Canadian Capitalist

It didn’t take long for two other major discount brokers to match TD Waterhouse’s move in lowering commissions for clients with more than $100,000 in assets. RBC Direct Investing and BMO InvestorLine will also be charging $9.95 per trade effective December 22, 2007 and November 1, 2007 respectively. E*Trade has long been offering $9.99 trades [...]

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Whether the government is blue or red, the surpluses keep piling up. The Globe and Mail reports that federal surpluses topped $14 billion last year or roughly $700 per taxpayer.
Ellen Roseman warns about an audacious credit card scam.
Rob Carrick writes that investors flock to high-fee funds because it isn’t easy to figure out how much [...]

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The tax on Employee Stock Purchase Plans (ESPP) has two components: the difference between the offering price and the fair market value (FMV) of the stock is treated as employment income and the difference between the FMV and the selling price is treated as capital gains or losses.
For example, let’s say that shares in your [...]

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Few months back, I moved our investment accounts to Questrade, attracted primarily by their ultra-low commissions and good word-of-mouth recommendations. Everything went smoothly for a while - my account was transferred out without a hitch and trades were executed perfectly - until last week. I logged in to my account and discovered that an interest [...]

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Tyler, the blogger behind Award Tour, mentioned in a comment on yesterday’s post that books are about 20% cheaper in the US compared to Canada. To compare book prices, I checked up on the prices of an unscientific sample of best sellers and popular finance books on Amazon’s Canadian and US websites. Here are the [...]

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With the Canadian dollar reaching parity, the lead story in Sunday’s Ottawa Citizen is that many Canadians are crossing the border in search of discounts in clothing, books and electronics. One couple featured in the story mentioned that they spent $120 and estimated that they saved $60 by shopping at Target. It is questionable how [...]

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Our dollar zoomed ahead this week and is currently trading within striking distance of achieving parity with the US dollar. It is easy to forget that it was only five years back that the loonie was derided as a “Northern Peso”. Personally, with a high, unhedged exposure to foreign equities (similar to the 50% weighting [...]

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Since my previous round up, a number of Canadian Financial Blogs have appeared on the scene:
FP Trading Desk is the online blog of The Financial Post and features extensive coverage of business and stock market news and analysis of individual stocks.
(RSS Feed)
Dividends Matter aims to “to empower individual investors to gain the knowledge, skill, and [...]

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I held 150 shares of iShares MSCI EAFE Index Fund (EFA) in my RRSP account and wanted to switch to the Vanguard Europe Pacific Fund (VEA), which is 20 basis points cheaper. Before the recent cut in trading fees by TD Waterhouse, I was hesitant to pay $58 ($29 to sell EFA and $29 to [...]

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Alex from New Brunswick asks:
I have a few questions about matching contributions made to a group RRSP by my employer. I work for a small software company, which matches an employee’s RRSP contributions up to 2% of their base annual salary. In order to qualify for the match, we sign up for an RRSP using [...]

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