wall street

I am pleased to announce the launch of our new web site, TSI Network (www.tsinetwork.ca). Building on our four newsletters (Canadian Wealth Advisor, Stock Pickers Digest, The Successful Investor and Wall Street Stock Forecaster), the site will contain archives of over 2,000 articles on individual investments. I’ll be the host of TSI Network. Every day, Monday to Friday, I’ll post free updates on issues that matter to you — the individual investor. Visitors will also be able to participate in daily polls, get access to my ongoing Twitter updates, and much more. In addition, subscribers to the site will get my latest report, “How to Trade Stocks and Make Good Investments in Canada”— free....

We continue to feel that most investors should have the bulk of their portfolios in more conservative stocks, like those recommended in The Successful Investor and Wall Street Stock Forecaster. However, Stock Pickers Digest is ideal for the smaller part of your portfolio that you may wish to devote to more aggressive stocks. And we do still feel that these stocks have gains ahead. More aggressive stocks, like those we recommend in Stock Pickers Digest, should make up no more than around 10% of a conservative investor’s portfolio, or up to, say, 30% for more aggressive investors. That’s because even our Picks of the Month or Best Buys from among these stocks expose you to greater risk of permanent loss. The stocks you choose from all of our recommendations depend on your personal circumstances and preferences. However, we do advise picking a selection of at least four or five from different sectors. You should also hold a mix of value and growth picks. Our Best Buys are a good place to start....

Unisys Corp., $1.34, symbol UIS on New York (Shares outstanding: 370.3 million; Market cap: $496.2 million), sells information-technology services to businesses and government agencies. The United States government accounts for 17% of its revenue. Unisys has two divisions: 1) The services division, which accounted for 88% of Unisys’s 2008 revenue, designs, builds and manages computer systems for its clients. These systems perform a wide variety of routine tasks, such as banking transactions, cheque processing, income-tax processing, airline-passenger reservations, newspaper-content management and shipping-port management. Automating these tasks helps Unisys’s clients lower their costs and focus on their core businesses....

Aggressive investing is an investing strategy that can yield high returns – but also entails taking on a lot of risk. An investment strategy that involves aggressive investing is only suitable for investors who can accept substantial risk, and the chance of losses.

The most common form of aggressive investing is to put a large part of your portfolio in stocks (or mutual funds) of less well-established companies without a history of earnings or dividends. Aggressive stocks don’t have the secure hold on the growing, or at least stable, clientele that conservative stocks have. When something goes wrong with aggressive investments, there is great risk of serious, if not total, loss.

We feel that the best investing strategy for most people is to hold the bulk of their investment portfolios in securities from well-established companies. All these stocks should offer good “value” – that is, they should trade at reasonable multiples of earnings, cash flow, book value and so on. Ideally, they should also have above-average growth prospects when compared to alternative investments.

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The U.S. newsletter publishing business is crowded and erratic, so publishers continually try to come up new gimmicks to lure subscribers. Some publishers have recently taken up the idea of a “secret gold currency” as a direct-mail offer. This is supposed to be a form of gold, but, as the marketing material states: “it has nothing to do with owning gold bullion, gold mining stocks, gold mutual funds, gold options or futures, or any other type of gold investment you’ve likely considered before.” The “secret gold currency” appears to consist of bullion coins that are valued by collectors for more than their bullion content. Modern gold coins issued by countries such as the U.S. (American Gold Eagle), South Africa (Gold Krugerrand) or the U.K. (Gold Sovereign) generally trade at a small premium to the spot price of gold — usually 4.5% or so. It appears the “secret” coins are older. Such coins sometimes trade at higher premiums to their gold content, depending on their rarity and condition....

Ev3 Inc., $7.35, symbol EVVV on Nasdaq (Shares outstanding: 106.7 million; Market cap: $784 million), develops technologies for the treatment of a wide range of vascular and neurovascular diseases. Ev3 offers a number of treatment options, including the main technologies used today: peripheral angioplasty balloons, stents, plaque excision systems, embolic protection devices, liquid embolics, embolization coils, thrombectomy catheters and occlusion balloons. Ev3 is showing steadily rising sales and profits. However, the company faces a lot of competition, including from C.R. Bard Inc. (symbol BCR on New York), which is recommended by our Wall Street Stock Forecaster newsletter....

One way to minimize your investment risk is to diversify. For example, you can spread your investments out across the five main economic sectors. This way, you minimize the chances of a big loss in your portfolio from a setback in any one sector. Another way to diversify is to invest a portion of your portfolio in international stocks. There is no one “world stock market”. Instead, there are many stock exchanges around the world, and investing in many of them entails considerable risk. However, one simple strategy to gain international exposure, yet at the same time cut risk, is to invest in U.S. stocks. Many blue-chip U.S. stocks have operations in multiple countries. This will let them benefit from a recovering global economy, as well as a return to prosperity in the U.S....

Gold moved up from $300 an ounce in the early part of this decade to over $1,000 in 2008. It fell to $700 in November 2008 as the stock market bottomed out. Like the stock market, gold has regained some of its losses and now trades at around $900. We feel gold could eventually surpass its recent highs with a corresponding impact on many gold stocks. That’s mainly because investors fear that low interest rates and government stimulus spending will spur inflation. Gold prices, and gold investing, should continue to gain as the credit crisis makes it harder for gold companies to fund new projects and expand production. Regardless of what happens with gold investing in general, speculative and promotional gold stocks will make significant gains from time to time on hopes of a gold discovery. You can say something like that about any sort of speculative or promotional stocks, but most investors who dabble in them still wind up losing money. That’s because it is much easier to launch penny gold stocks than to find a gold mine....

Sprint Nextel Corp., $2.42, symbol S on New York (Shares outstanding: 2.8 billion; Market cap: $6.7 billion), provides communications services to commercial and residential customers in the U.S. The Kansas-based company has two segments: i) Wireless, which accounts for 82% of Sprint’s revenues, serves over 5.05 million customers in 50 states under the Sprint brand. Sprint also offers digital-wireless services under its Nextel brand. Sprint’s Boost Mobile prepaid wireless and Boost Unlimited, a local-calling prepaid service, target the youth market. Sprint also offers wireless services to resellers known as mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). MVNOs buy wireless services at wholesale rates and resell them under their own brands. Some of Sprint’s MVNO clients include Virgin Mobile USA, Qwest, Movida, Helio and Embarq....

Many investors look on the soaring price of oil as a major negative for the market and economy. Certainly it hurts some companies and industries. But it may turn out to be a plus of sorts for a number of stocks we recommend, and not just our oil selections. That’s because many oil-producing countries are gathering up a growing portion of their newly ballooned oil income into so-called “Sovereign Wealth Funds”, or SWFs for short. The aim of these funds is to build up and invest the profits from oil, as a reserve for the day when the oil runs out. Non-producers such as China and India are also building up vast sums. Estimates of total SWF assets now run to $3 trillion, and that number could triple in five years....