95% of profits don't go toward jobs, salaries & investment, report finds + MORE Oct 6th

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
When you’re an acquisition-hungry newspaper executive preparing to go toe-to-toe with regulators in a country where media concentration has long been a dirty word, it helps to have an even scarier bad guy in the room beside you. And so, as Paul Godfrey, the CEO of Postmedia, made the rounds pitching his company’s deal to buy all of Quebecor’s English-language papers—175 titles in total, including the daily rivals to Postmedia’s papers in Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa—he did everything he could to conjure up the image of a multi-headed beast hell-bent on destroying Canadian journalism. Devil, thy name is Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo.
In presentations to journalists and analysts that were a dry run for the arguments he’ll be making to the Competition Bureau in the coming months, Godfrey repeatedly referenced “giant, foreign-owned, digital-only companies.” He also called them “behemoths of the digital world” and “foreign-based digital giants …

Canadian investors who bet on the British real estate market when the economy was shrinking are now seeing handsome returns

I enjoyed this quote from David Chilton in Jonathan Chevreau’s recent article so much I figured I’d lead off with it for this month’s dividend income update.
“Invariably, Chilton told me, the portfolios that had done the best over the long haul were of individual blue-chip Canadian stocks bought a long time ago and never sold. More often than not, they simply reinvested the dividends into more of the same stock.”
Jonathan Chevreau went on to write:
“I was reminded of this conversation a few weeks ago when an investor who had read one of my online pieces emailed me to remind me of the virtues of DRIPs, or dividend reinvestment plans. Not that I needed reminding. I use DRIPs in my own portfolio, both for individual stocks and for some ETFs. They’re practically idiot-proof, automatic, and cost-effective, since you incur no trading costs when the dividends are reinvested.”
Same approach here Jon…
For the past few years, I’ve bought and held many Canadian companies but only those companies (outside of owning Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs)) that pay dividends…

PHOENIX – Freeport-McMoRan Inc. is selling 80 per cent of its stake in a copper and gold mine in Chile for at least $1.8 billion.
The mining company announced the sale agreement Monday for the Candelaria-Ojos del Salado mine with Lundin Mining Corp. of Canada. In addition to $1.8 billion in cash, Freeport-McMoRan also said it will receive 5 per cent of copper revenues in any year over the next five years if the average price exceeds $4 a pound. It’s currently trading at just over $3 a pound. That could total as much as $200 million, the company said.
The sale, with an effective date of June 30, 2014, is expected to be completed by year’s end subject to approval by regulators.
Freeport-McMoRan said it expects to earn about $1.5 billion after taxes from the sale, excluding the additional fees.
Company executives said the deal is a step in its ongoing efforts to reduce debt, following the $3.1 billion sale of its Eagle Ford shale assets in Texas in June.
Lundin said the remaining 20 per cent of the mine will continue to be held by Sumitomo Metal Mining Co…

Companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index are set to spend $914 billion this year on share buybacks and dividends while skimping on capital investment and pay raises.