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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: I think you have mentioned in the past that for a retired conservative income investor, it would be appropriate to hold roughly 15-20% of foreign equities.

My first question is regarding 15-20% of what...the total portfolio of equities and fixed income or of only the equity portion?

My 2nd question is regarding each company and where they are domiciled. For example, BNS has 44% foreign income (based on their annual report). Do you count BNS as 0% foreign or 44%? WSP has 79% foreign. Do you count it as 0% or 79% foreign?

I have done it both ways. Using only where the stock is based (ex: BNS = 0% foreign), I get 14% foreign content. Breaking each company down by the income percent by geographic, I get 22%. Both of these #'s are a % of my total portfolio.

However, if you take the percentage of foreign content divided by only the equities (ignore fixed income), I get 35% foreign.

Back to my question...15-20% foreign content = based on what?

Thanks for your help.
Steve
Read Answer Asked by Stephen on April 06, 2015
Q: I am seriously considering WSP from your Income Portfolio. Aside from the nice dividend, I like the more than five-fold revenue growth since 2008. But, I am concerned that EPS has actually decreased over the last 5 years. With this lack of accretion from previous aquisitions, how can I have confidence that the most recent acquisition will pay off? I am also concerned about the high P/E multiple of 23 times TTM earnings. The forward P/E of 16.8 is not too bad, if they can actually pull it off. I would appreciate your comments and your recommendation.

Thanks,
Hans
Read Answer Asked by Hans on December 29, 2014
Q: I am a retired Dividend-Income investor and need to bump up my asset allocation in the Industrial-Tech sector.

I have narrowed it down to WSP and ET from your Income portfolio. ET looks good but seems fairly illiquid. WSP appears to have better metrics than ET (P/BV, P/Sales, upside based on Globefund summaries), but the beta is a little higher. Additionally, RBC has WSP as overvalued.

I like to give a stock time to run and have a healthy dividend. What are your thought on buying WSP vs ET at this time?

Thanks for your great service.
Steve
Read Answer Asked by Stephen on November 14, 2014
Q: The markets have been quite strong the last few days, yet WSP is not participating. Today, for example, the stock was down while the market was up nicely. My concern is, if the stock is weak in a strong market, what happens when the market comes back down. For some reason, my impression is that this company is not well liked by investors. Any idea why and what might turn this around?
Read Answer Asked by John on October 22, 2014
Q: Hi 5i,

I was excited to see the new report on WSP but then got a bit worried when I saw the overall rating. A B- rating is only one above noninvestment grade from your previous comments. I was very surprised especially because in the past you seemed to have put STN and WSP comparable. Was it the recent acquisitions that is the main concern or was there something else that pulled it down?

Thanks!
Read Answer Asked by Wayne on October 01, 2014
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