Canadian Capitalist

It is hard to sympathize with the plight of lumbering mutual fund companies.
The Toronto Star’s James Daw is cautious about the launch of the first peer-to-peer lending website - IOU Central.
You may have heard about the decoupling theory that the US doesn’t matter much anymore because China or (insert your favourite emerging market here) are [...]

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Have a plan: It is all too common that Canadians invest in “something” when they scramble to make their RRSP contribution before the deadline. Often, the “something” is an investment recommendation from an advisor that unfortunately results in a potpourri of holdings that turn out to be yesterday’s winners. This year, when investing your contribution [...]

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At the outset, I should confess that I don’t have much experience investing with financial advisors. The only time I invested through one was eight years back, when I picked a labour-sponsored mutual fund from the two that were recommended - the other was a communication fund. To be honest, I picked the labour-sponsored fund [...]

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As I’m fighting a cold and fever, I thought I’d get away with a short post on RRSP statistics today:

Deadline for a contribution for the 2007 year: February 29, 2008
Maximum contribution amount for 2007: $19,000
Percentage of tax filers eligible to contribute to a RRSP*: 88%
Percentage of eligible tax payers making a contribution*: 31%
Percentage of contribution [...]

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The portion of your portfolio that should be allocated to equities depends on your ability, willingness and need to take risk. One of the factors affecting the ability to take risk is time horizon: investors with a long time horizon can allocate a greater percentage to equities than investors with a shorter time horizon. Larry [...]

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Warren Buffett’s recent visit to Toronto generated a spate of newspaper articles. The Financial Post reported that Mr. Buffett is bullish on the American economy despite the recent credit crunch and carried his Q&A with a Toronto audience. You can also view a video of an exclusive interview the Post conducted with the Oracle of [...]

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While Claymore has introduced some novel ETFs, plain-vanilla indexers such as myself have been content to give their offerings a wide berth. But, Claymore’s two new offerings, reported by Rob Carrick in The Globe and Mail, are certainly worth checking out.
The Claymore Premium Money Market ETF, which invests in a mix of T-bills and [...]

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The following question is from Tony, the blogger behind Pharma Daddy:
I’ve been looking into the Manulife ONE concept over the last little while and it really intrigues me as we are very responsible spenders and savers and think that we could certainly accelerate paying off our loans with this sort of account. What do you [...]

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One of the reasons that I liked StudioTax is that it allowed entering tax information directly into the forms. Admittedly, not everyone is a fan of the direct entry method. A lot of people prefer the interview method where the software asks relevant questions and generates the tax return based on the answers. If you [...]

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Our sons’ RESPs are very similar to the Sleepy Mini portfolio and I rebalance them every year when making a lump-sum contribution. In the past years, I used a desk calculator, pencil and paper to figure out how to divide the new contribution among the four TD e-Series index funds. This year, I finally got [...]

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