Investment Q&A

Q: Hi 5i:
Just a comment for Mark who asked about a good way of arranging a charitable donation of SHOP shares with a big embedded capital gain. He might check out the CanadaHelps.org website as they facilitate this sort of thing, have a very broad range of charities to donate to, and make it relatively easy. It is flexible so with something like SHOP you could donate several shares and distribute it to a number of different charities, one share apiece if you want to. The tax receipt is great because it is for the full market value of the shares at the moment of the actual transfer and comes electronically from CanadaHelps. There is no tax on the capital gain that you are giving away. You can share your contact info with the recipient organizations, or not if you’d prefer anonymity over junk mail.
Cheers for the giving!

Q: Thanks for all your support. At the rate I'm having to trim Shop, I believe I will be running into tax issues.

Do you or other members have a simple way to quickly and simply sell shares to charities for tax purposes?

Any suggestions on how to track capital gains during the year?

Appreciatively,
Mark

Q: Dear 5IR Team,
Can you please, give me the most important criteria to be meet for 5IR team looks first before a deep analyze ?
Thanks

Q: Do you know of a website where one can have a comprehensive list of all aftermarket stock prices. My interest would be seeing companies with bigger post earnings price declines, for a quick trade.
Thank you

Q: Thank you for the new feature listing the dividends increase and cuts. This is nice way to help keep track of a critical part of our investments. I hope you make this an on going feature which I think would be fairly easy to maintain. Thank you again for being a refreshing source for perspective during these tough times.

Q: I thought I could rely on the earnings calendar of the TMX Money web site (tmxmoney.com), but numerous times I have found it is not complete. Example: As I write this at 8pm EST on May 5th, it does not list KXS earnings on May 6th, yet my RBC Direct Investing calendar shows KXS reporting earnings on May 6th.

In the TMX Money web site they do list whether the earnings will be released before markets open, or after markets close (good); whereas the RBC Direct Investing calendar does not tell me that information (bad).

Isn't TMX Money owned by TMX Group (that runs the TSX)? If that is the case why would their earnings calendar be so incomplete (and therefore unreliable)?

Do you know of a (free) RELIABLE web site that has an accurate earnings calendar?

Q: Hi,
I hope everyone is well. I have a friend who has inherited 500K in USD$. She needs to convert this money into canadian dollars. ( She has no experience with investing or an FA) What is the most cost efficient way for her to transfer this sizeable amount money into Canadian currency? Any suggestions from other members are also welcome. Thank you everyone.
Kerri

Q: What do you think of this etf as a hedge to the market ?

Q: I believe you have a link to dividend info but I can’t find it! help please!

Q: Hello Peter et al.

I hope you are all doing well in these unprecedented times. I would like an explanation of the ETF price movement of XLB.TO through these markets. When the markets began to crash to the lows in late March, XLB price surged all the way up to $29.00 and then dropped suddenly all the way to $22.00 and has since bounced all the way back to around $27.00 now? I expected the rise in price because stocks were dropping precipitately but I did not expect it then to drop all the way down to $22. Why did that happen? Also it has bounced back to $27.00 now and why is that as well? What am I missing here in my understanding of this bond ETF? I would have thought the bond prices would have went higher because people would have transferred into bonds for security in these uncertain times. Am I wrong in my interpretation here? I expected the same with gold and gold stocks went down for a bit because of mine closures due to COVID-19. They have since rebounded nicely due to mines being re-opened now and they are producing gold again at good prices. Thanks for the great service. Please educate me here.

Regards,

Brendan

Q: Given that my Margin account has the 5 big banks and 2 Telecoms paying dividends on a periodic basis and that I'm not "too" concerned that these will cut their dividends, would it be wise to implement trailing stop loss orders for these in case there is another retest of the lows of March. Had I done that at the beginning of the year, I could have picked up the above at much reduce prices with resulting greater dividend yields. And would using the same procedure for my RIF account (which has mainly REITs) be beneficial to capture the current values to avoid further losses there.
Your comments. Thank you

Q: Hello
Have you ever considered limiting the words in a question to something reasonable? Perhaps something like 100 words. Some questions are sooooooo long that it takes the fun away from reading them. Just a suggestion. :)

Q: While at home these past weeks, I notice a strange phenomenon that maybe you could explain. The Dow futures right before market open give a fairly good indication of the direction of the market for the day. So I thought, well hey, if you know the market is going to go down, would it be possible to sell early? Using MPC as an example, however, you can see that there in an IMMEDIATE 2 dollar drop in the share price at open. How is this possible? Why would an owner of the stock at 32 dollars one moment be willing to accept a bid of 29.91 with no intermediate prices at a large volume? Unless that seller was trying to move the market? Would like to hear your thoughts.

Q: In your opinion,what are the best sectors in North America to invest in at this time

Q: You often cite "insider ownership" ratios when commenting on various equities. Can you point me to a website where I could access this info or is access limited to professionals?

Q: This is in response to Donald's inquiry about converting CAD $ into US $. I've used Knightsbridge Foreign Exchange many times to convert USD to CDN and been very pleased. Its easy to set up your account and fees are approx 0.8% (or lower for large transactions) vs the banks 2.5-3%. Place a call to their trading desk and you'll be able to complete a trade immediately. They will quote you a rate, which is the spot rate less their fee. You can also place a standing order that's triggered once your price is hit. It takes about 5 days for your cash to be transferred from one account to the other. Hope this helps.

Q: We are managing the assets of my elderly parents. They have $1.5 M cash in a Canadian interest account. We are wanting to diversify and put some of this into a US interest account of some type, thinking the USD will gain over the next couple of years. Do you have any ideas of how to do this that will avoid the usual 2.5-3% currency conversion? Is the an ETF they could purchase that will basically give them US cash, or something else that you are aware of? Thanks for any advice you can provide.

Q: Hello
The Bank of Canada Target Rate is set at .25% until the Fourth Quarter of 2021.
However, I also noted that the forecast for the 5 year Government of Canada bond is different as follows:
Q2 2020......54%
Q3 2020.......63%
Q4 2020........75%
Q1 2021.........98%
Is it possible to have a gradual increase in the 5 year bond rate while the Bank rate is kept static at .25% ??
Thanks

Q: Another member pointed out that you have a link to "Dividend Updates", which I did not notice before. I don't recall seeing an email announcing that.

What is the criteria for entries in that list? Is it all Canadian stocks that report dividend changes? Since Jan 1, 2020?

I maintain my own list of dividend changes for stocks that I own, and noticed that there are a few dividend changes missing from your list. These changes were announced after Jan 1, 2020.

Specifically:

PPL Announced 20200106, up 5%
BPY.UN Announced 20200205, up 0.76%
BCE Announced 20200206, up 5%
BAM.A Announced 20200213, up 12.5%
TD Announced 20200227, up 6.76%
ENGH Announced 20200305, up 22.7%
SGY Announced 20200309, down 90%
VET Announced 20200316, down 82.6%
SGY Announced 20200415, dividend suspended
MX Announced 20200429, down 90%

Q: In todays list, you mentioned to a subscriber to consider VOM.

This ETF has a tracking error of 5.03%, is this important?

Can you please explain "Tracking Error" for everyone, including me.