mckeough

At major turning points in the market, “this time it’s different,” is one piece of investment advice that’s usually wrong…but not always.

Penny stocks often have big hurdles to overcome, and Nemaska Lithium must rely on a major spark from the electric car to succeed.

Pharmaceutical drugs are the biggest growth area for Johnson & Johnson today, as its strong brand helps it sustain a strong dividend yield.

One of the tech stocks that has had the greatest success for us, Apple is banking on Apple Pay and Apple Watch for its next growth spurt.

When investors get in the habit of using one investment measure to buy stocks, they often find that it can be dangerously misleading.

A high dividend yield can signal risk, as with Ares Capital and its high-risk loans funded with shadowy methods like mezzanine debt.

Pat McKeough responds to many requests from members of his Inner Circle. Every week, his comments on the most intriguing questions of the past week go out to all Inner Circle members. Each week, we offer you a highlight from these Q&A sessions.

Q: Pat: What is your opinion of Unilever going forward? Thank you.

A: Unilever plc (ADR) (symbol UL on New York; www.unilever.com) is one of the world’s largest makers of consumer goods. Asia and Africa supply 43% of its sales, followed by the Americas (33%) and Europe (24%). The company gets 59% of its sales from emerging markets.

Unilever operates through four divisions:

• Personal Care (37% of sales) makes skin and hair care products, deodorants and oral care goods. Top brands include Dove and Lux (soap), Sunsilk (shampoo), Axe (deodorant), Pond’s (skin cream), Vaseline (petroleum jelly) and Close Up (toothpaste).

...

Whenever IBM seems to lose momentum, it has the flexibility to adapt to fast-growing businesses, fortify its dividend and reward investors.

Meta Description: Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) give investors a low-fee way to match market indexes, and these two ETFs are the cream of the Canadian crop.

MANULIFE FINANCIAL $22.18 (Toronto symbol MFC; Shares outstanding: 2.0 billion; Market cap: $43.7 billion; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; Dividend yield: 2.8%; www.manulife.ca) now gets about a third of its insurance premiums from Asia—but that’s about to rise sharply. The company has just entered into a 15-year “bancassurance” partnership with Singapore-based banker DBS Group Holdings. The deal will let Manulife sell life and health insurance through DBS’s Asian branch network. Manulife won the deal over a group of companies that included Aviva plc, Prudential and AIA Group. It will pay DBS $1.2 billion to replace Aviva in its branches....