Investorial

Over the next few days, I will rehash a series that was featured a while ago from MoneySense.ca. The series was called Rich At Any Age - A LifeCycle Guide To Personal Finance. It was basically a synopsis of what most people could expect at a given stage of their life, with links to related MoneySense.ca articles.

I explained on Canadian Capitalist that MoneySense merged and reappeared as a sub-section of Canadian Business Online. As a result, that particular feature had links to articles that were no longer functional. I thought I might as well do a favour to MoneySense and direct readers to the stories that I found manually for each section. American readers may not understand the minor differences in the Canadian system but I’m sure you can follow along quite nicely!

Starting Out
Your 20s are all about new opportunities. Maybe you’ve been working for a couple of years and you’re starting to think about investing for the first time. Or perhaps you’ve just finished school and are looking for your first job that doesn’t involve flipping burgers or planting trees. Either way, this is the ideal time to be laying the groundwork for your financial future. “If you do your 20s right, you’re set for life,” says Paul W. Lermitte, a certified financial planner in Vancouver. (more…)

When AOL bought Weblogsinc. from Jason Calacanis, we saw the media company’s intent to step into the blogosphere in a big way. Performancing’s Nick Wilson blogged a piece on AOL’s powermove into the financial blogging arena - Blogging Stocks.

Before today, I had no idea of the (more…)

Irwin Michael, fund manager of ABC funds, has just put up his latest monthly commentary for April 2006. Investorial readers will know that Irwin is my favourite Canadian fund manager, and is often talked about in these articles.

What’s so refreshing about Irwin is that he lets everybody in on his thought processes so that you may learn about how he picks stocks. This month, Irwin focuses on the oil & gas run-ups and comments about metal prices.

… Interestingly, the oil & gas and mining sectors now comprise over 45% of the TSX index causing many investors to question whether the current market boom is akin to the high technology boom (and bust) of six years ago. In fact, for these investors who cannot recall, one TSE stock out of 300, Nortel, comprised at its peak price of $124½ over 35% of the TSX 300 index. Is the present resource boom reminiscent of the high tech mania of 1999-2000? Probably not, however, we are becoming increasingly concerned about the spectacular price rise in metals prices …

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Irwin has a podcast syndication feed on the site! Kudos to Mr. Michael for getting with the times!

If you were not convinced that many Americans are debt-ridden, taking on more liability than income and stretched beyond their means, then this post should be fun to read! I heard over the radio today during my commute that people were resorting to pawning items like chainsaws, jewellery and other goods in order to pay for gas to get to work.

Doing a bit more research (which means googling for news), here’s a list of different local newspapers that have reported the phenomenon in their regions. A cynic would rate these tales as a little bit of fear-mongering and a little bit of journalistic voyeurism for ratings. (more…)

Steve Pavlina published an interview he conducted with millionaire, Marc Allen. There were some interesting question and answers regarding becoming a millionaire and about money in general. A terrific quote, written by Kent Nerburn was thrown out that I’d like to share:

So true!

My friend Michael was chatting with me on MSN today asking if I knew about WealthWeb.ca. It was a site that he found useful to him because Canadians really have very few financial article portals available for their research. Tongue-in-cheek, I reminded him the reason for Investorial’s existence, but I quickly checked out the site.

WealthWeb is a collection of personal finance articles for Canadians. WealthWeb is maintained by James Yih, who has a vision to turn it into Canada’s resource centre to build, protect and manage wealth. James Yih is an author of two financial books, and is currently an account representative and Investment Marketing Consultant for Manulife Securities. I knew of James’s writings from his days as a weekly columnist on FundLibrary.com. In fact, I had connected with James via email about an article he wrote last year in (more…)

Investorial should have been on top of this story, but Investing Intelligenty picked it up and ran beautifully with his take on CNBC’s Mad Money. The show’s ringmaster is former hedge fund manager, the boisterous Jim Cramer. Jim was also the co-host on a previous CNBC program, Kudlow & Cramer.

I always thought the show to bring little value to the “common investor”; the ones Jim wished to help. I never did think enough of the show to do research and post on it. Like Investing Intelligently, I could barely stand watching the show for more than a few minutes while I flipped through the channels. It’s all about showmanship for Jim. While he’s busy pressing buttons (more…)

My work with American customers clues me in that MorningStar is a ratings authority whom investors depend on for some investment guidance. The debate is not about whether MorningStar deserves that attention, but rather to point out that Americans have a lot of choices when it comes to analyst ratings for funds and investments with Barons, Lipper’s, S&P, Morgan Stanley and a host of other firms.

Where does this leave Canadian investors? We can depend on U.S. analyst firms regarding equity investments, but they are not much help when the topic is about Canadian mutual funds. MorningStar does hold a Canadian presence with MorningStar.ca. Admittedly, it is not the first media I would use or recommend for others to check out. I thought it’s about time I took a quick tour of the site.

I believe most investors think of GlobeFund.com first when they are researching mutual funds. Yet a quick comparison reveals that GlobeFund basically gets all its information and even ratings from (more…)