Telus Corp.

We display a price-to-sales or p/s ratio with every stock we cover in our newsletters, including our flagship publication, The Successful Investor. Price-to-sales is the ratio you get when you compare a stock’s price to its sales per share (you get sales per share by dividing total annual sales by the number of outstanding shares).

Treat financial ratios like price-to-sales as one tool among many

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CENOVUS ENERGY INC., $29.16, Toronto symbol CVE, took its present form on December 1, 2009. That’s when EnCana Corp. split itself into two separate companies. One kept the EnCana name and “ECA” trading symbol, and focuses on unconventional natural gas. The other, Cenovus, specializes in oil-sands projects, oil refineries and conventional natural gas. Cenovus rose 2% this week. The gain was mainly in response to a big purchase in the Alberta oil patch: Chinese state-owned oil company Sinopec bought a 9.03% stake in the massive Syncrude oil-sands project for $4.65 billion U.S. The purchase price was roughly 20% higher than the consensus estimate. That helped draw investor attention to all oil-sands stocks, including Cenovus....

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, but you will quickly make these back because of the low management fees. 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....

TELUS CORP. (Toronto symbols T $33 and T.A $32; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Utilities sector; Shares outstanding: 318.0 million; Market cap: $10.5 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 1.1; Dividend yield: 5.8%; SI Rating: Above Average) provides telephone services in British Columbia, Alberta and eastern Quebec. It also sells wireless services through a nationwide network. The company expects its revenue to rise by 2% to 5% in 2010, to between $9.8 billion and $10.1 billion. Most of the gain will come from its wireless division, which contributes half of Telus’s revenue and earnings. This division recently upgraded its networks to handle a wider variety of cellphones, including Apple’s popular iPhone smartphone. Telus should also profit as more people use their cellphones to send email, access the Internet and download software. That’s good news for Telus, since it earns higher fees for Internet access than regular phone calls. Moreover, the company’s wireless upgrades will help it capture more roaming fees from foreign tourists and business travellers who use their phones while in Canada....

Canada’s big telephone companies have faced strong competition from cable companies for years. This experience will help them deal with three new entrants in the wireless field. One of these new competitors, Wind Mobile, is already operating. Two more, Mobilicity and Public Mobile, should launch later this year. Meanwhile, all four major phone companies are using their steady cash flows to expand and improve their wireless and high-speed Internet networks. That will fuel their long-term growth, and let them keep paying or raise their current dividends. BCE INC. $29 (Toronto symbol BCE; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Utilities sector; Shares outstanding: 767.2 million; Market cap: $22.2 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 1.3; Dividend yield: 6.0%; SI Rating: Above Average) provides telephone and Internet services in Ontario and Quebec. It also sells wireless and satellite TV services across Canada....

Dividend 15 Split Corp., $11.69, symbol DFN on Toronto (Shares outstanding: 11.2 million; Market cap: $131.2 million), is a split-share investment corporation that holds shares of 15 companies: BCE Inc., CI Financial Corporation, AGF Management, TransAlta Corporation, SunLife Financial, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, TransCanada Corporation, Manulife Financial, TD Bank, TMX Group, Royal Bank of Canada, Loblaw, Bank of Montreal, Telus Corporation and Enbridge. The company can also invest up to 15% of its portfolio in other equity issues. Dividend 15 Split Corp. has two share classes: Dividend 15 Split Corp. capital shares (Toronto symbol DFN), and Dividend 15 Split Corp. preferred shares (Toronto symbol DFN.PR.A)....

ISHARES DIVIDEND INDEX FUND $18.40 (Toronto symbol XDV; buy or sell through a broker) holds the 30 highest-yielding Canadian stocks based on dividend growth, yield and average payout ratio. The weight of any one stock is limited to 10% of of the fund’s assets. The fund’s MER is 0.50%. iShares Dividend Index Fund has a 3.7% yield. Top holdings are CIBC, 7.3%; Bank of Montreal, 6.3%; Manitoba Tel, 5.7%; National Bank, 5.5%; TD Bank, 5.3%; IGM Financial, 4.5%; Royal Bank, 4.4%; Bank of Nova Scotia, 4.3%; Telus, 4.2%; Sun Life, 3.6%; Power Financial, 3.4%; and TransCanada Corp., 3.4%....

I hope you are enjoying and profiting from the stock trading advice in my TSI Network Daily Updates. Every day, TSI Network attracts a wide variety of Canadian investors. To take the pulse of this unique online community, we publish weekly polls so we can see what the site’s visitors think of current financial issues. The feedback we get from these polls often forms the basis of the stock trading advice we give you in our TSI Network Daily Updates. We also welcome you to submit your own questions about stock trading advice or any other investment matter, so you can quickly and easily get a feel for where other investors stand on issues that affect you. Just send your suggestions to pat@tsinetwork.ca. If we think they’re suitable for the site, we’ll post them as our “Financial Question of the Week.”...

TELUS CORP. $32.34 (Toronto symbol T.A; Shares outstanding: 335.6 million; Market cap: $10.9 billion; SI Rating: Above Average; Dividend yield: 5.9%) expects its revenue to rise by 2% to 5% in 2010, to between $9.8 billion and $10.1 billion. Most of the gain will come from its wireless division, which accounts for half of Telus’s revenue and earnings. This division recently upgraded its wireless networks to handle a wider variety of cellphones, including the hugely popular Apple iPhone. Telus should also profit as more people use their cellphones to send email, access the Internet and download software....

BCE INC., $27.51, Toronto symbol BCE, has increased its quarterly dividend by 7.4%, to $0.435 a share from $0.405. The new annual rate of $1.74 yields 6.3%. This is the company’s third dividend hike since a private consortium led by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan dropped its plan to buy BCE a year ago. BCE has also earmarked $500 million for share buybacks. That’s equal to 2.4% of its $20.9-billion market cap. From December 2008 to May 2009, the company spent $986 million to buy back 5% of its shares. Share buybacks increase the value of the remaining shares....