Your Broker and IPOs he offers: easy money?

A reader (and the owner of www.hungrytable.com an Ottawa restaurant review website), gives us an excellent suggestion regarding online brokers and IPOs. He says that if your Canadian online broker, such as TD Waterhouse, offers new issues of common shares (and notification via email) you should look into acquiring them and them selling them within several weeks. Because of the publicity of the IPO, there will be an increase in trading volume and the share price will most likely rise a couple of percent in the first weeks. He also says that he personally hasn't paid any commission fees on the purchase.

save some time when organizing meetings: Meeting Wizard!

As I was trying to coordinate times for a meeting with fellow Ottawa financial bloggers, I came accross Meeting Wizard, a free online meeting organizer which lets you propose multiple dates to your attendees and see the summarized responses in a nice graphical UI. It also takes care of sending reminders and a confirmation email for the final date the organizer has chosen.

So I gave it a quick try and instead of wasting tons of emails trying to settle on a date, it took a very short amount of time and we had the meeting all setup.

Here's the visual summary (I've removed dates and attendees for privacy reasons):

update on crazy stock gambling: +571% !!!

Although I had sold almost all my non-RRSP stocks to pay my mortgage faster, I had kept a few stocks that I thought might do well (picks from the Stock Pickers Digest newsletter). Interestingly enough, one of them (CME) has done incredibly well: +571% so far. As always, I'm not sure when I'll sell. I figure that if I get a ten bagger, I should sell and not look behind. And as usual, I didn't put enough money in to retire. If I look at the others stocks I've got, then my speculative non-RRSP portfolio is up 62.4% since I bought the stocks in March of this year.

This is pure gambling for fun, not stock picking advice!

If you're looking for safe advice, why don't you look at the Couch Potato Portfolio.

To hedge or not to hedge? (US$ going "bankrupt"?)

A lot has been said about using currency hedged ETFs or not (for example the canadian XSP from iShares Canada which is hedged but has a higher MER than the american unhedged IVV - chosen by Canadian Capitalist).

My personal choice is to pay the extra MER which basically equates paying an insurance against currency fluctuations. Using an ETF to do that still results in much lower MERs than typical mutual funds.

Yes, currency fluctuations even out historically, but what if the situation is bad when you retire and you need the money? Worse: what if the US dollar sinks for the next 50 years? Although very unlikely, that could happen if they keep spending hundreds of billions every year on wars for example ...

newborn in Ontario: paperwork simplified!

Thanks to my friend George, I went to the site http://serviceontario.ca/newborn instead of filing all the papers.

This is a very convenient site where you can register the birth (although you need to print and mail that statement), get birth certificates and get a SIN all in one operation. They take care of automatically starting the next step when one is done.

Now I'm off to researching RESP (I need to put my son's great-grand-father gift somewhere useful!).