The Successful Investor Hotline – Friday, January 13, 2012

Article Excerpt

CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY LTD., $70.77, Toronto symbol CP, is our “Stock of the Year” for 2012. Next week, Stock Pickers Digest, our newsletter for aggressive investors, will reveal its #1 pick for 2012. We’ve had great success with CP since we recommended it in the first issue of The Successful Investor in January 1995. In October 2001 the old CP broke up into five separate companies: CP Rail, CP Ships, Fording Coal, Pan Canadian and Fairmont Hotels. In 2002, PanCanadian merged with Alberta Energy to form EnCana, which broke up into Encana and Cenovus in December 2009. All of these mergers and breakups unlocked significant shareholder value. Railways are highly cyclical. Unpredictable factors, such as weather, also add risk: in 2011, avalanches in B.C. and spring floods in the Prairies delayed CP’s trains and hurt its earnings. The company now has a new plan for dealing with bad weather in the future. It is also increasing its efficiency by upgrading its trains and…