The Investment Fee Tree
By Scott Ronalds Investment fees reduce returns. This much is obvious. What isn’t so clear, however, is what constitutes reasonable fees. A number of variables play a role, such as whether you work...
View ArticleAnd the Winner is ...
By Tom Bradley “Should Ed Clark, a 50-goal scorer, be paid the same as a good two-way winger on a deep team, a dependable defenseman, a second-line center and a penalty-killing specialist?” With the...
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The Grand Experiment
By Tom Bradley The following chart came courtesy of Tim Price of PFP Wealth Management in London.*Variously the Bank Rate, Minimum Lending Rate, Minimum Band 1 Dealing Rate, Repo Rate and Official...
View ArticleFixed Income's New Reality (Live)
By Tom Bradley In a Globe and Mail column on May 8th, I talked about how investors have been moving from defense to offense in their fixed income portfolios. Indeed, many of the new income funds and...
View ArticleCMHC - Back to its Roots
By Tom Bradley There’s a terrific article in the Globe and Mail today. It’s based on an interview with the new CEO of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Evan Siddall. It’s terrific because...
View ArticleGetting in the Business
I saw a note that 150,000 people worldwide wrote CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) exams on June 7th. It’s a reminder of how tough it is to get into the investment business. For some reason, lots of...
View ArticleAddicted to Zero
By Tom Bradley I opened the Financial Times website this morning to see that the unemployment rate in the U.S. had dropped to 6.1%. Beside that headline was a story about the Dow Jones hitting 17,000....
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Bond Yields - Ontario vs Italy
By Tom Bradley In presentations over the last year, I’ve often referred to Ontario as the Italy of Canada. In other words, its finances are abysmal. At a time when the province’s key economic drivers,...
View ArticleOne National Regulator - Two Small Steps
By Tom Bradley It was announced yesterday that Saskatchewan and New Brunswick have joined Ontario and British Columbia in committing to a Federal securities regulator, currently (and hopefully...
View ArticleCanadian Real Estate - A Crack in the Tree
By Tom Bradley “It’s like if the tree in the backyard has a crack in it, you worry it’s vulnerable to a storm. But if no storm happens, it goes on and on, and maybe eventually strengthens through...
View ArticleBuying Canada: An Inexact Science
By Tom Bradley There was a story in the Report on Business on Monday about the results so far from China’s oil investments in Canada. To date, Chinese energy acquisitions (including CNOOC’s purchase of...
View ArticleThe New Xerox
By Tom Bradley When I came out of business school too long ago, it was a given that if you wanted to pursue a sales career, you went for a job with Xerox or IBM. These organizations put their recruits...
View ArticleCentral Bankers - Dreams and Distortions
By Tom Bradley Last month we had record auto sales in Canada and the U.S. Vehicles are zooming off dealer lots. Meanwhile, it continues to be a sellers’ market for real estate in most parts of Canada...
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Mark Your Calendar - National Portfolio Simplification Day
By Scott Ronalds September 12th was National Chocolate Milkshake Day. September 5th was National Cheese Pizza Day. August 26th was National Dog Day. August 13th was International Left-handers Day....
View ArticleThe Poor Banks
By Tom Bradley With more stringent banking regulations post-2008, the lending and finance landscape has changed significantly. Specifically, the U.S. and European banks have exited a number of...
View ArticleWhy We Have Low Interest Rates
By Tom Bradley In Connor, Clark & Lunn Investment Management’s latest ‘Outlook’, there is an excellent rundown of why interest rates are going to stay low. The manager of our Income Fund is of the...
View ArticleA Narrowing Housing Market
By Tom Bradley In its weekly letter, the economics team at BMO published an interesting piece on residential real estate – Canada’s Housing Boom: And Then There Were Three. Senior Economist Sal...
View ArticleCentral Bankers Have an Ego Problem
By Tom Bradley “We get by with free markets in all other walks of economic and financial life – why let the price of money itself be dictated by a handful of State-appointed bureaucrats?” In his...
View ArticleToo Much Information?
By Tom Bradley Ryan Males at CIBC World Markets in Vancouver passed on this thought-provoking quote from Herbert Simon, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics. In an information-rich world, the wealth...
View ArticleIndex-linked Notes: To Who's Advantage?
By Tom Bradley “There are those who know and those who don’t. All the advantages go to people who know.” These words are from investor advocate Glorianne Stromberg in 1998. She was speaking to the...
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