Alphabet shares follow in Amazon’s footsteps and top $1,000 + MORE Jun 5th

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If you don’t know them personally, you’ve read about them: the woebegone residents of Vancouver, Toronto, and the surrounding areas of those two cities who bought too much house. Some of you pity them; so unfair their time to buy arrived at the frothiest stages of a property bubble. But I bet just as many of you are disdainful. You ask: Why the hell don’t these people rent?
Hold onto those competing impressions. We will be coming back to them.
The economy just survived a scare. For a few weeks in May, Home Capital Group Inc. looked like it would become the first Canadian financial institution to collapse since the 1990s. But HomeCap still is with us, and the chatter that its troubles herald a housing meltdown has subsided. “From the very beginning, we have seen this as a Home Capital issue as opposed to a broader issue,” Finance Minister Bill Morneau told the Globe and Mail on May 12.
Home Capital, a subprime lender, is too small to cause much trouble on its own. (Its mortgages account for about one per cent of the total market…

Deborah Fuhr, partner, and co-founder of ETFGI, an independent research and consultancy firm based in London, is one of the world’s most respected voices on ETFs. Fuhr has over 20 years of experience, with 15 years focusing exclusively on ETFs. MoneySense caught up with Fuhr during a recent visit to Toronto to get her perspective on the evolving ETF market and how it’s changing the way investors manage their money. 
MoneySense: The way people manage their money has changed dramatically in a very short time. ETFs have cut costs while the new and growing segment of robo advisors is giving investors access to help that they never had before. How do you expect this trend to evolve?
Deborah Fuhr: I think that millennials are embracing the use of automated or robo advice, but more importantly, and a related trend, many people close to retirement age are using robos to do their homework and to become educated such that they can have informed conversations with financial advisors…

TORONTO — The Toronto Real Estate Board says home sales in the Greater Toronto Area plunged last month by 20.3 per cent as prices continued to climb.
The board says the average selling price for all properties in May was $863,910, an increase of 14.9 per cent from the same month last year.
Sales of detached homes, which had an average selling price of $1,141,041, fell by 26.3 per cent in the GTA.
The data captures a month during which the Ontario government implemented a 15 per cent tax on foreign buyers in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, a fast-growing region stretching from the Niagara Region to Peterborough, Ont., retroactive to April 21.

Greater Toronto’s real estate market outlook 2017

The measures are intended to temper rapid price growth that has given rise to concerns that Toronto has become increasingly unaffordable.
They are also aimed at preventing or mitigating the damage that could result from a housing correction if one were to occur.
The board said in a statement Monday that the effects of Ontario’s housing changes have yet to be seen…

CBC.caTREB May numbers show a soft month for Toronto real estate marketCBC.caHas the searing Greater Toronto Area housing market lost some of its sizzle? ​. According to the latest statistics from the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB), the annual pace of increase for the City of Toronto house prices rose by nearly 15 per cent …Efforts to cool housing market working as Toronto home sales fallToronto SunToronto home sales drop most since recession as new rules put brakes on marketFinancial PostPlummeting Toronto Home Sales 'Exactly What The Region Needs'Huffington Post CanadaCanadian Lawyer Magazine -Reuters Canada -Financial Times -Toronto Starall 24 news articles »

The parent company of Google and online retail juggernaut Amazon are part of a small group of stocks belonging to companies that have shunned stock splits