Cutting Through the Noise
October 16, 2013
While the Republicans and Democrats are duking it out in Washington over the debt ceiling, it’s ironic that the Congressional Budget Office is unable to report the fiscal year-end budget numbers (it’s not deemed an essential service and is shut down...
Read MoreOctober 2, 2013
Toronto Stock Exchange runs print ads every six months to celebrate/welcome their new listings. I find it informative to see the mix of businesses that are going public. Certainly, it’s changed significantly from the early days of my career. This month’s...
Read MoreSeptember 6, 2013
In last Friday’s Report on Business, Scott Barlow wrote an article entitled, ‘The Scariest Chart You’ll See all Year’ (it was a price chart showing how the S&P/TSX Composite Index has diverged from the MSCI Emerging Markets Index after tracking it closely...
Read MoreSeptember 4, 2013
In the asset management business, there has to be a balance between the best interests of the clients and those of the shareholders. A manager must make judgments on a number of factors whereby existing clients have different interests than...
Read MoreAugust 22, 2013
It’s a sad statement. Glencore Xstrata, the Swiss mining giant, announced that it’s taking a US$7.7 billion writedown on its investment in Xstrata. Writedowns in the resource sector are a daily event right now, but … but … Glencore just bought Xstrata for US$29 billion...
Read MoreAugust 13, 2013
Scott and I met with a client recently who owns a number of commercial buildings. He was telling us a story about his first purchase in the early 1980’s. Along with a few partners, he bought a building at a fraction of its value (in his opinion), but had to finance it with...
Read MoreJuly 22, 2013
I’ve written about RRSP transfers a few times and will continue to do so because the way some large institutions treat their investment clients is ridiculous, abysmal, maddening, inexcusable, disrespectful, unnecessary, unethical, despicable, appalling...
Read MoreJune 17, 2013
June 13, 2013
In the previous two posts, I put my perspective on the current news around the Canadian housing market and reviewed the valuation measures. Mercifully, in this final one, I want to talk about what REALLY worries me. My biggest concerns are what I’ve already...
Read MoreJune 12, 2013
In this, the 2nd of 3 posts on the Canadian housing market, I address valuation. Near-zero interest rates are absolutely driving this market. The problem is, low rates are transient, while purchase prices live on forever. In today’s terms, transient means that it’s...
Read MoreJune 11, 2013
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been writing about housing because it’s a big part of our clients’ net worth, it's great fodder for a devoted student of market cycles and ... it’s just so darned interesting. In the first of three posts this week, I’ll try to bring some...
Read MoreJune 7, 2013
In his June Investment Outlook, PIMCO’s Bill Gross says that the Quantitative Easing policy (QE) of the U.S. Federal Reserve hasn’t worked. He points out that over the last 5 years there hasn’t been a 12-month period when the economy has grown faster than...
Read MoreJune 6, 2013
It’s confirmed. We have the healthiest banks in the world. They’ve all reported their second quarter earnings and the numbers are spectacular. Industry leader RBC had a return on equity of 19%, while CIBC and National Bank were over 20%. Yes, 20% in a...
Read MoreMay 30, 2013
Last year we blogged about bank CEO’s compensation (Can I Join the Club?). We took issue with the fact that they all made about the same last year, despite the fact that the performance and positioning of their respective banks were quite different. We...
Read MoreMay 28, 2013
On June 7th in Toronto, the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) is hosting a roundtable on mutual fund fees. It is open to the public and will follow the agenda outlined in this invitation. We have been a regular contributor on the topic of fees and recently made...
Read MoreMay 24, 2013
Should you rent or buy? There are all kinds of reasons to buy a home – making it your own, establishing roots in the community, good schools, basketball hoop on the driveway – and they should be at the top of the list. From a financial perspective, however...
Read MoreMay 6, 2013
In Saturday’s Report on Business, there was a remarkable table embedded in Rob Carrick’s article (How to Shelter Your Portfolio from a Housing Decline). It showed the top 10 Canadian equity funds (by assets) and the top 10 Canadian dividend income...
Read MoreMay 3, 2013
I thought a recent report from Mawer Investment Management captured well the opportunity, challenges and complexity of investing in the Asian markets. A paragraph from the conclusion summarizes their balanced optimism. Overall, we find ourselves...
Read MoreApril 29, 2013
Lori and I attended a Celebration of Life for Art Phillips last Friday. (There was a wonderful obituary in the Globe and Mail last week.) Art founded Phillips, Hager & North in 1965 with the help of Bob Hager and Rudy North. It was Art’s reputation and wallet that got...
Read MoreApril 25, 2013
My last post on gold spoke to the impact of investor sentiment on security prices. In the case of the shiny metal, sentiment is everything. As for other securities, such as bonds and stocks, it’s a secondary factor - economic fundamentals (profits)...
Read MoreApril 22, 2013
I’ll never forget an interview I did with Michael Hainsworth on BNN. It was almost exactly two years ago. Michael started the interview very directly, “Tell me, why no gold?” After I explained why our managers didn’t own any gold stocks, he then asked, “And no interest in base metals?” When I said we had no mining stocks in our funds, Michael was beside himself. “Do you at least own some energy stocks?” ...
Read MoreApril 15, 2013
Last week, we filed a submission to the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) on their Discussion Paper on mutual fund fees. If you have an interest in this topic, we’d encourage you to give it a read. If you’re a Steadyhand client and don’t have...
Read MoreMarch 27, 2013
We’ve had a lot of calls lately from investors looking to purchase our funds through discount brokers. The questions often relate to availability, fees and fund codes. There seems to be some misinformation on the topic, so we felt it was a good time to...
Read MoreMarch 26, 2013
It’s stingy times for income investors. Government of Canada bonds are yielding less than 2% (5-year maturities are at 1.3% and 10-year maturities at 1.8%) and high quality corporate bonds are only 1-1.5% higher. Dividend-paying stocks are paying...
Read MoreMarch 18, 2013
I recently attended a pension seminar. As part of the program, the organizers used a cool interactive polling system to gauge where the audience stood on certain issues. While there was plenty of good information provided throughout the morning, what stood out...
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