Posted in Credit, Investing, Stocks, REITs on Apr 9th, 2008 2 Comments »
I’ve been under the impression that after the collapse of the residential real estate market, the commercial real estate market will follow.
My assumption is three fold:
1. Unemployment is much higher than is being reported.
2. Consumer spending will drastically slow down.
3. There will be a credit crunch regarding mortgages for commercial lending
Posted in Investing, Stocks on Aug 19th, 2007 1 Comment »
The past few weeks have certainly been pretty volatile in the stock market. After hitting new highs for the past several months, all the market indices plummeted on July 17th. Its now mid-August and the markets have dropped significantly since then. Not only the US stock markets, but markets all over the world have dropped in unison. Last Thursday (August 16th) saw a retest of the lows created earlier in the year. On that day mutual funds recorded outflows of $19.9 Billion dollars as nervous investors pulled the plug on their investments. As mutual fund managers have to give money back to their investors, they often need to liquidate their positions at the worst time. The bad stocks have dropped the most, so in order to raise the most capital, the sometimes sell the good stocks that have appreciated a lot. This caused huge drop in almost every asset class.
Posted in Investing, Stocks on Jul 30th, 2007 1 Comment »
Value stocks typically return a dividend between 2.5% to 10% depending on the industry they’re in and the prevailing market conditions. Growth stocks typically do not provide a dividend, and if they do its usually less then 2.5%. They usually retain their earnings for future growth. Many stock analysts and investors believe that returning money to shareholders means that the management is running out of ideas on how to grow the business and avoid dividend paying stocks like the plague! Personally I’m partial towards dividend-paying stocks. I especially like the Canadian Income Funds that invest in Oil and Gas.
