Posts by Canadian MoneySaver

The Internet Era and Financial Information

Finance has always been a respectable career due to its contribution not only to people's retirement plans, but it also facilitates companies’ ability to raise capital to create jobs and improve society. Investing knowledge was often thought to be acquired only by professionals who graduated with prestigious college degrees from elite institutions, however, that perception is no longer true.

In recent years, accessing information is no longer a competitive advantage. Far gone are the days when investors had to email the authorities and wait two weeks until they can receive a company’s quarterly earnings or annual reports. Nowadays, investors just need to go to popular websites, such as SEC or SEDAR filings to instantly acquire original information at a cost of almost zero. In fact, financial information has been democratized not only in terms of cost but also its timeliness and ubiquity. For exam

Do you remember the infamous Rogers outage on 8 July 2022, also known as Red Friday – when a routine maintenance update backfired and led to a shutdown of services for customers across Canada?

A coding error in a routine maintenance update deleted a routing filter in its distribution routers, Rogers later told the CRTC. This caused the routers to propagate “abnormally high volumes of routes throughout the core network,” leading some network equipment to exceed capacity and fail.

Like many customers, I had no idea what was going on that morning when I woke to find my phone had no coverage. Was our wi-fi network down? To test that theory, I went outside, but my phone still didn’t work.

There I met a neighbour who warned me to carry cash if I planned to buy anything. He had tried to fill his large car with gas, but his credit card was not acce

I was asked a question by a reader of my blog a couple of weeks ago. It was regarding the potential for a sideways market emerging after the current bear trend ends, rather than the emergence of a new bull market. As it happens, more than 20 years ago, in the January 2001 issue of Canadian MoneySaver, Bull, Bear or Neither? (canadianmoneysaver.ca), I wrote an article that was one of his most important market observations at the time. The article, entitled “Bull, Bear or Neither”, appeared to be among the first to suggest the end of the mega bull market that, at the time, had been the 1982 to 2000 bull. I postulated the potential of a choppy sideways trading range for the coming decade. My observation at the time was that the US markets had experienced several prolonged sideways periods over its 100+ year history. These choppy sideways periods occurred after each significant bull market.

Going back to the early 1900s, there have been four major periods of sideways

Ellen Roseman speaks with Hamish Khamiza, President and CEO of SparxTrading, an online media company which publishes digital investment content for DIY investors.  They chat about online investing, online brokerages, dividend re-investing and upcoming trends.

The two most common misconceptions about cybersecurity are;

1. They are not targeting me and

2. I am well protected.

So now that we established this article is for you, let’s dive in. For the record, I will take some shortcuts and make some generalizations to make things simpler for everyone, sorry for the cybersecurity purist this may offend!

First, let’s start with why criminals (the hackers, we refer to them in the industry as “bad actors”, but for today we will call them what they are, criminals) are trying to get to you. The vast majority of the time, the answer is simple: money (there is a thing called hacktivism, where hackers are using their “talent” for one social cause or another, but those will typically be more focused on attacking nations or large companies).

The two main ways they make money are fairly simple:

1. They take your (from your bank account, credit cards…)

2. they take your data and sell it to someone else.

In the first part of this three-part series, we examined the basics of ESG investing. To reiterate, the E in ESG stands for environmental issues such as pollution and climate change, while the S represents a company’s social attitudes as in how it treats its employees, its customers, and its investors. Finally, the G for governance looks at issues such as boardroom diversity, executive compensation, conflicts of interest and shareholder rights.

Ellen Roseman chats with Shaun Maslyk, CFP and host of the podcast "The Most Hated F-Word" about our money-stories and how they affect our relationship with money. He mentions Dr. Brad Klontz and the four money-scripts or subconscious beliefs that we develop as young children about money.