I got to know the Motley Fool web site back in the mid 1990s as a great place to learn about investing in stocks. They taught me about avoiding high MERs and commissions and investing for the long run among many other useful lessons. However, they seem to have lost their way. The Fool message in the early days was clear: investing in indexes is a great approach, and for those who are willing to put in the work, picking individual stocks can be rewarding as well. They advocated investing for the long-term with low turnover (infrequent trading) to keep costs low and keep the focus on company fundamentals rather than short-term trading. The Motley Fool was a big part of my attempt to beat the market through stock selection and my ultimate decision to give up on this strategy and buy low-cost index ETFs. I even subscribed to one of their newsletters for a while. Since I cancelled my subscription, I received many “last chances” to come back. In just the past year I’ve received 63 p...

The Blunt Bean Counter says that when it comes to taxes, beware of any scheme that seems too good to be true. My Own Advisor runs down his list of favourite Canadian ETFs. Big Cajun Man isn't too happy with Air Canada's new baggage fees and offers an amusing way around them. Canadian Couch Potato looks at whether gold is really a hedge against inflation.

Typically, discount brokerages in Canada offer lower trading commissions for investors who have more than $50,000 in their trading accounts. However, there is usually some fine print that can lead to novice investors paying higher commissions than they expect. A good example is Qtrade’s Commission and Fee Schedule page. It says that online investors with accounts that total at least $50,000 qualify for $9.95 commissions on trades. But a footnote says “You must advise us of these multiple account relationships.” Just because you know that you have multiple accounts with your RRSP, RESP, and TFSA doesn’t mean that Qtrade knows. In practice, you have to tell them that all your accounts plus your spouse’s accounts should be grouped together. Otherwise, you could be paying $19 per trade instead of $9.95. I went through this misunderstanding years ago with BMO and recently a colleague overpaid on a few commissions with Qtrade. It pays to read the fine print related to any fees yo...

I won ’ t say that I think we’re in a gold bubble because an ounce of gold has lots of room to rise until it trades at historical prices for tulip bulbs or 100 shares of Nortel. Fundamental analysis points to a high value for gold as well. In addition to its ability to sit around in piles near armed guards, an ounce of gold has many uses: – paperweight – ring – shiny thing – very small barbell We have reason to believe that historical fascination in gold will persist. After all, modern inventions like computers and smart phones are in no way more interesting to look at than a shiny piece of gold.

There is a new app available that makes a game out of eating well and losing weight. This got me thinking about whether the same could be done for personal finances. Imagine a game that has access to all your account balances and can assess the state of your finances and whether the latest changes have been a step forward or a step back. Cleverly tying this into game play might provide the kind of incentive many people need to manage their money well. There are obvious security concerns with giving some app access to your accounts, but I think it is possible in principle to do this safely (possibly with the cooperation of banks). The app would only need account balances; it wouldn’t need the ability to make transactions. It would probably take several iterations of uninspired versions of such a game to finally get to something that would actually affect people’s behaviour, but I can see the possibility of this working extremely well.

Boomer&Echo have a guest post from the Blunt Bean Counter with a clear explanation of dividend taxation including what the various boxes on your dividend tax slip mean. Canadian Financial DIY calls on reporters of index returns to report total returns instead of stock returns without dividends. My Own Advisor explains why he drives an 11-year old car. Coincidentally, that’s the age of my car. Big Cajun Man makes fun of magical healing bracelets with his “Financial Balance Band”.

Recently, Dividend Growth Investor set out to determine whether stock buybacks benefit investors . The unsatisfying answer is that it depends. There is no computation that can be made today to determine whether a current stock buyback will be good for investors. When a company buys its own stock, they are essentially retiring shares. This means that each remaining share represents a slightly higher percentage of the company, but the company has less cash. If the company is fairly valued, this should be a wash for investors. However, if the company's stock is undervalued, the increased ownership of each share is a bargain and investors benefit. Conversely, if the company's stock is overvalued, the loss of cash from the share buyback is too great to compensate for the increased ownership represented by each share. A problem here is that determining whether a stock is overvalued or undervalued depends on knowledge of the future. We can look back at a share buyback fro...