Canadian Capitalist

A few months back, I moved our investment accounts to Questrade to take advantage of their rock-bottom trading commissions. Since then, the bigger discount brokers (TD Waterhouse, BMO InvestorLine and RBC Direct Investing) have reduced commissions to $9.99 for some of their clients. Since we already have our RRSP accounts with TD Waterhouse and qualify [...]

[Read more →]

Almost exactly one year after finance minister Jim Flaherty played Freddy Kruger and slashed the income trust sector to shreds, he is playing Santa Claus this Halloween and announcing a number of personal tax measures in the Fall fiscal update:

The Goods and Services (GST) tax will drop a further 1% to 5%, effective January 1, [...]

[Read more →]

How is that we can sometimes be pretty stupid with our money? We tend to sell winning stocks too early, hold losing stocks too long, regret the stocks we didn’t buy (think Apple or RIM), regret the stocks we did buy (think Nortel or JDS-Uniphase), play the 6/49 despite the lousy odds, believe we are [...]

[Read more →]

I wanted to comment on posts on investing in Initial Public Offerings, Mortgage-Backed Securities and Emerging markets that were recently featured in some of the blogs that I follow.
Canadian Money Blogs Reviewer wrote a post on how you can profit from IPOs by buying them without paying a commission and selling them in a few [...]

[Read more →]

Tightening credit spreads are affecting the discount on posted rates for fixed-rate mortgages and off prime for variable-rate mortgages. The discount from prime for new variable-rate mortgages have shrunk from 0.9% to as low as 0.6% and could go down further, says Rob Carrick in The Globe and Mail.
The Financial Post reported today that CMHC [...]

[Read more →]

Jon Chevreau and Rob Carrick have weighed in on the latest Fidelity study that finds that “Canadians are on track to replace only 50% of their pre-retirement income once they retire”. Fidelity continues to insist that this is well short of the “recommended 80% level” despite the shaky assumptions in their original research and another [...]

[Read more →]

The National Post is reporting that the federal Conservatives are planning on a “mini-budget” packed with a number of new tax cuts. Some ideas being considered are:

A further 1% reduction in the GST.
A broad-based tax cut that will “save the average middle-class family around $700 a year”, which sounds like a 1% cut in the [...]

[Read more →]

Among the arguments in favour of fundamental indexing, the most suspect is the following claim:
John Bogle’s (creator of the Vanguard mutual fund behemoth) back-testing research several decades ago that showed that most investors would be better off in funds that simply mirrored the then best market indices available, but at the lowest cost. However, times [...]

[Read more →]

I am currently reading Your Money & Your Brain, a fascinating new book on behavioural finance by Jason Zweig. The book shows how our brains, which evolved to help us survive as a species, lead us completely astray when it comes to investing. The chapter on how humans tend to see patterns even when there [...]

[Read more →]

The biggest news this week that affects our pocketbook is the Bank of Canada’s decision to keep interest rates steady. The prime rate, on which interest charged by the banks for loans and variable mortgages is based, stays at 6.25%.
The Bank of Canada notes in its interest rate decision that the credit crisis will directly [...]

[Read more →]