Canadian Capitalist

The big banks announced earnings this week but TD Bank was the only one to raise its dividend. Canadian Banks and Insurance blog has extensive coverage of earnings from our banks and insurance companies.
The Dividend Guy discovers the joys of not checking how his portfolio is doing.
Million Dollar Journey on the “pitfalls” of index investing. [...]

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Claymore Canada has introduced a couple of ETFs that track interesting asset classes: Claymore Global Real Estate ETF (CGR) and Claymore Global Infrastructure ETF (CIF). CGR tracks the Cohen & Steers Global Realty Majors index, which is composed of 75 securities representing the US (40%), UK (10%), Japan (13%), Hong Kong (10.5%), Australia (11%) and [...]

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After reading Rob Carrick’s article in the Globe and Mail on a study commissioned by the Federal Government on Registered Education Savings Plans, I went looking for the report. Fortunately, it is available online, provides a wealth of interesting information and explains various RESP options available to parents in a clear and straightforward manner. As [...]

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Sometimes, the active versus passive debate is a bit like the movie Rashomon, in which different characters recall wildly different versions of the same incident. Take the S&P Passive versus Active (SPIVA) report card on mutual fund returns during the last bear market from August 2000 to December 2002. The report points out that just [...]

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It started with a Goldman Sachs paper that popularized the term BRIC, referring to the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The paper projected that by 2040 the combined BRIC economies will be larger than the developed economies of the US, Japan, UK, Germany, France and Italy. BRICs would have remained nothing more [...]

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Mark Hulbert writes in The New York Times that stocks are a good inflation hedge because though future earnings are discounted at a higher rate when inflation is higher, corporate earnings tend to grow faster than inflation. Investors worried about the first effect ignored the second, offsetting effect in the past and drove stock prices [...]

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Despite the gloom and doom about the US economy and its currency, the US stock market is faring relatively better (down 19% from its previous peak) compared to other markets. The MSCI EAFE Index which tracks stock markets in other developed markets in Europe and Japan is down 30.5% off its recent peak in U.S. [...]

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Recently a friend asked about a “tax scheme” that claims to buy medicines for AIDS patients (”Fight AIDS Save Taxes” is its slogan) in Africa and provides a tax receipt for four to five times the donation amount. While stiffing the government, helping AIDS patients and putting some money in the pocket may sound like [...]

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While there is healthy competition with many players offering high-interest savings accounts at attractive interest rates and features, President’s Choice Financial is pretty much the only game in town if you want a no-fee chequing account. Not for much longer. Nancy Zimmerman, who is a Bank Evangelist at Citizens Bank (and a money coach and [...]

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We might do all the right things in investing – keep expenses low, not chase performance, stick to the plan even when markets are terrible – and still get low returns just because our investing career coincided with a time period in which market returns were much lower than we expected at the outset. In [...]

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