Here’s a question for you.
Would you rather have $100 USD or $100 CDN?
If you are trying to think of the exchange rate today, you’re on the right track. At the time of this writing, the exchange rate is 1 CAD = .9345 USD. That means that one U.S. dollar will buy $1.07 Canadian dollars.
So today, [...]

Exchange Traded Funds are an investment that many advisors don’t want you to know about. They would rather sell you mutual funds. You see, ETFs have almost all of the same benefits of mutual funds, but at a fraction of the cost. Less cost to you, the investor, means less compensation to your advisor. Therefore, [...]

In many ways growth investing is the opposite of value investing. This is a strategy in which investors aren’t as concerned with the income stream the company earns as much as they’re concerned with the future growth potential of the company. The price a growth stock is trading at reflects the anticipated growth of the [...]

A segregated fund is a mutual fund with a principal guarantee. An insurance company provides the guarantee, and investors pay for it with a higher MER than regular mutual funds have, usually by 1% or 2% (see “Management Expense Ratio” ). The guarantee applies on the 10-year anniversary of the purchase. If you invest $10,000 [...]

Behind every financial product is a clever marketing machine. The marketing machine behind Principal Protected Notes (PPNs) doesn’t need to be all that clever, however. The features are attractive: 100% principal protection at maturity, exposure to a diversified portfolio of great performing stocks (or to almost whatever asset class, sector, or geographic region you want), [...]

Value investing is a process of selecting stocks that trade for less than their intrinsic value. “What does that mean?” you might ask. Well, if you think about the earnings of a company in relation to the price of its stock, you start to get an idea whether the stock is cheap or expensive.
If the [...]

If you’re investing in mutual funds you should learn how to do it as economically as possible. By reducing the cost of investing, you automatically increase the return the investments deliver to you. If you reduce the cost by 1%, you’ve increased your return by 1%.

Management Expense Ratio (MER)
This is the fee that every mutual [...]

This is the fee that every mutual fund charges to invest in the fund. It includes all of the ongoing fees of the fund: the manager’s fee, the costs to print the prospectuses and annual reports, custody fees, the costs to mail you statements, and even the federal and provincial regulatory fees.
It also includes the [...]

If you don’t completely understand how your financial advisors are paid, you’re not alone. It’s a subject that your advisor doesn’t want to talk about and very seldom does. After all, if you really understand how he gets paid, it might trigger other difficult questions from you as you begin to learn of his biases. [...]

Most of the time when rates of return get distorted, the distortion exaggerates the upside and makes an investment appear more attractive than it really is. This is not always the case, however. Sometimes a distortion makes the investment look less attractive. This can be the case with individual stocks that pay dividends.
Barry is evaluating [...]