Visa Inc.

ENBRIDGE INC., $56.48, Toronto symbol ENB, plans to transfer its 66.7% stake in the U.S. portion of its Alberta Clipper pipeline to its American affiliate, Enbridge Energy Partners, L.P. (New York symbol EEP). Alberta Clipper pumps crude from Alberta’s oil sands to Superior, Wisconsin. Enbridge will receive $300 million U.S. in cash and $600 million U.S. worth of Enbridge Energy Partners units. The $900-million U.S. total is equal to 2% of Enbridge’s $47.8-billion (Canadian) market cap....

Every Thursday we bring you “Best U.S. Stocks.” You get our specific recommendation on the stocks we profile, with a full explanation of how we arrived at our opinion. You will read about stocks making moves you should know about, from coverage in our newsletter on U.S. investing, Wall Street Stock Forecaster. AMERICAN EXPRESS CO. (New York symbol AXP; www.americanexpress.com) started up in 1850 and is now one of the world’s largest issuers of payment cards, with 109.9 million cards outstanding in over 130 countries. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett owns 14.3% of the company. Amex issues two types of cards: charge cards, which have no pre-set spending limit and must be paid in full each month; and traditional credit cards, which let users carry a balance....

AMERICAN EXPRESS CO. $89 (New York symbol AXP, Conservative Growth Portfolio, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 1.0 billion; Market cap: $89.0 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 2.8; Dividend yield: 1.2%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www. americanexpress.comtarget="_blank”) started up in 1850 and is now one of the world’s largest issuers of payment cards, with 109.9 million cards outstanding in over 130 countries. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett owns 14.3% of the company. Amex issues two types of cards: charge cards, which have no preset spending limit and must be paid in full each month; and traditional credit cards, which let users carry a balance. High-quality clientele cuts risk...

AMERICAN EXPRESS CO. $89 (New York symbol AXP, Conservative Growth Portfolio, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 1.0 billion; Market cap: $89.0 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 2.8; Dividend yield: 1.2%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www. americanexpress.comtarget=”_blank”) started up in 1850 and is now one of the world’s largest issuers of payment cards, with 109.9 million cards outstanding in over 130 countries. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett owns 14.3% of the company.

Amex issues two types of cards: charge cards, which have no preset spending limit and must be paid in full each month; and traditional credit cards, which let users carry a balance.

High-quality clientele cuts risk

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TIM HORTONS $60.17 (Toronto symbol THI; TSINetwork Rating: Average) (905-845-6511; www.timhortons.com; Shares outstanding: 134.3 million; Market cap: $8.1 billion; Dividend yield: 2.1%) operates 3,610 coffee-anddonut shops in Canada, 870 in the U.S. and 44 in the Persian Gulf. In the quarter ended March 30, 2014, sales rose 4.8%, to $766.4 million from $731.5 million a year ago. The gain was mainly because the company opened 23 outlets in Canada and 11 in the U.S. Samestore sales rose 1.6% at its Canadian locations and 1.9% in the U.S. Earnings rose 5.5%, to $90.9 million from $86.2 million. In the past nine months, the company has repurchased $1 billion worth of shares. As a result, its earnings per share jumped 17.9%, to $0.66 from $0.56....

SPDR DOW JONES INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE ETF $169.58 (New York symbol DIA; buy or sell through brokers; www.spdrs.com) holds the 30 stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The SPDR Dow Jones ETF’s top holdings are Visa, IBM, Goldman Sachs Group, ExxonMobil, Chevron, 3M, McDonald’s, Caterpillar, United Technologies and Boeing. The fund’s expenses are about 0.17% of its assets.

SPDR Dow Jones ETF is a buy.

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CANADIAN IMPERIAL BANK OF COMMERCE $98 (Toronto symbol CM; Conservative Growth and Income Portfolios, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 397.4 million; Market cap: $38.9 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 2.3; Dividend yield: 4.1%; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; www.cibc.com) is Canada’s fifth-largest bank, with $397.1 billion of assets.

CIBC prefers to focus on domestic banking instead of expanding internationally; Canada accounts for around 85% of its revenue.

The bank recently teamed up with Tim Hortons (see page 76) to launch a new loyalty credit card called the Double Double Visa. This card lets users earn points toward coffee and food at Tim Hortons.

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The U.S. Federal Reserve has indicated that it will probably end its bond-purchasing program, known as quantitative easing, as early as October 2014. After that, the Fed may raise interest rates, particularly if inflation becomes a problem. Higher interest rates in the U.S. would likely push up rates in Canada and elsewhere, slowing demand for mortgages and car loans. However, Canada’s big banks continue to expand into feebased services, like wealth management, which are less sensitive to interest rates. We continue to like all five banks, but we prefer TD and Bank of Nova Scotia for new buying....

Exchange traded funds (ETFs) are set up to mirror the performance of a stock market index or sub-index. They hold a more or less fixed selection of securities that represent the holdings that go into the calculation of the index or sub-index. ETFs trade on stock exchanges, just like stocks. That’s different from mutual funds, which you can only buy at the end of the day, at a price that reflects the fund’s value at the close of trading. Prices of ETFs are quoted in newspaper stock tables and online. You pay brokerage commissions to buy and sell them, but their low management fees give them a cost advantage over most mutual funds....

DEVON ENERGY CORP., $79.21, symbol DVN on New York, has agreed to sell some of its properties to Linn Energy LLC (Nasdaq symbol LINE) for $2.3 billion. The sale includes Devon’s holdings in the Rockies, the onshore Gulf Coast and the Mid-Continent region (which includes Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas). The sale will let Devon focus on what it sees as low-risk/high-reward properties, especially the oil-producing assets it bought in Texas’s Eagle Ford shale formation for $6 billion last year....