Investing

In my recent review of “Rule #1″ I talked a bit about people taking Buffett quotes and twisting them. A while ago during a conversation about “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” a similar idea came up that people can use aphorisms to mean whatever they want. One Peter Lynch quote that I think gets [...]

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It was recently announced that Philip Morris put in a generous offer to buy Rothmans (of which Mr. Cheap is a little less than a majority owner).  On news of the offer, Rothmans stock shot up above $30 / share then sank back to a bit below it (to $29.71 as of the holiday weekend).  [...]

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This is part two of my three part series comparing various Canadian and American investment accounts.

This post deals with the Canadian RESP and the U.S. 529 plan which are both educational savings accounts. For the 529 account we are only looking at the 529 savings account (not the pre-paid plan). In part [...]

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I had a request recently from a blogger friend of mine – Paid Twice, who thought it would be a good idea to do a post on the common U.S. and Canadian investment accounts and try to find which ones are comparable. This post deals with the Canadian RRSP and the U.S. 401(k) plan – [...]

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This article was originally posted on Blueprint for Prosperity.
A lot of inexperienced investors who invest in stocks either through mutual funds, index fund, ETFs or owning the stocks directly want great returns with minimal or no losses in the bad times. Unfortunately this isn’t possible for the simple reason that you can’t get great rewards [...]

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This article was originally posted on Blueprint for Prosperity. Things have changed in the p2p world since this was written but I’ve left the post as is.
In the blogosphere there seems to be a lot of excitement about peer-to-peer lending which is the ability to lend money to other individuals through companies such as [...]

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The Personal Financier wrote a very interesting post on the idea that long term equity investments are not risk free which is not a popular opinion for most investors.
A lot of the investment books that I’ve read often quote a long term equity return figure of 10% for equities. The idea is that while [...]

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Most Canadians are probably familiar with the company BCE (Bell Canada Enterprises) since it is the biggest telephone provider in the country. Last June, the Ontario Teacher’s fund made the winning bid of $42.75 per share for BCE for a total of $35 billion dollars. Since that time the collapse of the credit [...]

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A while ago I hit a bit of a milestone with my stock portfolio, and collected my 2000th dividend dollar, which has made me somewhat retrospective. I’ve gotten more used to having the dividends roll in, but I still feel a happy rush whenever they show up in my E*Trade account. Because I’m [...]

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If someone had the choice between a $1,000 / month or a 1% monthly increase on their investments, which is the better choice?
The correct answer, of course, is “it depends”. If someone had $100,000 than 1% monthly would be $1,000. So if you have more than $100k, the increase is better, and [...]

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I had recently written about my decision to buy some REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts). REITs are a good way to add diversification to your portfolio since they are not closely correlated with equity returns. In the last post I looked at an ETF and several individual Canadian REITs. I’ve been thinking [...]

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A man I knew a few years back got seriously into real estate after reading “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and inheriting a million dollars (his father-in-law died). He had been living in Toronto, and after discovering how much cheaper property was in smaller towns (duh) he started buying anything he could get his hands [...]

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We recently received a question from a reader whose name is Samantha. Samantha asked about the benefits of contributing to a RRSPs (401k for our American readers) for younger investors under the age of 30 who have other debts. My first reaction was – how would I know? It’s been almost a [...]

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Last week, (ironically on April 1) Questrade discount brokerage announced a change to their trading price structure. The new trading costs are 1 cent per share with a $4.95 minimum and $9.95 maximum.
I don’t understand
Ok, here are some sample trading costs:

If you trade 70 shares then you pay the minimum $4.95
If you trade [...]

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Lending Club, the popular peer-to-peer lending site sent out an email this week to members basically saying that they are ceasing to accept any new loans indefinitely. In the email they mention they are filing with the SEC to be able to create a secondary market for their loans, but there isn’t any mention [...]

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photo by wwworks
Vanguard just announced that they will be offering a global stock index fund and global stock exchange traded fund (ETF) in the second quarter of 2008.
They will track the FTSE All-World Index which measures the performance of large- and mid-cap stocks worldwide according to their market capitalization weighting.
The fund will be approximately 45% [...]

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