1stmilliondollar.net

A financial journey to our first million dollar

Posts Tagged ‘investing’

Free Investment Seminar from TD Waterhouse

June 2nd, 2010

We just learned that TD Waterhouse provides free seminars every month all across Canada. The topics vary from introduction to investing to fundamental analysis and even options investing. Unfortunately, all those seminars are offered on weekdays during lunch hour. We hope that they will offer similar seminars during the weekend as well.

If you are interested attending these seminars, you can check the schedule (see links at the end of this posting). Then you can call 1-877-TDW-RSVP (1-877-839-7787) for reservation.

Links

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Posted in Learning

Tags: free investing Learning seminar td

Are We Gold Bug?

May 28th, 2010

As we saw lately, gold price has been soaring. It is not traded at above $1,200 per ounce. Are we (we = 1stmilliondollar.net) a gold bug? Are we buying gold?

We used to like keeping money in gold. However, we have changed our strategy since last year, i.e. not to invest in gold at all. Why? First of all, we read Warren Buffett’s quote about gold:

[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head

Basically he is saying that why invest in something that has no utility. Gold will do nothing for us. This quote keeps us thinking, why we are investing in gold then.

The second reason is because gold is just a currency. The value will never go up or down. It is just our dollar that goes up or down in value. If we can buy a car with 1 bar of gold today; we should be able to buy the same car with 1 bar of gold in 20 years from now. The price of the car might be double or triple; but in terms of value, it is just the same.

As summary, we don’t invest in gold at all these days. However, we invest in some gold companies indirectly through Canadian index. The two largest gold mining companies in the world are Canadian companies; and they are included in Canadian’s S&P/TSX index.

(Picture is from Mykl Roventine @ flickr.)

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Posted in Investment

Tags: bug dollar gold inflation investing tsx warren buffet

ETF and Relative Strength Investing

April 29th, 2010

We wrote about Relative Strength Investing (RSI) a couple of weeks ago. We are currently developing a system that uses Relative Strength Investing to help us decide which sectors or countries leading the market. We will disclose the detail about this system in our future posting. What we can say now, it is our hobby project; and we are doing it in our spare time.

Today, we tried to run our RSI system against our ETF database. Here is the list of ETFs that are leading the market in the last 5 days.

1 day	TAN: +5.72% ICF: +4.6% RWR: +4.54%
2 day	ICF: +4.98% VNQ: +4.83% RWR: +4.74%
3 day	GDXJ: +2.65% XBI: +1.99% IHF: +1.84%
4 day	ICF: +2.4% RWR: +2.32% VNQ: +2.29%
1 week	GDXJ: +4.35% ICF: +3.96% VNQ: 3.64%

Note that we only choose ETFs with the following criteria:

average volume at least 100K daily
no leveraged ETF is included

As you can see, TAN is leading the market today with +5.72% increase. For those who don’t know, TAN is an ETF that invests in solar-cell related companies.

If we go back to 2 days range, we can see that ICF is leading the market with a total of +4.98% increase. ICF is an ETF that invests in large and liquid REIT (Real Estate Income Trust).

Based on a table like above, we can see which sectors or countries are leading the market. For example, we can easily identify that REIT dominates the market this week.