Author Archives: Avrex

He’s got the largest TFSA …but did the investment qualify?

The Financial Post believes they’ve found the individual with the largest TFSA account in Canada. The article describes how the individual has an amazing $172,382 in his TFSA account. The problem is, did this investment qualify for inclusion in the TFSA? The financial planner in the article, purchased the penny stock Fannie Mae (FNMA) (OTCBB). […]

Canadian Brokerages – Options Commissions

The June 2013 issue of MoneySense magazine looked at Canada’s Best Discount Brokerages. MoneySense partnered with Surviscor to look at the Canadian Discount Brokers. It compared the brokerages, in a chart, on several categories, including stock commissions and option commissions. In their chart of the 14 brokerages, 12 brokerages tied for the ‘lowest’ option commissions […]

How to successfully bid on Priceline Hotels

My wife and I just completed a vacation of several southern US cities. The biggest travel cost that you incur is accommodation. I decided to use Priceline to book our hotels for this vacation. I’m glad I did. I believe Priceline offers tremendous savings over other booking websites (like Expedia, hotels.com, etc.) Our hotel needs […]

Canadian REITs – The Vanguard REIT ETF brings cost relief

In Canada, our REIT ETF choices have been limited. The iShares REIT product is ‘the gorilla’ in this arena with Assets under management (AUM) of approximately 1.4 billion dollars. The younger BMO REIT ETF has been steadily growing, but only has about a quarter of the assets that the iShares product has. These two companies […]

Are you invested in Mutual funds? Congratulations, you’ll now be working an additional 3 years.

[November is “Financial Literacy month”. Bloggers are participating in the “Blog for Financial Literacy” campaign by sharing their ‘best financial tip’ with their readers.] Many investors don’t realize it, but the high Management Expense Ratios (MER) of Mutual Funds are slowly eroding their personal life savings. Let’s compare the characteristics of the two main investment […]