Canadian Capitalist

The more I learn about group RESPs, the less I like them. In the comments thread on an earlier post on Group RESP plans, a reader referred to the prospectus for the years 2000 to 2007 filed by the Canadian Scholarship Trust filed with SEDAR. I was initially excited to lay my hands on so [...]

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The news on the housing front out of the U.S. continues to be bleak - prices were down 12.7% on average in 20 markets in February 2008 compared to the same time last year, with prices dropping 20% or more in Las Vegas, Miami and Phoenix. In Canada, at least one analyst boldly declared the [...]

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Responding to a question from a group of business students on what investors should do, Warren Buffett replied:
The answer is you don’t want investors to think that what they read today is important in terms of their investment strategy. Their investment strategy should factor in that [...] if you knew what was going to happen [...]

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The nice thing about NETFILE is that if CRA owes you a refund, you can expect to receive it by direct deposit in about eight business days. I owed the CRA a bit of money this year but my wife got a big refund and we wondered what to do with it. Jon Chevreau writes [...]

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Your taxes are due on or before April 30, 2008. If you haven’t done so already, now would be a good time to start working on your taxes. Tim Cestnick has tax tips for last-minute filers.
While the stock markets have recovered somewhat from the deep losses around the middle of March, Larry MacDonald writes that [...]

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The Romans said nosce te ipsum - “know thyself” and in this excellent new book, Dan Ariely, describes experiments that illuminate aspects of human behaviour that are, in turns, surprising, delightful, amusing and yes, even disturbing. Subtitled “The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions”, the author who is a professor at MIT says that we [...]

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Financial Jungle recently wrote about a study put out by Tweedy Browne that purports to show the clear superiority of investing in high dividend yield stocks. One of the examples quoted in the Tweedy Browne study is the Dogs of the Dow.
Constructing the Dogs of the Dow is simple - after sorting the stocks in [...]

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The Bank of Canada followed up its previous 0.5% reduction in interest rates with another cut of the same magnitude today. At this point, it looks like our central bank is expecting to lower rates even more as it noted that “some further monetary stimulus will likely be required”. You can read the full text [...]

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Sometimes authors or publishers offer to send me a book for a possible review. I usually accept with every intention of reading the book and writing a review. Unfortunately, as I didn’t have the time to read the following books - I didn’t get past the first chapter on two of the books and skimmed [...]

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Last week, it was widely reported in the press that Telus was ordered to refund the “network access charge” ($2.95 per month) that was slapped on customers who did not use its long-distance network. The news is a reminder to check your phone bill and see if you are still paying a fee for the [...]

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