Investing

For those who bank with CIBC, please consider making a trade on December 4 2013, to show your support for children across Canada!

CIBC Miracle Day is an employee-driven fundraiser that started at a Wood Gundy branch in 1984. Every year, on the first Wednesday in December, CIBC’s wholesale banking employees and participating CIBC Wood Gundy Investment Advisors donate their fees and commissions to help kids in need.

Since its inception, Miracle Day has raised $69 million for children’s charit…

At today’s price of $41.75 a share the company is valued at $22.7 billion. Is Twitter really worth $22 billion?

This 7 year old company has yet to be profitable but investors have driven up the stock price by over 60% in 12 days. On Thursday November 7, 2013 Twitter became a public company, and its share price skyrocketed. The initial share price was set at $26 but closed at $44.90 on its first trading day, a 73% increase!

Should you go out and buy shares in Twitter now? I had the honor of bei…

Ever hear Warren Buffett talk about a castle and moat? Why does he look for companies with large moats? Mary Buffett in her book "The New Buffettology” describes the castle concept quite nicely:

“When explaining the concept of the competitive advantage, Warren (Buffett) likes to use the castle-and-moat analogy. Pretend that the business in question is a castle and the surrounding the castle is a protective moat we’ll call its competitive advantage. The competitive-advantage moat protects the ca…

A habit is something that a person does often in a regular and repeated way. There are certain habits that can ruin your portfolio.

Make sure you aren’t following these habits:

1. Paying too much in fees. Mutual fund fees can ruin your portfolio. Always know how much you pay in fees. In a previous blog post I showed you how to figure out the true cost of owning your mutual funds.

2. Buying high, this applies both to stocks and mutual funds. When the stock market is riding high, everyone and t…

Do you know which of the 20 most valuable brands in the world pay dividends? Interbrand recently announced their list of the 100 most valuable brands in the world. I thought it would be interesting to view the top 20 in the list and see which ones pay a dividend. After all dividends are the key to successful investing.

Here are the top 20 brands (dividend payers in green):

1. Apple
2. Google
3. Coca-Cola
4. IBM
5. Microsoft
6. GE
7. McDonald’s
8. Samsung
9. Intel
10. Toyota
11. Mercedes-Benz
12. BMW
13. Cisco
14. Disney
15. HP
…

Since 1964 Warren Buffett has been able to increase the book value of shares in his company by 586,817%. Therefore I believe he is the best person to answer the following question:

Question: If value investing is so easy, why isn't everyone doing it?

Answer:

"I can only tell you that the secret has been out for 50 years, ever since Ben Graham and Dave Dodd wrote Security Analysis, yet I have seen no trend toward value investing in the 35 years I've practiced it. There seems to be some perve…

The P/E ratio is one important factor that could save you from making bad investing decisions. Here is your quick guide to Price & Earnings and the P/E ratio. I’m going to keep this simple, let’s begin with the only two definitions you will need for today:  

Price: this is the stock price  

Earnings: this is earnings per share; earnings are the amount of profit that a company produces

Let’s take a look at a fictional company XYZ:

Company XYZ’s stock price is $50, therefore Price …

When you are investing your hard earned money, you want to make sure that you are not putting that money at excessive risk. One way to avoid too much risk is to invest is large well established companies, these are companies that:

• are leaders in their industry
• are virtual monopolies with very little competition
• will continue to provide products and services for the next 25 to 50 years

Why risk your money by investing in small companies that may not be around in the future? Focus on some …

Is it better to start now, or wait a few years before you start investing? It is definitely better and more profitable to start investing sooner than later. The longer you invest the more you will earn, and reduce your risk over time. It takes time to grow your investments; this isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. The longer your time horizon the better it will be for you to ride out any downturns in the economy. Downturns do happen and sometimes can last for months or years; therefore it's in your a…

Imagine earning $385,024 each year for the rest of your life, and getting annual increases too! I’ve written many times about the power of dividends especially increasing dividends.

Now let’s take a look at a real-life example with Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart became a public company on October 1, 1970 and started issuing shares at $16.50 each. Since then the company has had eleven 2 for 1 stock splits. Basically this means that if you purchased 100 shares in 1970, today you would own 204,800 shares:

19…