we manage the portfolios of clients of our Successful Investor Wealth Management service. When we fill out account transfer forms, we make sure that each form is checked and double-checked by two different people in our office, to avoid costly mistakes....
GARMIN $32.31, symbol GRMN on Nasdaq, rose as much as 26% this week, to $34, before slipping back to today’s price. The jump was caused by quarterly results that beat consensus estimates. In the three months ended June 30, 2009, Garmin’s earnings per share, excluding one-time items, fell 30.3%, to $0.83 from $1.19 a year earlier. Despite the drop, this was much higher than the $0.51 that analysts were expecting. Sales fell 27%, to $669.1 million from $911.7 million, but this was still better than the $657.1 million that was predicted. Garmin is a dominant maker of navigation devices that use the global-positioning system (GPS). It makes 80% of its sales from consumer products, like hand-held GPS receivers, portable navigation devices for use in cars, and fixed-mount GPS systems that are used in cars and boats. The company gets the other 20% of its sales from GPS- and VHF-enabled receivers that are used in aircraft....
AMAZON.COM INC., $77.63, symbol AMZN on Nasdaq, has cut the price of its Kindle 2 e-book reader by $60 U.S. The unit now sells for $299 U.S. (The Kindle is only available in the United States.) The company’s larger Kindle DX, which it plans to start shipping later this summer, is still $489 U.S. Kindle users can download files from Amazon’s Kindle store, which contains over 300,000 books. Most bestsellers and new releases are just $9.99 U.S. each. Users can also download leading U.S. and international magazines and newspapers, as well as over 1,200 blogs. Because of strong demand for the Kindle, Amazon has been able to negotiate better prices from manufacturers. The price cut should spur more sales and downloads....
Recently some readers have asked what we think of U.S. newsletters that predict a total collapse in stock prices. The short answer is that I disagree with these publishers. But the best answer has to include some industry background, and point out that I also disagree with their approach to the newsletter business. We aim to publish balanced, realistic investment advice that you can use to help you invest your money, make it grow over long periods, and generally prepare for a comfortable retirement....
DUNDEEWEALTH INC. $5.69 (Toronto symbol DW; SI Rating: Speculative) (1-800-301-6745; www.dundeewealth.com; Shares outstanding: 118.3 million; Market cap: $673.4 million) manages investments and operates a brokerage business. It also provides financial-planning and investment advice. DundeeWealth reported a loss of $126.3 million, or $0.89 a share, in the three months ended December 31, 2008. It made $48.1 million, or $0.32 a share, a year earlier. The loss was mainly caused by a $117.2-million writedown of the value of its investment portfolio caused by falling stock markets. The stock market decline also meant that Dundee collected fewer management fees from its mutual funds during the quarter. Its revenue fell 47.3%, to $171.7 million from $325.6 million....
CALIAN TECHNOLOGIES, $13.99, symbol CTY on Toronto, rose this week after it won a five-year, $100-million contract extension from Canada’s Department of National Defence. The contract includes options for four additional years. If the military exercises these, the contract could last up to nine years. Calian has provided the Canadian military with simulators and training services since 1995. The Canadian Forces, especially the army, use Calian’s simulators to plan and train for military operations. Aside from the Canadian military contract, Calian’s systems engineering division sells hardware and software that is used for testing, operating and managing satellite and other communications systems. The division accounts for 36% of Calian’s revenue....
Last month we pointed out that we were in a particularly dangerous time in the market — a time you might call the ‘hey, this-is-easy’ segment of the market cycle, particularly for investing newcomers. That’s when it may seem that you (or your broker) can do no wrong. But since then the market has gone into a steep decline, ostensibly due to rising interest rates and problems related to the real estate market. Now it no longer looks quite so easy to most investors.