investment

Allied Properties REIT and RioCan REIT both continue to focus on Canada’s top markets. All in all, each trust remains attractive thanks to its high-quality properties and tenants.


ALLIED PROPERTIES REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT TRUST, $17.23, is a buy. The REIT (Toronto symbol AP.UN; Units outstanding: 128.0 million; Market cap: $2.2 billion; TSINetwork Rating: Average; Dividend yield: 10.5%; www.alliedreit.com) owns 199 office buildings and 13 properties under development, mainly in major Canadian cities.


With the January 2023 payment, Allied raised your monthly distribution by 2.9%....

VANECK VECTORS VIETNAM ETF, $13.18, is a buy for aggressive investors. This emerging-markets ETF (New York symbol VNM) taps the leading Vietnamese firms as well as foreign firms that get a significant share of their revenue from this Southeast Asian nation....

GREAT-WEST LIFECO, $37.61, is still a hold. The company (Toronto symbol GWO; shares outstanding: 931.7 million; Market cap: $34.9 billion; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; Dividend yield: 5.5%; www.greatwestlifeco.com) has completed several acquisitions in the past few months as part of a plan to diversify its operations.


Great-West’s latest acquisition, through its Canada Life unit, is Investment Planning Counsel Inc....

Insurers write policies, collect premiums from customers, and then invest those premiums to meet future claims. That need to cover claims means they invest significant amounts of their funds in fixed-income instruments, namely bonds. That also means high interest rates are a boon to their returns....

If we only look at the face value of investments, ethical investments make sense for many investors. Keep reading for more.

A: The Horizons Seasonal Rotation ETF, $25.37, symbol HAC on Toronto (Units outstanding: 6.8 million; Market cap: $172.3 million; www.horizonsetfs.com), aims to

tactically spread and move around its holdings between stocks, fixed-income investments, commodities and currencies based on historical seasonal trends.

The managers believe that investment markets follow these seasonal trends and so have seasonal rhythms....

Since March 2022, the Bank of Canada has raised its benchmark interest rate 10 times, from just 0.25% to 5.0%. The rapid increase is meant to counter rising inflation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and related supply chain disruptions. So far, the plan is working: Canada’s inflation rate has dropped from its peak of 8.1% in 2022 to 4.0% in August 2023.

While rising interest rates let banks earn higher interest on their loans, accounting rules also force banks to set aside more funds to cover any rise in loan defaults as borrowers face those higher interest payments....

U.S. stocks are a great way to boost your portfolio returns. Here’s why, and here’s how to pick good U.S. stocks.

Algonquin Power offers a very respectable 6.0% yield while it considers selling assets and rebalancing its overall strategic mix.

AMAZON.COM INC., $127.12, symbol AMZN on Nasdaq, is a buy. The company is one of the world’s largest online retailers. It’s also the third-largest digital ad provider in the U.S. Through its Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company is one of the world’s largest providers of cloud infrastructure services.

Amazon has just agreed to invest up to $4 billion in privately held artificial-intelligence company Anthropic; it will take a minority ownership position, committing an initial $1.25 billion....