Academic who blew the whistle on China’s influence on Australia says Canada is in even worse trouble. Silent Invasion, Clive Hamilton’s ground-breaking book about China’s covert influence on Australian society, has been both applauded as an overdue exposé and criticized as an exaggeration of the problem. But when he finished the book, he received some unwanted validation of its central thesis: three Australian publishers declined to publish it, citing fear of retribution from Beijing or its allies. Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Canberra’s Charles Sturt University and former executive director of progressive think-tank The Australia Institute, eventually found a willing publisher, and now is working on a sequel dealing with similar issues in North America.
What he’s discovered so far makes him very concerned for Canada. He spoke with the National Post during a visit to Toronto. Some experts suggest the problem of Chinese soft-power interference is much more pronounced in Australia and New Zealand than here. I think it’s more of a problem in Canada. I was shocked. How to prepare the economy for the baby boom bust: Don Pittis. Population aging has often been described as a "demographic time bomb" especially in places like northern Europe, Japan and South Korea. In Canada too there has been long-standing anxiety, often expressed in media reports, that the aging baby boom generation would bankrupt our health-care system and saddle the rest of the economy with an overwhelming burden.
According to Statistics Canada, the oldest of the boomers turn 73 this year, and over the next decade all but the trailing edge of the boomers will turn 65. But rather than being gloomy, a group of Canadian experts in aging and the economy say the latest research debunks the doom-laden predictions, at least in this country. Instead, they say, Canada is one of the developed-world countries best placed to cope with an aging population.
But that optimistic outlook comes with caveats. Education spending at all levels is essential to maintain a healthy economy as boomers age. Live healthy, then drop off Failure to adapt. CBC.ca. Business owners Stefan Marten and Pearl Scott-Marten say they had to fight to get money back from their credit union after several of the couple's employees cashed their paycheques twice using increasingly popular banking apps that allow cheques to be deposited with a photo. In the Martens' case, the double deposits — known in the industry as double presentment — happened 17 times. They were tipped off by an employee who accidentally deposited the same cheque twice.
When they reviewed their bank records, they found the other double deposits, leaving them with thousands of dollars in extra payments. "It's been frustrating and nerve-racking," said Scott-Marten, who with her husband owns Marten Brewing Co. in Vernon, B.C. "When we were building the pub and the restaurant and the brewery, we were wearing a lot of hats and not having a full-time bookkeeper. We had to keep an eye on our accounts at the same time as doing everything else. Half exchanged as images Old banking, new technology.
Income tax + retirement savings Canada. Why old-fashioned bank drafts could leave you on the hook for big bucks. Ian Camacho was stunned when he saw the CBC News story about a couple's struggle to convince TD Canada Trust to replace a lost $846,000 bank draft. He was even more astounded when he read that TD, after the story drew international attention, backed down and released the couple's inheritance.
That's because Camacho, 63, a retired former COO of an investment brokerage — and a former risk manager at TD Securities — had pretty much the same experience when he was disbursing money from his late brother's estate. Camacho spent months trying to get TD to cancel a bank draft he bought for $17,475.57 US that he figured was lost in the mail when it never made it to his cousin in Singapore. "I bought [bank] drafts for everybody, thinking drafts are about as safe an instrument as you can get," Camacho said. Although TD Canada Trust eventually refunded Camacho's money, the issue demonstrates how poorly bank customers understand bank drafts.
Here are some important facts. Not as safe as you might think. Questionable crash indicator 'Hindenburg Omen' was triggered this week. Thursday's session saw the Hindenburg signal trigger at both the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, marking just the 10th time that's ever happened, according to Roberto Friedlander, head of energy trading at Seaport Global. There are three criteria for the Hindenburg signal to trigger, Friedlander said: First, the number of issues in a specific exchange hitting 52-week highs and lows must both exceed 2.2 percent of the number of issues in said exchange.
Second, the McClellan oscillator — a measure of market breadth based on advancing and declining stocks — must be negative that day. Third, the benchmark index for the exchange must trade above its 50-day moving average. On Thursday, the number of stocks hitting either 52-week highs and lows on both exchanges totaled more than 2.8 percent, Friedlander said. And the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 are both above their 50-day moving averages, confirming the Hindenburg at the NYSE and Nasdaq, respectively. When saving into an RRSP instead of a TFSA could cost you dearly. It’s the time of year when Canadians are bombarded with ads about filling up their Registered Retirement Savings Plans, or RRSPs.
Maximizing your contribution before the March 1 deadline is simply the wise and financially responsible thing to do, the message goes. But is that right? No one would quibble about the importance of saving for retirement. But whether you should put your hard-earned savings into an RRSP isn’t always obvious. In some cases, you’d be better off with a Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA), according to Ted Rechtshaffen, head of Toronto-based TriDelta Financial. RRSP vs. TFSA basics Both are personal savings accounts that help you boost your savings by sheltering them from tax. READ MORE: How much do you really need for retirement? Some of the differences: RRSPs have been around since 1957.
READ MORE: Why maximizing your RRSP contribution simply isn’t enough Money going in. READ MORE: Money123 – the easy way to be smart with your money. Save or pay down the mortgage? Rising interest rates are changing the math. If you have a little extra cash to throw around, is it better to take a bite put of your mortgage debt or fatten up your retirement savings? MORE: Sign up for Money123 That’s the eternal dilemma that faces many Canadians around this time of the year, when they have to make a decision about how much money they should put into their Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) before the March 1 deadline for getting a tax refund for the prior tax year.
READ MORE: How much do you really need for retirement? We did the math And if mortgage vs. RRSP wasn’t hard enough to tackle, the introduction of Tax-Free Savings Accounts (TFSAs) in 2009 has thrown a third option into the mix. The good news here is that you can’t really go wrong whatever you choose. Still, walking through a concrete example will highlight some parameters to help make your decision. Meet Joe and Jane Canuck READ MORE: Nest-egg inequality explains why women need to save more than men WATCH: Why RRSPs aren’t for everyone 1. 2. The math. Five investment facts and strategies you might not know about — from the pros.
Investors like to learn or should. Our company has noticed this (and benefited from it) as we have thousands of clients who are constantly questioning the market, the economy, individual stocks and, yes, even our research opinions. Along these lines, let’s outline five facts and investment strategies that might not be common knowledge to the average investor. Experts do not know everything Sure, professional investors and fund managers work full time on your portfolio, have access to companies’ management teams and subscribe to great data and financial streams for information, but the market is still bigger than them and we have seen lots of very smart fund managers make very big mistakes. One of the biggest mistakes is doubling down on a losing investment. Smart (and, we have to add, arrogant) investors sometimes tend to believe they are right and the market is wrong, so they buy more and more of a losing position.
Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. The “sell on news” phenomenon. I lost my entire savings ($10,000) trying to buy the dip from the stock market today. : personalfinance. Personal Finance For Canadians. Investing - personalfinance. Commontopics - personalfinance. $10K lost in a day: This 24-year-old Vancouver man put a big stock market bet on his credit card | CTV News. Buy low, sell high. That tired mantra was surely rattling around the brains of plenty of investors who saw opportunity in the whipsawing U.S. capital markets this week.
Some brave amateur day-traders even dared to wade in amid the volatility. What could possibly go wrong? Buying Monday’s rapid sell-off didn’t end well for one 24-year-old financial analyst in Vancouver who wound up losing his entire savings, and then some -- about $10,000 in total. He’d been dabbling in the stock market since July, and managed to pocket as much as $2,500, literally overnight, by spotting dips, then selling as indices roared to fresh record highs. When he noticed the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunging on Monday, a sell-off that would go down as the biggest daily point loss of all time for the basket of 30 major U.S. companies, he couldn’t resist. “I was mainly buying CFDs for the NASDAQ 100, Dow Jones and Google,” the investor, whose name is being withheld by CTVNews.ca, said in a phone interview. The Balance - Make Money Personal.
Why old-fashioned bank drafts could leave you on the hook for big bucks. Document forgery in financial industry more common than you'd think, past employees say. Employees in Canada's financial industry are speaking out about falsifying documents, telling Go Public that potentially criminal acts — like forging and photocopying customer signatures, adding initials to blank documents and using Wite-Out to conceal information — are more common than most people would think.
"It was easily 85 per cent of the back sales team doing it," says a former CIBC financial services representative, speaking about the last branch in which she worked, but adding that forging signatures on documents occurred in other branches she worked as well. CBC has agreed to conceal her identity. 'You feel pretty awful knowing that you could have caused some serious harm to [customers] all in the name of profit for a bank.' - Former CIBC employee She also says a financial adviser who handled wealthy clients asked her almost two dozen times to forge customer signatures for insurance on loans, telling her his clients would never notice extra charges.
Been wronged? Share Video. 'I feel duped': Why bank employees with impressive but misleading titles could cost you big time. Mike Black says he feels "completely betrayed" after trusting RBC Dominion Securities employees with impressive-sounding titles to manage his life savings, only to earn far below the market average for six years. "I worked 35 years at two jobs and saved up a considerable amount due to the fact that I didn't have a pension and would need money for retirement," said Black, who managed to put away nearly $1 million. An RBC "financial advisor" — "advisor" with an "o" rather than an "e" is important, but more on that later — invested his money in mutual funds, but when the portfolio performed poorly for three years and Black threatened to leave the bank, he was sent to an RBC "vice-president" who would manage his money. Black received a financial plan that claimed his nest egg would earn "about six per cent in annual interest" when invested in different mutual funds, mostly owned by RBC.
Been Wronged? Contact GoPublic@cbc.ca "I feel duped," Black said. Deceptive employee titles What's in a vowel? Bitcoin, pot stock crazes take root in Canada’s wild west. When Hive Blockchain Technologies Ltd. was looking to tap into the cryptocurrency fervour by going public, Canada’s junior stock exchange was the obvious choice. The bar for listing was low. Retail investors, used to the rise and fall of penny stocks, were eager for the next hot thing.
To help ensure a spectacular debut, Hive paid online promoters more than US$750,000 plus options to sing the stock’s praises. “Our top stock suggestion for the history books!” It all worked like a charm. Canada, a bastion of financial stability with some of the world’s soundest banks, has become a launchpad for the next big thing — from lithium stocks to 80 marijuana startups and now Bitcoin miners. Volatile Stocks Yet they can also open the door to blatant stock promotion, murky disclosure and spectacular volatility. Liberty One Lithium Corp., a Vancouver-based penny stock tapping investor demand for the metal used in electric car batteries, soared 250 per cent in October thanks in part to paid promotion. Record cheap electricity is transforming world energy markets as Canada struggles to keep up: Don Pittis. A new world record price for electricity set earlier this month signals a radical disruption in global energy markets — and Canada, whose economy was once powered by some of the world's cheapest electricity, will not escape the effects.
The new price, described by the news site Electrek as the cheapest electricity on the planet, was less than 2 cents per kilowatt hour, "part of a pattern marching to 1 cent per kWh bids that are coming in 2019 (or sooner)," the site declared. The record was not set in a place where energy is traditionally cheap. Nor is it from a traditional electricity source. Low bids The new low price of 1.7 cents per kilowatt hour was part of a contract between the Italian multinational ENEL Green Power and the Mexican government agency that administers the country's electricity wholesale market. It was just one of a series of low bids, including from Canadian Solar — the company founded by former Ontario Hydro engineer Shawn Qu — to make electricity. Pushing prices down.
Heightened market risks. Investing 101 | Wealthsimple. We have a sneaking suspicion you already know what investing is, but just in case, let’s define investing terms. Then we'll tell you how to do it. That is the super concise investing definition that comes courtesy of Merriam-Webster. Regardless of where you invest your money, you're essentially giving your money to a company, government, or other entity in the hope they provide you with more money in the future. People generally invest money with a specific goal in mind, for example, retirement, their children's education, a house — the list goes on. Investing is different from saving or trading. Generally investing is associated with putting money away for a long period of time rather than trading stocks on a more regular basis.
That's why many people choose to invest their money. Now we know you're eager to learn the investing basics given that you're reading this article. Things to consider before investing First things first. 1. 2. In polite terms, poop happens. Avoid lifestyle creep. Magazine | Wealthsimple. How to Make Money in Stocks: A Winning System in Good Times or Bad, Audiobook Trailer. Investor's Business Daily | Stock News & Stock Market Analysis - IBD. 20 Must Read Investing Books - StockTrader.com. 10 Trading Secrets Few Investors Know - StockTrader.com. When I first started trading at the ripe age of 15 years old, it was because I had lost over $3,000 of my roughly $5,000 in life savings from mowing lawns in the dotcom crash. The mutual funds my parents had invested me in had plummeted in value. As a result of this traumatic experience, I wanted to take charge of my financial future and not leave it in the hands of an actively managed mutual fund.
With no concept of trading costs, order execution quality, let alone a fear for losing, I sold the mutual funds, opened a custodian account at TD Ameritrade, and quickly started crushing the market. Over the course of three years I took my portfolio of several thousand and ran it up to nearly $100,000. I was the man. When I reached my peak portfolio value at age 18, I was a freshman in college with three monitors on my dorm room desk, skipping class and day trading for friends live. I then lost $72,000 in one trade and realized there was a lot more to trading than meets the eye. 10. 9. 8. 7. 6. Investing for Beginners - RBC Direct Investing. Free Investment Seminars - RBC Direct Investing. How to buy stocks in canada beginners.
The Basics of Investing - Canadian MoneySaver.