investment

A: DNI Metals, $0.05, symbol DNI on Toronto (Shares outstanding: 74.9 million; Market cap: $3.4 million; www.dnimetals.com), aims to produce a number of metals from its Alberta Black Shale project, about 900 kilometres north of Calgary. These metals include molybdenum, nickel, uranium, vanadium, zinc, copper and cobalt, plus specialty metals, such as scandium, lithium and thorium. Traditional mining methods won’t work on black shale rock, so the company hopes to use a process called bioleaching. Using this process, DNI will dig up the ore, pile it onto a leaching pad and irrigate it with a solution containing certain bacteria. The tiny organisms then “chew up” the rock and expel the metals as waste. The metals are then piped into a refinery and separated....

H&R REIT (Toronto symbol HR.UN; www.hr-reit.com) owns stakes in 41 office buildings, 112 industrial properties and 163 shopping malls in Canada, principally in the Greater Toronto Area. In the past two years it also added two major purchases in the U.S: Two Gotham Center in New York and the Hess Tower in Houston. The trust has a 99.0% occupancy rate....

Agilent is up 9.5% since it was spun off from its parent company 14 years ago. We take a look at the outlook for this tech stock which bases its growth on an aggressive acquisition strategy. AGILENT TECHNOLOGIES INC. (New York symbol A; www.agilent.com) makes testing systems that help electronics firms improve their products. It also manufactures testing gear for medical research labs. Agilent was a unit of Hewlett-Packard until 1999, when Hewlett spun it off as a separate firm....

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORP., $206.35, New York symbol IBM, is paying an undisclosed sum for SoftLayer Technologies. Based in Dallas, Texas, this privately held firm sells online data-storage space and related services to 21,000 business clients. It has 13 data centres in the U.S., Asia and Europe. IBM expects to complete this purchase by September 30, 2013. Demand for cloud computing, which mainly involves storing data on remote, secure servers, is growing strongly. That’s because it gives cost-conscious businesses access to better services and software without the high cost of buying and setting up their own servers. SoftLayer’s technology will enhance IBM’s cloud-computing expertise and help it increase its annual revenue from this field to $7 billion by 2015. To put that in context, IBM’s total revenue was $104.5 billion in 2012....

Pat McKeough responds to many requests for advice on specific stock picks and other questions on investment and the economy from the members of his Inner Circle. Every week, his comments and recommendations on the most intriguing questions of the past week go out to all Inner Circle members. And each week, we offer you one of the highlights from these Q&A sessions. While we reserve our buy-hold-sell advice for Inner Circle members, these excerpts provide a great deal of information and analysis on stocks we’ve covered for members of Pat’s Inner Circle. This week, an Inner Circle member asked about a stock that has risen sharply this year. AutoCanada’s franchise car dealerships have profited from robust car sales and the company continues to expand. Pat looks at whether AutoCanada can sustain its growth and also measures the risk of its growth-by-acquisition strategy....

We think conservative investors could hold up to 10% of their portfolios in foreign stocks. One way to do that is to buy carefully chosen exchange traded funds (ETFs) that have an overseas focus.

The best ETFs offer very low management fees and well-diversified, tax-efficient portfolios of high quality stocks.

Here are six international ETFs we like:

ISHARES MSCI JAPAN INDEX FUND $10.60 (New York Exchange symbol EWJ; buy or sell through brokers; us.ishares.com) is an exchange traded fund that tries to match the return of the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) Japan index.

The ETF’s top holdings include Toyota, 6.6%; Mitsubishi UFJ Financial, 3.0%; Honda Motor, 2.5%; Sumitomo Mitsui Financial, 2.1%; Softbank Corp., 1.9%; Mizuho Financial Group, 1.8%; Canon, 1.6%; Japan Tobacco, 1.5%; Takeda Pharmaceutical, 1.4%; and Hitachi, 1.3%.

The fund’s industry breakdown is as follows: Consumer Discretionary, 21.8%; Financials, 20.1%; Industrials, 18.9%; Information Technology, 10.7%; Consumer Staples, 6.5%; Health Care, 6.2%; Materials, 6.2%; Telecommunication Services, 4.7%; Utilities, 3.1%; and Energy, 1.3%.

iShares MSCI Japan Index Fund was launched on March 12, 1996....

TRANSCANADA CORP. $46.23 (Toronto symbol TRP; Shares outstanding: 707.0 million; Market cap: $33.5 billion; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; Dividend yield: 4.0%; www.transcanada.com) plans to build a new 200-kilometre crude oil pipeline that will connect Edmonton to the storage hub at Hardisty, Alberta....

LOBLAW COMPANIES $48.89 (Toronto symbol L; Shares outstanding: 282.1 million; Market cap: $13.9 billion; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; Dividend yield: 2.0%; www.loblaw.ca) has announced more details of its upcoming plan to set up 75% of its real estate holdings as a publicly traded real estate investment trust (REIT).

The company will transfer 425 properties, including 415 stores, nine warehouses and one office building, to a new entity called Choice Properties Real Estate Investment Trust....

CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY LTD. (Toronto symbol CP; www.cpr.ca) fell almost 7% this week after activist investor Pershing Square Capital Management L.P. announced that it will sell 7 million of its CP shares over the next year. Pershing currently holds 24 million CP shares, or 14.2% of the total outstanding. In June 2012, Pershing helped install Hunter Harrison as CP’s chief executive officer. Mr. Harrison is the former CEO of Canadian National Railway Co. (Toronto symbol CNR)....

Every Wednesday, we publish our “Investor Toolkit” series on TSI Network. Whether you’re a beginning or experienced investor, these weekly updates are designed to give you specific investment advice. Each Investor Toolkit update gives you a fundamental piece of investing strategy, and shows you how you can put it into practice right away....