All posts by Financial Independence Hub

Is 2019 gold’s year to shine? A Q&A with Harvest president & CEO Michael Kovacs

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Harvest Portfolios Group Inc. launched a global gold ETF yesterday (on January 15, 2019.) In the sponsored Q&A below, Harvest President & CEO Michael Kovacs explains why the company is launching the Harvest Global Gold Giants Index ETF (TSX: HGGG) now, the thinking behind this unique ETF and why the ETF aligns with the Harvest value strategy of conservative growth and income.

Why is Harvest launching a gold ETF?

We are not gold bugs, but we have been looking at the gold market for some time, especially gold company shares. They have been in a bear market for the better part of six years, so share prices are low. We see considerable value there.

A lot of the smaller companies are out of business because they couldn’t make money at these lower prices. Others that are struggling are being acquired by the big companies. Consolidation is a sign of a market bottom and while there is always downside risk in investing, we think a lot of that risk is out of the market.

So your focus is just the largest global producers?

Yes. If you’re a large firm you’re able to take advantage of the situation.  So we looked at the top global gold companies – the biggest by market cap – and are focusing on just the top 20. So if gold rises there is a lot of upside potential.

The other thing is that we’re in the late stages of the economic cycle. I don’t know whether we are in the ninth inning, or we have some extra innings ahead, but at some point US markets will start to weaken. Interest rates will top out and probably decline. We will see some decline in the US dollar as well. The US dollar has been on a tear and like any cycle it will probably come to an end.

At that point investments like gold make a lot of sense. There’s inherent leverage in the equities if gold prices rise.

Why is that?

In a simplified example, let’s say you are Barrick Gold Corporation producing gold at $800 an ounce. Gold is worth about $1,250 an ounce, so your margin is $450. If gold rises by $250 to $1,500, you’re increasing your profit margin by 55%. That goes directly to the bottom line.  So we think it is an opportune time to be looking at large gold producers.

Are you worried about inflation?

We do not see a lot of inflation. There may be some inflationary pressures, but the world has changed so much with technology. Continue Reading…

5 tips for new parents wanting to own their own home

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By Ernesto Mar Domingo

(Sponsored Content)

Owning a house may sound daunting. It can be an instant switch that can make you feel excited, nervous and really conflicted.

Although home ownership is a trial and error thing, it is a possible goal if you aim for it. One thing that can help you with this journey is a solid house-buying battle plan.

Like any other major purchases, you need help, research, and a strong resolve, but as a parent, you may be more motivated on this goal. After all, there is nothing greater than getting your own roof for your family.

Ready to embark on this ride to successful homeownership? Here are five tips to get you on your way.

1.) Know what you and your family need

We all have a certain dream house. While we may rather live in a castle or a glass house, we have our family to account for.

It is crucial that you choose with your brain and not your heart. To do this, you need to acknowledge what your family needs. You need to think of your lifestyle and look for a home that perfectly fits this kind of living.

Knowing what you need in a home is the first step in owning one. There are many kinds of houses: apartment, single-family home, condominium space or even a cottage in the countryside.

Aside from this, you also need to write down how many rooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and other utilities you need. Do you need a garden? A large garage? Balconies facing the sunsets? You should take all of this into consideration.

However, be realistic. You can’t exactly buy the best and grandest home you can imagine. Unfortunately, we have what we call a budget. In the end, choosing a house will still go down on how much you can afford.

2.) Save. Save. Save.

The biggest question in owning a home is glaringly challenging: how much can you afford?

But do not let this keep you down. With a grueling but fruitful savings regime and iron-clad perseverance, you can save up enough money for your dream home.

How?

You can:

  1. Create a budget plan.
  2. Give your savings a time frame to move things up.
  3. Cut down any unnecessary bills and payment.
  4. Earn larger amount money.

3.) Stick to your budget

The idea of maximizing all your income and savings sounds reasonable enough, right? Unfortunately,  it is not practical. Continue Reading…

Cheering for Daniel-san to crane-kick the FAANG stocks

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Figure 1: Share Price Performance, YTD 2018

By Jeff Weniger, CFA, WisdomTree Investments

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

FAANG. What an acronym. A FAANG stock, cobra logo on its uniform, is like the antagonist in the classic 1984 movie The Karate Kid.

The FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google-parent Alphabet) is unstoppable as he sweeps the leg and kicks the proverbial “value stock,” Daniel-san, in his broken ribs. No mercy. Miyagi, Daniel-san’s mentor, cannot help him.

At least that was the situation until a few months ago, when both Apple and Amazon reached valuations north of $1 trillion.

When I wrote about the top-heaviness of FAANG stocks in market capitalization-weighted indexes earlier this year, these five stocks alone accounted for about one-eighth of the U.S. stock market. Since then they have been cracked, with Facebook and Netflix taking the hardest hits.

Not many of us have issues with Netflix as an organization. But the other four FAANGs’ public reputations are on tenterhooks.

Amazon gives millions of small businesses sleepless nights, while its employees complain of poor working conditions. Want to talk about business risk? Wake up one morning to President Trump doing a Teddy Roosevelt trust-buster impersonation. You’re unstoppable until Daniel-san gets into the crane position.

Or look at the half-dozen reasons that reasonable people hate Facebook. One of them is probably our collective inability to prevent hundreds of images of our children from being plastered on its site, even if we are not “on Facebook.” If you don’t like it, tough luck. The BBC cites an Ofcom study finding that 70% of people do not think it is OK to share images of others without permission. It’s that other 30% that the rest of us have to worry about.

But there’s so much more.

Facebook is beset by accusations about “fake news” and political biases.  Also, how about your high schooler’s shrinking attention span and growing self-doubt as friends post solely their life’s highlights?

Stock market sentiment is a fragile thing: $408 billion is a lot to pay for a company that you and your next-door neighbour dislike.

And while we’re talking about aiding and abetting our society’s mass experiment with device-addicted zombie scatterbrains, there’s Apple. It sells the pipe to the smoker.

There is no shortage of people itching for Daniel-san to kick some of these companies in the face, in the interest of civil society. Our industry wants to talk about environmental, social and governance (ESG) screens. Great. Let’s talk candidates.

Google cannot be forgotten. The internet was supposed to be a utopia of free discourse.  Free discourse, unless the Chinese Communist Party’s censors give you heat.

When a company like Sears or Woolworth’s rolls over, most of us feel bad, nostalgic even. But there is something unsettling when the top of the S&P 500 is populated by companies that are dinner table pariahs.

If Daniel-san is doing that awesome crane pose and kicking some of these FAANGs across the face, there are value-investing “Miyagis” out there watching from the sidelines, giving a slow nod of approval.

Jeff Weniger, CFA serves as Asset Allocation Strategist at WisdomTree. Jeff has a background in fundamental, economic and behavioral analysis for strategic and tactical asset allocation. Prior to joining WisdomTree, he was Director, Senior Strategist with BMO from 2006 to 2017, serving on the Asset Allocation Committee and co-managing the firm’s ETF model portfolios. Jeff has a B.S. in Finance from the University of Florida and an MBA from Notre Dame. He is a CFA charter holder and an active member of the CFA Society of Chicago and the CFA Institute since 2006. He has appeared in various financial publications such as Barron’s and the Wall Street Journal and makes regular appearances on Canada’s Business News Network (BNN) and Wharton Business Radio.

 

Make Investing great again …. one day? Part 2

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By Aman Raina, Investment Coach, Sage Investors

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

In Part 1, I shared some thoughts on a recent report by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) outlining the challenges the financial services industry is having in getting Millennials to invest. The OSC report had a great opportunity to address those investing pain points, but like so many financial literacy initiatives, the messaging is not clear, consistent, and understandable. The report identifies solutions, yet they are separate and not integrated and use a lot of industry jargon that people just won’t connect with. They emphasize processes over results. What is the outcome we want Millennials to achieve with investing?

Another way?

In this post, I’d like to share from my experience as Investment Coach and as someone who works with people to develop their investing competencies, some approaches that I found have better motivated people and not just Millennials into becoming more engaged with investing. They address the pain points people have with expressed about investing which include; being scared of investing, feeling overwhelmed by the process, feeling paralyzed when trying to make a decision, and not knowing how to start and take that first step. These are my takes and perspectives. They are by no means the most definitive and all encompassing. 

The First Step: Define the investing path

The OSC report identified taking the first step in investing as a major pain point for people. For most people, after they have the epiphany that they should start growing their savings and invest, the most common series of events that occur include opening a brokerage account, buying some books or researching investing on the Internet or simply doing what their peers are doing. They buy a few stocks and some work out and some don’t and that’s where the fear pain point comes in.

The default for investing seems to be buying stocks, but does this really apply to everyone? In Part 1, I said that investing can be a very boring, repetitive, and time consuming process. Investing in stocks requires a major time commitment to analyze and evaluate stocks and managing the portfolio. For a lot of people, they really couldn’t be bothered to learn about investing because they have other more pressing priorities in their life … and that’s OK.

There are different investing paths we can take but ultimately we want to be on an investing path that compatible our life situation. If I don’t have the time to invest maybe I should consider working with a financial advisor, maybe use a robo-advisor service. Maybe buying a basket of Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s) is a better path than buying individual stocks. 

Why are you investing?

It is critical that at the people define right away the appropriate investing path they want to travel. It begins with defining what the end of the path looks like (Why am investing?) as well how the road will be travelled. Will I travel it alone (Do-It-Yourself) or with someone else?

Once you’ve been able to answer these questions and defined a path, then you will have defined and reduced your scope of investments that you will use and begin work on building your investing competencies. Why learn about investing in stocks when you will be investing in ETFs?

The investment industry doesn’t really take the time to work with people on defining their investing path because they established a default that people that come to them want to invest in stocks when in reality they may have no interest or tolerance for it. The starting point is such a difficult pain point for many because once they begin to follow an investing path that was not compatible with their life and quickly they fell off it and into a ditch, it becomes harder to emotionally get back at it. These type of conversations need to happen before opening a broker account or signing up for an investing course.

Building investing competencies

I view financial literacy to be more about building competencies, more specifically investing competencies. From my experience, the people that have this investing thing pretty figured out possess three competencies. My role as an Investment Coach is to help people develop these investing competencies. 

Competency 1: Education – Principles versus Formulas

Once we have defined an investing path, we can target our learning to focus on developing our investing competencies in those areas. If we are committed to investing in individual stocks then we should focus our education on learning that area. Most investing education focuses on the mechanical aspects of investing and those mechanics which involve formulas, spreadsheets, and math trigger people’s pain points of finding investing overwhelming. Continue Reading…

Make Investing great again …. one day? Part 1

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By Aman Raina, Investment Coach, Sage Investors

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

My motivation in starting my own practice to teach and engage people on investing revolved around financial literacy. I thought that if I could improve someone’s financial literacy, they will have a better chance at becoming a successful investor. I was always a big supporter of financial literacy programs, especially in schools. It made sense and I thought it was the right thing to do.

The reality is over the years I’ve learned and witnessed first-hand that while noble and done with good intentions, financial literacy programs just don’t work. A revolving door of programs, a lot of them government and industry sponsored have been rolled out over the years, starting out with enthusiasm and then just petering away in obscurity.

Here in Canada, we even have a Financial Literacy Commissioner , which acts and cheers Canadians into becoming more financially literate but to no avail. We even have a Financial Literacy Month late every year: So much effort, again all with good intentions, will be put into improving financial literacy but it just doesn’t seem to stick. 

Millennials scared of investing

So queue the latest attempt at cracking the financial literacy daVinci Code. A 42-page report commissioned by the Ontario Securities Commission, prepared by a dream team of consultants and personal finance thought leaders. The report attempts to answer why people, specifically Millennials, are not investing and what financial institutions can do to get them to invest. 

The report does a good job of capturing the pain points of why Millennials are not investing. They’re scared of investing. They feel overwhelmed by the process. They often freeze when trying to make a decision. They don’t know how to start and take that first step. I hear these thoughts very often from people I’ve worked with, and not just Millennials. 

The report outlines some broad solutions and strategies that financial institutions could adopt to better engage the Millennial cohort. The problem is the solutions are drowned out in consulting jargon and don’t effectively address those pain points that people are consistently complaining about. Often I’ve seen many programs rolled out that don’t articulate a clear, consistent message that speaks to the pain points. Here’s what OSC report came up with:

Make Investing a Priority

This is an attempt to address the pain point of establishing the first step into investing. The report believes that the first natural step to expose people to financial concepts is in the classroom. Teach the concepts early on, maybe high school and it plants a seed that will carry them into adulthood.

It seems like common sense. Ontario high schools have just started rolling out a financial literacy curriculum. The problem is it’s been done and it doesn’t work. A study published in the journal Management Science by John Lynch, a consumer psychologist at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School, compiled the results of more than 200 studies of financial literacy programs, adjusting for subjects’ family background and personality traits that had been ignored in the previous research. The study found that studying financial literacy has a “negligible” impact on future behavior and that within 20 months almost everyone who has taken a financial literacy class has forgotten what they learned.

Students don’t retain the information. The reality is the information during that period in our lives goes through one ear and out the other. It’s just not a priority…at that time. The report cites an excellent example by one of the participants, who said “at 15 years I’m thinking only 3 months ahead and when I got to 22 years, I was thinking years ahead”. Teaching financial literacy in high schools intuitively makes sense, but at that age, we’re not thinking about the future. The future for me at that age was thinking about what I was doing after school on Friday with my friends. I’m not a psychologist but I think Teenagers aren’t wired for it. Their brain is still developing. It’s only when people experience adversity (i.e. living on their own, managing their paycheque for now and the future) that motivations for improving their financial knowledge crystalize. 

Validation by Social Circle

The report suggests getting out to where Millennials are hanging out and engaging them about the importance of investing. The thinking is Millennials are more likely to follow what Continue Reading…