U.S. broker Charles Schwab’s launch this week of 8 new exchange traded funds (ETFs) could be a watershed event for providers and users of ETFs and mutual funds. What’s remarkable is that they have fixed their management expense ratios (MERs) even lower than the Vanguard ETFs and are allowing their ...

Now that Burlington Northern (BNI) is up 30% on a takeover by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), some people have sent in congratulations for recommending the stock in a May 4, 2009 blog post. Thank you very much but I didn’t see the takeover coming; I was thinking it could ...

Rate hikes by the Reserve Bank of Australia have led some analysts to wonder if the Bank of Canada will be soon following suit. David A. Rosenberg, Chief Economist & Strategist at Gluskin Sheff, is not one of them.

Despite making an average $500,000 a year (in today’s prices), the great novelist and playwright F. Scott Fitzgerald, never was able to put money aside. He and his wife thought the solution was to budget, to prepare a complete record of what they had spent running the household. But somehow, ...

The article in Saturday's Globe and Mail about business schools introducing oaths of ethical conduct for MBA graduates is worth reading. (Here's a link to MBA oaths from Harvard, Telfer School of Managements, and Richard Ivey School of Business: Sampling of Oaths.)

The highlight of my participation in the CSR Weekend at the Queen's School of Business was helping to judge the annual Nexen Awards.

In Thomas Hardy's masterpiece of a novel written in the 1880s,  The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge, the destinies of the two main characters, the tragic Michael Henchard and the triumphant Donald Farfrae, essentially rested on the outcome of their trading in commodities.

I'm in Kingston for 2 days participating as a speaker and panelist in the 3rd Annual CSR Weekend hosted by the Centre for Responsible Leadership at the Queen's School of Business. Here are two things I learned yesterday.

Today’s release of the Teranet-National Bank National Composite House Price Index shows a vigorous gain of 2% in Canadian resale house prices from July to August. The national house price index (based on six cities) has now risen four straight months (and likely will show further increases in September and ...

An International Monetary Fund (IMF) working paper released this month asks: Is the Canadian Housing Market Overvalued? The study concludes that house prices in Alberta and British Columbia are now only 8% overvalued while house prices in Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan are close to equilibrium (as of end of the second ...