In the days of increased corporate governance and shareholder transparency, the annual shareholder meeting can often be a pretty good indication of how shareholder focused a company is. A recent book I read was A Weekend With Warren Buffet and Other Shareholder Meeting Adventures that provided a light and easy read into 22 shareholder meetings the author attended. Each of the annual meetings the author attended were evaluated based on 5 different items: educational value, entertainment …
Top 8 “Other” Ways to Save Money on Your Investments
As readers of investing and finance blogs, you have probably heard of the cardinal rules for saving money when managing your investment portfolio. These rules include such things as keeping buying and selling of securities to a minimum to reduce transaction costs, only buying low cost mutual funds or index funds, and not buying load mutual funds. These are all absolute musts when building an investment portfolio. I have been doing some more thinking about investment fees and have come up with …
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Impacts of Investing in the Most Profitable Sector of the S & P – Financial Services
First off, before we get into today's post, thanks to Credit Card Lowdown for posting this week's Carnival of Money, Growth and Happiness. There is an interesting "thought piece" over at the Money.com site that has a number of experts presenting their thoughts on what the future has in store for us. From a purely investment related perspective, and perhaps of most interest to us dividend investing folks is the piece on John C. Bogle about the future of financial services. In this blog, I …
BCE – A Sell Gone Way Bad
If you have been following my blog for some time now, you will know that I do not sell stocks very often. The stocks I tend to buy, the real blue chip, dividend increasing type of companies never give me much reason to sell. This has worked in my favor more often than not. However, if I look back at a post I did on one of my sales, here, I wrote about why I was selling the Canadian telecommunications company BCE. In that post I didn't hold much hope for the stock. Revenues were down, …
Insane Mutual Fund Fees
I was reading the latest edition of Canadian Moneysaver, which is a great magazine that is Canadian focused but would be of value to any type of investor from any country as it touches on many key investment and personal finance topics. In one of the sidebar boxes, they had a blurb about the fees paid to one of Canada's largest mutual funds: $291,117,000 Yup, you read that right. The Investors Dividend fund pulled in that much from fees. Ok, granted the fund has over $13 billion in …
2 Mistakes an Investor Can Make
I was recently surfin' some investing message boards and came across a great summary of the investment process. More specifically, it was a very simple description of the two kinds of mistakes an investor can make. It really hit home with me. When you filter the investment process down to its most basic level, there really is only two things that can make a good plan go completely haywire. The two kinds of mistakes one can make in investing are: 1) Not buying a company that one should …
