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Investment Q&A

Not investment advice or solicitation to buy/sell securities. Do your own due diligence and/or consult an advisor.

Q: 5i is my best source for Canadian investment information so I naturally turn here for a (possibly) difficult-to-answer question.

A guest on today’s BNN Market Call mentioned as an alternative to Shopify a small, growing company that sounded like “Hop-spot” or “Hot-spot”, but didn’t show or indicate a stock symbol. I searched for the symbol using a range of what I thought are plausible alternative spellings but turned up nothing.

With your encyclopedic grasp of what’s available to Canadian investors, could you point me in the right way to this (probably small-cap) stock?

Thanks
Read Answer Asked by Steve on October 30, 2017
Q: With the major devastation of some cities in the Southern USA in late summer I invested in Norbord as they have several plants in the vicinity manufacturing building materials. I invested in Norbord in August and the stock price started to climb in September until 2 things happened:
a fund managed by BAM had a secondary offering of Norbord shares owned by that fund at a selling price of $42.50 and TD downgraded the stock after upgrading it the week before. At approximately the same time Norbord increased it's dividend from $.50 to $.60. With the secondary offering I suspect that a number of the fund holders sold the Norbord shares realizing a quick profit but driving the market value down because a large number shares becoming available (approximately 4-5% of the issued shares). I expected a quick recovery but the TD downgrade seems to have affected the market value. Why did TD downgrade this stock? I think this is an excellent opportunity to buy this stock but I have not been able to find out why the downgrade by TD. Thanks
Mike
Read Answer Asked by Michael on October 30, 2017
Q: Hello Peter/Ryan & Team,

I do need to apologize to everyone about CLS. I decided to finally buy it so naturally the 12% decline the next day would happen. But I have smartened up and only started with a quarter position.

And you would think that I should start to smarten up about buying into negative momentum, but with that said, do you think I should be adding in the next couple months to get to a full position or wait off until momentum improves?

Thank you for all you do.

Wes
Read Answer Asked by Wes on October 30, 2017
Q: in an earlier question i asked about tax loss selling for rrx and you mentionned pxt and vet. I should have mentionned that I already own whitecap. in doing a little further research I noticed in another question you answered that you said whitecap could be a reasonable replacement for RRX. Wondering if this is still true and whether it makes a big difference which one is chosen
thanks for your great help
Joe
Read Answer Asked by joseph on October 30, 2017
Q: Hi 5i
Thanks for the service

I purchased TV recently seeing the momentum but clearly that has stopped.
With a purchase price higher than latest close and technical view of chart shows price breaking down, does one get out and wait for some pain to pass?

Chart movement indicates it could easily get back to $1.10; offering me a significant loss on initial purchase.

Would you please add some thoughts on the negative price action for this name?

Dave

Read Answer Asked by David on October 30, 2017
Q: Since 5i is not averse to the preferred shares of split corps, here are some notes that have been gleaned from the Quadravest website, listing the ticker symbols of several (not all) of their preferred shares and the approximate dividends:

LFE.PR.B - 6% dividend with no suspensions ever since 2006
DFN.PR.A - 5% dividend with no suspensions ever since 2004
XTD.PR.A - 5% dividend with no suspensions ever since 2009
BK.PR.A - 5% dividend with no suspensions ever since 2006

FTU.PR.B and XMF.PR each suspended dividends for nearly a year during 2009-2010.

I believe DFN.PR.A has the longest history of paying dividends and also the most diverse holdings. Its chart since inception is mostly breathtakingly level, though it lost nearly 30% in 2009-2010.
Read Answer Asked by Jerry on October 30, 2017
Q: I am an avid reader on the Q&A daily and find I get most of my thoughts clarified by using the history of the questions. A great service. But I am trying to sort out which investments are best held in an RRSP for my personal situation. I am 67 ,retired with no pension and live on the income from my investments which is sufficient to maintain my lifestyle. I do not believe in owning interest bearing investments because of the low yield/risk relationship and tax treatment. I prefer to buy preferreds from blue chip companies like the banks as my "fixed income" because of the obvious tax treatment. I also like covered call ETFs like ZWB, ZWC etc. for the income and downside risk mitigation. I do not invest in US stocks preferring to diversify into the USA using Canadian companies that benefit from their big US presence(TD etc.). It seems to me that given this situation, holding anything in an RRSP has a tax disadvantage. Any tax on dividends earned in the RRSP is delayed until I take the money out but then I will be taxed at the full rate instead of enjoying the "discounted" tax rate on dividends. ROC is even worse because in a non-registered account I effectively pay capital gains when sold but the ROC would be fully taxable when I take it out.
If my reasoning is correct, it really does not matter much what is kept in a registered vs. a non registered fund. Can you tell me if I am looking at this correctly?

Thanks
Don
Read Answer Asked by Don on October 30, 2017
Q: Can you please provide your opinion on a long term hold of Hamilton Thorne ($HTL.v) from this level? Currently the company includes the original IVF equipment business, toxicity testing business, and a European full service distribution business.

The company has telegraphed its intention to continue growth by the following:

1. Making meaningful acquisitions with active discussions underway;

2. Organic growth by expanding into new geographies and expanding the breadth of product and service offerings from both internal R&D and adding new 3rd party suppliers on the global platform; and

3. Cross selling between all of the integrated businesses.

It is also at the ~$100M market cap (fully diluted) where both new institutional and retail investors alike will start to take notice.

TIA,
Meredith
Read Answer Asked by Meredith on October 30, 2017
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