Investing and Personal Finance
From the category archives:
As a member of the BMO (Bank of Montreal) share purchase plan (and drip), I recently received a notice that there is now a 2% discount on any shares bought through the dividend reinvest plan (DRIP). Please note that this is the share purchase plan run through Compushare – it doesn’t apply to shares bought [...]
{ 14 comments }
Jordan has agreed to help out the crack writing staff here at Four Pillars by contributing the occasional post. He is a young guy living and working from home in Vancouver with his wife and 2 young kids. Jordan is a computer geek at heart and last year discovered he also had a hidden passion [...]
{ 19 comments }
I recently moved my investment accounts from Questrade to RBC Direct in order to take advantage of the RBC 1% rebate deal so I thought it would only be fitting to do a review of their services.
Who are they?
RBC Direct is the discount brokerage arm of the Royal Bank of Canada which is the biggest [...]
{ 15 comments }
This service by INO offers a free trend analysis of any stock you desire to help you with your technical analysis. All Canadian and American stocks are eligible – all you have to do is enter the stock symbol or name, your first name (Homer?) and an email – that’s it! No cost or [...]
{ 0 comments }
I had a reader question the other day where they mentioned buying both XIU (iShares Cdn Large Cap 60 ETF) and XDV (iShares Cdn Dividend Index Fund ETF) for their portfolio. I had responded that although I wasn’t sure, I suspected that might be a lot of duplication in the two funds since XIU has [...]
{ 4 comments }
I’ve written quite a few posts on Questrade but since I’ve never done an actual review, I thought I should do one while they are still fresh in my mind, since I just moved to RBC Direct to take advantage of their 1% deal. This will be part of a series of brokerage reviews that [...]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
I recently came across yet another post on investing which goes something along the lines of “If you invested 10 years ago in the Dow then you would have earned exactly nothing in that time”. I hate to pick on any one blogger since I’ve read these articles all across the blogosphere but this one [...]
{ 17 comments }
I recently found out about a company (INO) that offers free stock trading videos online. While I’m not into active trading anymore (at one time I had a big interest in it), there are plenty of investors out there who love to trade stocks.
INO offers free online videos which are basically educational trading strategy lessons [...]
{ 0 comments }
I have to admit that while I haven’t been bothered by the falling markets, today I found it a bit tough for some reason. It seems like every day the market falls and if it’s only 1 or 2% then that is ok. Well today the Canadian market fell 9%. 9%!!! That would be a [...]
{ 24 comments }
I love the idea of passive income. Some magic is performed, and a steady stream of money comes into your life every month. A Google search on this site with the term “passive income” turns up 55 hits, so its definitely a popular topic. As much as I think passive investing in index funds is [...]
{ 11 comments }
There’s a lot of fear about the stock market right now. As Mike wrote recently, we’re in a bear market. You read about people who are upset, people who are excited, and people who don’t seem to care.
What is the right reaction?
I think all three are the right reaction. Which one is right for you [...]
{ 17 comments }
The markets have not done well lately….the TSX in particular has gone down from around 15,000 points down to a bit less than 10,000 points as I wrote this (one week ago). Hopefully there will be some stunning rallies and we will all get a good laugh out of this outdated post!
I have to admit [...]
{ 14 comments }
Are we there yet? The week before last, the TSX dropped 11%, last week it dropped 16%. Oddly enough on Friday I was expecting the worst day so far since the Asian markets had crashed about 8% and the Japanese market had dropped almost 10% overnight. When the TSX went down 5.5% I felt oddly [...]
{ 6 comments }
I’ve had this post bouncing around in my head for a while. It would have been far more valuable to post it before Oct 7th: some of the ideas may be obvious in hindsight now.
Dividend investors love seeing a long history of uninterrupted dividend payments (ideally growing steadily as well). Often we’ll [...]
{ 21 comments }
What, me worry? Yes, of course I’m worried – it’s tough to watch the markets fall and hear about how the American credit market is seized up without wondering if we edging too close to the end of civilization as we know it. I was quite surprised when the “Great American Bailout” vote didn’t pass [...]
{ 18 comments }
One of the most basic of stock buying strategies is to buy low and sell high. It makes absolute mathematical sense, but the difficulty is the execution. Psychology works against us: when markets are high there’s a euphoria that makes it very easy to join in with the herd and buy high. Conversely, when markets [...]
{ 30 comments }
As most readers know I’m pretty big on low cost investing – it’s one thing to talk about it – how about some actual suggestions on how to do it!!
Save on taxes – Investing in a taxable account when you have tax free retirement accounts available is costing you money. Max the rrsp/401(k)/roth accounts first!
Save [...]
{ 9 comments }
As I mentioned last week, RBC Direct has a promotion going on where they will pay anyone 1% of assets moved to RBC Direct from another broker. Since I am a huge fan of low-cost investing (and getting paid a rebate certainly lowers the costs!) I was pretty excited about this deal since it appears [...]
{ 9 comments }
I wrote at the beginning of August about Philip Morris’ (aka Altria) interest in purchasing Rothmans. It was a friendly takeover offer. The Rothmans board of directors recommended accepting the offer of $30 / share, a significant premium over the previous share price, and the highest price its ever been sold at (at [...]
{ 18 comments }
As some of you have already heard, Canadian Capitalist broke the news last week that RBC Direct discount brokerage (read a review of RBC Direct) is offering a 1% payment for any assets transferred from another investment institution. There are limits to the rebate but they are quite generous ($2500 per account type).
I’m a big [...]
{ 11 comments }
