90 days – 1.75% + MORE Jan 22nd

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(Getty Images / Peter Dazeley)
Last year I had a steep learning curve. I spent hours in Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant courtrooms—at times with a newborn—as I desperately tried to hold my dead-beat tenants accountable. It took me months. Cost me hundreds of dollars in court fees, and in the end I learned the hard way how to evict a tenant from hell.
It all started a few weeks before I was due to give birth to my second child. I rushed to find a tenant and, as a result, I made one of the biggest mistakes a landlord can make: I didn’t do my due diligence. Instead of calling all references and verifying all financial information, I glossed over the references, accepted spotty work histories and let the couple move in to the apartment in our west-end raised bungalow.
The result? Almost $10,000 worth of damage, a pile of mail that literally stood three-feet high and two feet wide, feces smeared on the walls and floor, and the pleasure of paying cleaners hundreds of dollars just to get the apartment ready to show…

MONTREAL – Richelieu Hardware (TSX:RCH) says its net earnings attributable to shareholders increased 20 per cent to $15.9 million in the fourth quarter on higher revenues both in Canada and the United States.
The Montreal-based company said it earned 80 cents per diluted share for the period ended Nov. 30, up from 64 cents per share a year earlier.
Revenues grew 14.5 per cent to $177.8 million.
Sales to manufacturers increased 14 per cent to $152.3 million while sales to hardware retailers and renovation superstores grew 16.4 per cent to $25.5 million.
Canadian sales increased 10.2 per cent to $127.7 million, mainly from internal growth.
In the U.S., revenues grew 18.2 per cent to US$44.8 million. They were up 27 per cent when translated into Canadian dollars.
For the full year, Richelieu’s net earnings attributable to shareholders were $52.4 million or $2.63 per diluted share. That compared with $46.4 million or $2.22 per share in 2013.
Revenues grew more than 10 per cent to $646…

(Tim Pelling/Getty Images)
Investors can win with dividend stocks and they do even better with value. But triple plays are possible when the two are combined and momentum is added into the mix.
My search for triple play stocks started this week with Canadian dividend payers. Not only do dividend stocks provide income, but they also tend to outperform over the long term.’
While dividends are nice, I’m always on the lookout for a good deal. That’s why I opted for stocks with a combination of low price-to-earnings (P/E) and low price-to-book-value (P/B) ratios.
Last, but not least, in an effort to avoid leveraged oil firms plumbing new lows, I stuck to stocks trading near their 52-week highs.
The five firms that pass my triple play test are presented below, in order of decreasing market capitalization (or size).
Toronto-based Fairfax (FFH) leads the list with a market capitalization of $13.6 billion.  The insurance conglomerate also happens to be the most expensive of the bunch with a P/B of 1…

Teck has stumbled before under Don Lindsay, narrowly avoiding catastrophe in 2009 when the financial crisis and a temporary crash in commodity prices left it with insufficient capital to pay off debts