Phil regularly comments on this blog and I asked him if he would be interested in contributing to a new segment where you, dear reader, can talk about anything on your mind. You can share with other readers your financial success stories or maybe something that didn’t work out so well. If you’d like to participate in this segment, please contact me and we can discuss your idea further. Now, over to Phil…

I recently looked into investing in “mortgage investment corporations” such as those offered by Carevest and Equimor, which allow investors to invest in a pool of mortgages. I decided not proceed because the Ontario Securities Commission requires that we fill out a questionnaire to show that we qualify as a “sophisticated” investor. The OSC qualification to be considered a sophisticated investor really doesn’t have much to do about investment knowledge, but rather to do with how much money you have. So, unless you’re literally a millionaire ($1 million in assets) or make over $250K a year, you aren’t considered a sophisticated investor for the purposes of investing into these private funds. But aside from that legal entanglement with the OSC, the mortgage investments do seem to offer a nice healthy return, I just don’t know what the implications are if you don’t actually qualify according to the OSC and still get into that investment. Are you still protected from fraud? I don’t know. So, I opted out since I don’t qualify according to the OSC’s definition.

I’ve also looked into a private REIT (League Asset Corp) as well, which seems to offer a much better ROI than publicly listed REITs (they boast a 10-12% return). But their structure and holdings look rather scary. The syndicated property ownership model means that you own a small piece of one specific property. If I were interested in getting that closely tied to one single property, I would personally prefer that the deal is not a syndicated deal and just buy some commercial real estate on my own. Also, they offer a diversified fund, but in my opinion, it holds some rather low quality real estate.

I’m currently not sure where to put my new money these days. But many small and micro cap stocks seem to have taken the worst beating. I’ve been combing through the small caps to see what might be interesting to me these days but they are usually quite illiquid and it’s hard to get in and out of them.