royal bank

ROYAL BANK OF CANADA $54 (www.rbc.com) has formed a new alliance with Shoppers Drug Mart, which operates over 1,200 drug stores in Canada. Under the deal, Shoppers’ customers can use a new Royal Bank Visa credit card to earn reward points on their purchases....

TORSTAR CORP. $8.96 (www.torstar.com) recently bought Heartsong Presents Book Club, a publisher of Christian romance novels, for an undisclosed sum through its Harlequin book-publishing subsidiary. This purchase nicely complements Harlequin’s “Love Inspired” line of inspirational novels. Best Buy. PENGROWTH ENERGY CORP. $9.90 (www.pengrowth.com) will focus on developing its western Canadian oil properties in 2012. Due to lower natural gas prices, it will hold off on further investments in its gas properties during the year. Buy. ROYAL BANK OF CANADA $54 (www.rbc.com) has formed a new alliance with Shoppers Drug Mart, which operates over 1,200 drug stores in Canada. Under the deal, Shoppers’ customers can use a new Royal Bank Visa credit card to earn reward points on their purchases. The bank will also install 300 new automated teller machines in Shoppers’ stores. Buy.

You may find that exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have a place in your portfolio. Unlike many other financial innovations, they don’t load you up with heavy management fees or tie you down with high redemption charges if you decide to withdraw. Instead, they give you a low-cost, flexible, convenient alternative to mutual funds. They have another advantage. Since shares are only added or removed when the underlying index changes, there’s a low turnover. That means you aren’t faced with the capital gains bills generated by the yearly distributions most mutual funds pay out to their unitholders....

Exchange traded funds (ETFs) may have a place in your portfolio. That’s because, unlike many other financial innovations, they don’t load you up with heavy management fees or tie you down with high redemption charges if you decide to get out of them. Instead, they give you a low-cost, flexible, convenient alternative to mutual funds. ETFs trade on stock exchanges, just like stocks. Prices are quoted in newspaper stock tables and online. You’ll have to pay brokerage commissions to buy and sell ETFs. However, ETFs’ low management fees still give them a cost advantage over most conventional mutual funds. As well, shares are only added or removed when the underlying index changes. As a result of this low turnover, you won’t incur the regular capital gains bills generated by the yearly distributions most conventional mutual funds pay out to unitholders....

ROYAL BANK OF CANADA $50 (www.rbc.com) reported record earnings for fiscal 2011 due to strong growth at its Canadian banking, wealth management and insurance divisions. That’s helping it offset slower growth at its securities-trading operations....

ROYAL BANK OF CANADA $50 (www.rbc.com) reported record earnings for fiscal 2011 due to strong growth at its Canadian banking, wealth management and insurance divisions. That’s helping it offset slower growth at its securities-trading operations. In the year ended October 31, 2011, earnings per share rose 16.5%, to $4.45 from $3.82 in 2010. As well, loan-loss provisions fell 21.4%, as more people are repaying their loans on time. Buy. CAE INC. $10 (www.cae.com) continues to benefit as airlines upgrade their fleets. It recently received an order from Emirates Airlines for two flight simulators. The $34-million value of this contract is equal to 2% of CAE’s annual revenue of $1.7 billion. Including these new orders, CAE has sold 21 flight simulators in its 2012 fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2012. It sold 29 simulators in fiscal 2011, up from 20 in 2010. Best Buy. CENOVUS ENERGY INC. $34 (www.cenovus.com) reported that its cash flow per share rose 54.4% in the third quarter of 2011, to $1.05 from $0.68 a year earlier. A 9.6% increase in oil prices was the main reason for the gain. The stock trades at 8.0 times Cenovus’s forecast 2011 cash flow of $4.27 a share. That’s a reasonable multiple in light of its high-quality reserves. Buy.

Senvest Capital Investments, $67, symbol SEC on Toronto (Shares outstanding: 2.8 million; Market cap: $187.6 million; www.senvest.com), manages a portfolio of equity and real estate investments. The company mainly invests in publicly traded and privately held companies through Senvest International. It carries out its real estate investments through Pennsylvania Properties Inc., Senvest Argentina and Senvest Equities. Senvest’s holdings include a lot of small- and mid-cap companies that are mainly located in the U.S....

Canada’s big five banks avoided the problems with subprime mortgages and European sovereign debt that have crippled many of the world’s largest financial firms. The big banks are now using their strong balance sheets to make acquisitions, often at bargain prices, and to upgrade their holdings. ROYAL BANK OF CANADA $45 (Toronto symbol RY; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 1.4 billion; Market cap: $63.0 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 1.8; Dividend yield: 4.8%; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; www.rbc.com) is Canada’s largest bank, with $730.6 billion of assets....

RESEARCH IN MOTION LTD., $24.26, Toronto symbol RIM, fell slightly this week, because of technical problems that stopped or slowed the delivery of emails to BlackBerry smartphone users. The outage also disrupted the company’s popular BlackBerry Messenger instant-messaging service. It did not affect voice calls.

The problems began when a critical part of RIM’s infrastructure in Europe failed. An automatic backup system also failed. The outage eventually spread to other parts of the world, including Africa, Asia and North America.

Unlike other smartphone companies, RIM compresses and encrypts email and messages before sending it through carrier networks. That makes its systems more secure, and relieves the load on wireless carriers. Still, wireless carriers that have offered refunds to their customers may seek compensation from RIM.

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ISHARES S&P/TSX 60 INDEX FUND $16.56 (Toronto symbol XIU; buy or sell through a broker; ca.ishares.com) is a good, low-fee way to buy the top stocks on the TSX. The units are made up of stocks that represent the S&P/TSX 60 Index, which consists of the 60 largest, most heavily traded stocks on the exchange. Expenses are just 0.17% of assets. Most of the stocks in the index are high-quality companies. However, as it must ensure that all sectors are represented, it holds a few we wouldn’t include. The index’s top holdings are Royal Bank, 6.7%; TD Bank, 6.4%; Bank of Nova Scotia, 5.5%; Barrick Gold, 4.8%; Suncor Energy, 4.1%; Potash Corp., 3.9%; Goldcorp, 3.8%; Bank of Montreal, 3.7%; Canadian Natural Resources, 3.2%; CN Railway, 3.2%; BCE Inc., 3.0%, TransCanada Corp., 2.9%, CIBC, 2.9%; Enbridge, 2.6%; Cenovus Energy, 2.3% and Manulife Financial, 2.1%....