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Stock Picks for 2011

January 3rd, 2011

It’s a new year; and it is time to reveal our stock picks for 2011. As some of you might already know, there is a stock picks competition among Canadian bloggers. Each of us has to pick 4 stocks (American and/or Canadian stocks) in equal dollar amounts to sit for the duration of the year. No changes are allowed until the end of the year.

Here are our stock picks for 2011:

APKT – Acme Packet. It is our stock pick for cloud-computing. We believe that cloud computing is the future and Acme Packet is a strong play in this area. Their technologies enable service providers to deliver real-time multimedia sessions across IP network.

LVS – Las Vegas Sands. This company operates a couple of big casinos around the world, including Las Vegas, Macao and recently Singapore.

MELI – MercadoLibre. It is the e-bay of Latin America. We pick this stock as a play for Latin American market.

YONG – Yongye International. It is a Chinese biotechnology company that research liquid and powder nutrient compounds for plant and animal products. We pick this stock because we are bullish on agriculture sector.

You can follow live-performance of our stock picks in this link. You can see how our stock picks compared to S&P 500 and Nasdaq. We are going to include stock picks from other bloggers once they have revealed theirs.

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Stock Picks Update – March 2010

March 31st, 2010

It’s another end of the month. It’s time for an update of our stock picks for 2010. For those who don’t know, we participate in Canadian bloggers stock picks competition. Each participant has to choose 4 stocks in equal amount of dollars. We are not allowed to change our picks for the duration of 2010.

Here are the return of our stock picks year to date:

  • ASIA: –13.04%
  • CAGC: +77.89%
  • ITC: +5.59%
  • PEGA: +8.82%
  • Average return: +19.82%

For comparison, here are the return of popular benchmark, S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100.

  • S&P 500: +4.87%
  • Nasdaq 100: +5.68%

PS: You can follow the performance of our stock picks live on this page; and the live result of the competition on this page. Alternatively, you can click the links at the top of the page.

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ETFs and Index Funds in Our Portfolio

March 11th, 2010

We have just added a new page in our blog, called Portfolio. You can access it from the links at the top of our blog. This page contains the complete picture of our portfolio. As we mentioned in our previous posting, we use ETFs and index mutual funds. We also use dollar-cost averaging in our retirement account. Lastly, we try to keep our portfolio as simple as possible.

15% US Index

  • PowerShares QQQ Trust, Series 1 ETF (NASDAQ:QQQQ)
  • BlackRock Enhanced Capital and Income Fund (NYSE:CII)

15% Canadian Index

  • CIBC Canadian Index (CIB300)

15% Emerging Market Index

  • Claymore Canadian BRIC ETF (TSE:CBQ)
  • Market Vectors Brazil Small Cap ETF (NYSE:BRF)
  • Claymore/AlphaShares China Small Cap ETF (NYSE:HAO)

30% Fixed Income

  • TD Canadian Bond Index (TDB966)
  • iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bonds ETF (NYSE:HYG)
  • PowerShares Financial Preferred Portfolio ETF (NYSE:PGF)

5% REIT

  • Vanguard REIT ETF (NYSE:VNQ)
  • iShares Canadian S&P/TSX Capped REIT ETF (TSE:XRE)

Notes

  • For the US index, we basically invest in Nasdaq-100 and S&P 500. We use a closed-end funds (CII) for S&P 500 because of its dividend. Check also our posting here for a couple of different closed-end funds that replicates S&P 500.
  • Although Canada represents only 2% of the world GDP, we maintain a pretty high percentage of Canadian index. Why? It’s just because we live in Canada. Our “native” currency is Canadian dollar.
  • We know that CIBC Canadian Index might not be the best mutual funds. However, we have to keep it this way until end of next year.

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