Canadian Dollars Blog

In our area, grocery store sales begin on fridays and end on the following thursdays. A bag of flyers is sent out in the mail usually around thursday highlighting what is for sale. When the flyers come, we go through them very carefully to figure out what is for sale in the upcoming week. What we used to do is just make a mental note of which store had the most sales and just get most of our groceries from that place. Unfortunately we found that this was a real time waster because having to remember grocery lists was never a good idea. We'd get most of the items we wanted to buy, but in doing so we also bought a lot of extra junk that we didn't need. So we needed a better way. We know use an electronic list. I just open up my favorite text editor and input all the items that we want to buy. Once that is done, I just send the list to my phone and we're off shopping. By making a set list, I am able to visualize where I need to go and get in and out of a grocery st

With the TSX and DOW trading at near or above their 52 week highs, I've received a lot of emails asking me where I think the market is going and what should people do with a lot of the profits they've made up so far in the calendar year. Here's my answer: I don't know. My guess is as good as yours. For anyone that was brave enough to invest money back in the early part of the year, you will notice that your portfolio is up quite a bit. My best move was TCK.B when I bought it around $10. There were times when I second guessed my purchase but I'm glad that I held on to it. As it's been up 300% I got out and sold around $30. My worst performer so far has been MFC. It looked like it was starting to recover nicely until they decided to slash the dividend by half. Whether that is a beneficial thing for the company remains to be seen. The market seems a bit expensive at the moment so I've been extremely selective (more so than before) about which equities to

It's not very often that we get a 15% pullback when a stock meets expectations, but that happened to RIMM. The market had gotten ahead of itself and was expecting a blowout quarter. Instead what they got was what was expected. Some say that the co-CEO should focus more on running the business rather than chase the Phoenix Coyotes. Others say that RIMM is losing a lot of market share to AAPL. Heck some others are saying that RIMM is going to go bankrupt like Nortel. While there may be some truth to the first statement, I believe that multiple smartphones can be successful in the marketplace. While AAPL has a wide moat with computers, ipods, iphones and software, not everyone wants an iPhone to do their emailing. Have you ever tried emailing with an iPhone? There's no contest when comparing it with a Blackberry. Secondly, I don't know where these 'facts' that RIMM will go bankrupt are coming from. They are enjoying healthy margins and have robust sales. Next t

What happens when one of your beloved stocks suddenly decides to cut it's dividend? Do you sell it or do you hang on to it in the hopes that one day it'll raise it's dividend again. What if you, like a lot of Canadians own Manulife Financial. What do you do at this point? Well the first thing you should do is evaluate your portfolio and risk allocation. The MFC dividend cut is a solid and stark reminder that anytime you invest in the stock market there are two things that are never guaranteed: 1) the rise in value of the stock and 2) a steady dividend. Those that though it was safe suddenly got spooked. The TSX as a whole sold off - especially the insurance and financial sectors. The next day the buying was back because people started to believe that the MFC dividend cuts only applied to them. Or do they? I guess only time will tell. The important thing to learn from all this is that dividend cuts can and will happen so the dividend that one gets from their portfoli

I don't know about you but I find that there are really a lack of really good stock screener options for Canadian stocks. For American stocks, there are plenty of excellent free options like google finance and Finviz.com . Sure the Globe and mail has a filter, but I find it a bit of a pain to use. The filtering is cumbersome but it will have to do until I find a new tool to use. So, readers do you have any good free stock screeners for the Canadian market? If so, please share ideas and links with other readers!

Before we get too far, there's been a lot of misconceptions about the term aggressive investing. Aggressive investing is not stupid investing. It's not about chasing stocks that are overpriced or stocks that don't have growth prospects. It's not about putting all your chips into the market without knowing what you're doing. That's just plain stupid. Aggressive investment doesn't mean investing for the sake of investing. It means investing with the same investment discipline and criteria that you have whether you're 50% invested or 100% invested. The way I see it is if there is value out there, I will put money into it. This is in contrast to what a lot of my friends have been saying about just putting money in the market because it's guaranteed to 'go up'. That's just silly.

Okay so imagine a year ago I told you that you could pick up quality stocks below book value or that stocks like Bank of Montreal have a dividend yield of over 10%. What would you say? You'd probably say that these stocks are damn cheap. Why is it that with all the good stocks are being thrown out with the bad water, suddenly the markets are acting irrationally? Everyone is getting out of the market right now but doesn't that go against the whole buy low sell high philosophy? Sounds to me like people are letting their emotions get the better of them. Have we seen the bottom? I don't know. Are we near the bottom? I don't know. Thing is there are tons of stocks that seem to be priced in the crapper. It's not rational. Sure there's short term volatility but I'm positive that 10-15 years from now we'll look back at this time as the best time to be buying stocks. You can sell if you want to. It's your money.

I've initiated a position in RICK's. It's the kind of industry that is very recession resistant much like the alcohol industry. In good times or bad, there will always be business at gentlemen's clubs. Trading at a low p/e with positive earnings growth, I have been accumulating shares below 4.50. Today I initiated a position at 4.28 and intend to hold this as it will likely be a great money maker for years to come. That said, if there is a sudden spike in price to 7.00, I would put in a stop loss to protect any gains in this volatile market.

I initiated a small position in Harry Winston Diamond today at 5.10 for two main reasons low P/E and low P/B. HW has no long term debt and they own plenty of high quality mines in Canada. With a recession, people will still be getting married and people will still be purchasing diamond engagement rings. Also, price of diamonds is currently undervalued compared with gold. I expect that diamond prices will be priced more accurately relative to gold in the future. I am buying this stock for a long term hold. Once we get out of this recession, and people start spending more, this stock should be ready for a good rebound.

A few more stocks came up on my screener today: Sterling Shoes Income Fund (SSI.UN) http://finance.google.ca/finance?q=ssi.un This one dropped a lot in price mainly because of the cut in dividends. Looking at their financial results, their year over year revenue has been up even though they've been scaling back their growth for 2009. The stock is basically paying out 40 cents per 1.54 (last day) closing per year of yield. Amazingly this stock is ridiculously cheap trading at a P/E of 2.83. Be warned though retail numbers have not been great as of late and I expect that there may be some further weakness in this one. Despite all that, I am looking for an entry in this stock and have put in a buy order at 1.40. Also, this stock is very thinly traded so if you are planning on buying, it will be difficult to flip this one. When the economy turns around I am confident that this one will trade at higher multiples. Generally speaking this stock is not followed by many/analysts and a