Canadian Capitalist

In an earlier post, we discussed how investing in funds that hedge the exposure to foreign currencies entails a significant cost in terms of a large tracking error. There is a further cost involved in holding these funds: taxes. It is no surprise that currency-neutral funds could generate large taxable distributions - by their very [...]

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With the steep increase in the value of our dollar compared to other currencies, hedging against currency fluctuations has become popular and many US and international equity funds are now available in currency-neutral flavours. There are two schools of thought on currency hedging: one holds that currency fluctuations “cancel out” for a long-term investor and [...]

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Stocks have staged a significant recovery after falling sharply in the first quarter of 2008. The TSX Composite is up about 19% from its low in January and the S&P 500 is up about 11% from its mid-March swoon. If the lows reached in the first quarter was indeed the market bottom, we can classify [...]

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Warren Buffett hosted the annual general meeting for Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in Omaha last weekend. The most anticipated part of the meeting is the Q&A session that Buffett and partner Charlie Munger hold with shareholders and this year the duo lived up to expectations and dished out wit and wisdom:

Jason Zweig of Money magazine reported [...]

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Like everyone else, I’m excited when a stock I hold increases the dividend. Dividend increases in recent years have been very strong. TD Bank (TSX: TD), for instance, has raised its dividend from $1.12 per share in 2002 to $2.36 per share today, a compounded annual rate of more than 12% per annum. The joy [...]

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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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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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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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Taxes have a huge impact on investment returns. The Bogleheads Guide to Investing cites a study by Charles Schwab that found that for the 30-year period from 1963 to 1992, $1 invested in U.S. equities would have grown to $21.89 in a tax-deferred account but only to $9.87 in a taxable account for a taxpayer [...]

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A good definition of efficient markets can be found in a paper by Eugene Fama titled Random Walks in Stock Market Prices:
An “efficient” market is defined as a market where there are large numbers of rational profit-maximizers actively competing, with each trying to predict future market values of individual securities, and where important current information [...]

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