Urbancorp reminds us that our investments are at risk + MORE Aug 26th

Inspired by, and named after, a rugged amphibious airplane, Canso Investment Counsel is proudly contrarian

After ending yesterday higher, Canada's main stock index opened higher again on Friday, buoyed by the materials sector.

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Welcome to some new Weekend Reading friends.  Earlier this week I shared some simple all-in-one investing solutions to consider here; thanks to Rob Carrick for picking that article up in his Globe column.  I also provided some quotes to live by from a reader of this site.
Enjoy your weekend!
Rob Carrick found an interesting list of sites and calculators to answer some common financial questions.
Were you smart with your money this summer?   Probably not, I drank too many #craftbeer.  They taste so good though…
Scott Adams is not holding back when it comes the American election, stating “You say Trump lied to get some votes in the primaries? Snore. They all lied. He just did it better.”
How To Save Money offered a few money lessons from seven personal finance books.  I’m a fan of what Robert Brown, author of Wealthing Like Rabbits mentioned below:
“When it comes to budgeting, Brown believes that we should:  Pay yourself first and budget the rest…Whatever budgeting system you decide to use, always remember that the most important part of any budget is to balance the fundamentals…

HONG KONG – U.S. short-seller Andrew Left engaged in market misconduct by publishing false or misleading information about a Chinese property developer, a Hong Kong tribunal ruled Friday.
The city’s Market Misconduct Tribunal said in its decision that Left was reckless and negligent when his firm Citron Research released its report on Evergrande Real Estate Group in June 2012.
Citron is known for publishing online investigative reports about companies with the goal of profiting when their shares decline. Short sellers profit by borrowing shares of a company to sell, then buying them back after the price has fallen and pocketing the difference.
Citron’s recent targets include Canadian pharmaceutical company Valeant, which it compared to collapsed energy giant Enron. It’s also taken aim at chemical company Chemours, a DuPont spinoff it said was a bankruptcy waiting to happen.
The tribunal found that Left’s allegations that the company, now known as China Evergrande Group, was insolvent and used fraudulent accounting were not true…

Want to know why our grandparents hid money in their mattress? Because prior to 1967 any money saved was at risk. If a bank failed, those savings were gone. Wiped out. A big, fat zero. For them, it felt safer to tuck the bills into a hidey-hole and hope for the best.
But the feds realized this wasn’t a great strategy if they wanted to grow the nation’s economy. As a result, they created a Crown corporation: the Canadian Deposit Insurance Corporation (CDIC), with a mandate to protect all eligible deposits made by Canadians. (See more on this below under “What CDIC does.”)
Still, the line between what’s a saving and what’s an investment can become blurred—just ask the thousands of disappointed Urbancorp buyers, who watched virtually all their money disappear when the real estate developer declared bankruptcy earlier this year.
While these same buyers are currently fighting to get official representation at the company’s bankruptcy hearing, the question that’s left unanswered is whether a real estate purchase is an investment, a form of saving, or a human right?
What buyers can learn from the Urbancorp collapse »
What CDIC does
As a crown corporation, the CDIC contributes to the stability of the Canadian financial system by covering the potential loss of savings that are deposited at member institutions…