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Investing: Prescription for profit
On March 22, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a landmark bill that gives roughly 32 million uninsured Americans health-care coverage for the first time. It was a historic moment for our southern neighbours, but here in Canada keen investors were watching something other than the explosion of punditry on CNN — they were watching stock prices in the volatile American health-care sector....
Emerging economies: Border crossing
It was just over a year ago that the stock market’s recovery officially began. Between March 9 and May 7, 2009, the S&P/TSX composite index jumped more than 2,800 points, and investors were thrilled that the dark days of the recession were over. Since then, however, the picture hasn’t been as rosy. In the following 11 months, the markets have climbed only 1,800 points, leaving anxious...
Income trusts: Trust temptation
Leslie Lundquist will never forget where she was the day Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced the federal government would tax income trusts. It was a Halloween afternoon in 2006, and the fund manager at Calgary’s Bissett Investment Management was sitting in a colleague’s office, having a casual, late-day chat. “Then my phone started ringing off the hook,” she says. When she heard the...
Why the banks want to be your Facebook friend
Ever wonder who’s checking your Facebook profile? Sure, there are probably the old standbys, like your high-school crush and your nosy co-worker, but you should be aware that there might be someone else checking you out: your banker. Financial institutions of all stripes have been scouring social-networking sites since the days when MySpace was all the rage; now they troll Facebook, Twitter...
Travel: St. John’s, Nfld
Compared to most of Canada’s major cities, St. John’s, Nfld., is tiny. And yet when the Juno Awards comes to town on April 15 to 18, visitors will be taken by the outsized personality of the place — not to mention the spectacular views of the Atlantic. Metric, Michael Bublé and tween hero Justin Bieber are set to perform at the event. But for pure entertainment, it’s hard to compete with...
Travel: Austin, Texas
From March 12 to 21, a huge crowd of bands, film nuts, movie execs and music lovers will converge in Austin, Texas, for the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) film and music festival. The event, now in its 27th year, is one of the city’s largest — more than 170,000 people pile into the growing desert locale to make deals, listen to copious amounts of music and explore this always-active college...
Weighing the cost of pennies and nickels
Inflation has hit the humblest of financial instruments. In the American government’s recent budget, the Obama administration revealed that pennies cost 1.8¢ to make, while nickels run 9¢ per coin. The U.S. treasury has spent $100 million more in some years than the currency is actually worth.
The rising costs of zinc and copper are to blame, so fashioning the coins out of a cheaper material...
Outlook 2010: Can this bull market continue?
Two months before the last federal election, Stephen Harper sat down with CBC’s Peter Mansbridge and uttered a line that he’d quickly regret: “I think there’s probably some great buying opportunities emerging in the stock market.” Many Canadians didn’t want to hear it; jumping into the TSX in October 2008, in the midst of the worst recession in decades, seemed ridiculous, to say the...
Bryan Borzykowski is a Toronto-based web and print writer, editor and blogger working mainly for business and entertainment publications. He regularly contributes to Canadian Business magazine, writes Metro Canada's weekly Audio Files music column and shares personal finance tips on Rogers TV's Daytime Toronto. He's also written for Maclean's, MoneySense, PROFIT, Chatelaine, Hello Canada, MSN Tech, Yahoo Finance and the National Post. He was recently nominated for five National Magazine Awards, winning one in an online category.
