Don’t Cross Off Hedge Funds Right Away + MORE Jul 23rd

A U.S. Senate banking committee begins looking Tuesday at whether big American banks can both trade commodities and hold physical assets related to shipping oil and metals.

Chinese markets rally strongly overnight on reassurance about the economy

Hedge funds.. they are at the center of a lot of what happens in the markets these days and I certainly found the latest research about their performance very interesting. I don’t think anyone would argue that things are going well for hedge funds. There has been research about performance, headlines about insider trading, etc
Don’t Cross Off Hedge Funds Right Away
For every bad example of hedge funds, there are good examples. Yesterday, Daniel Loeb announced he was selling off most of his Yahoo stock and getting off the board. He made a killing by seeing an opportunity of a mispriced asset, getting the company to get rid of a poor CEO and replace him with Marissa Mayer which has certainly turned out to be a brilliant bet.
He made a killing and certainly deserves every penny of it. He might make other mistakes but I’d argue that hedge funds will continue to do well because they’re able to make big bets, have the most brilliant investors (because that is where they’re best compensated for their performance)…

This GIC rate is offered by Outlook Financial and was updated on 2013-03-14. Click on the link above to get more details or apply online.

It is more than 3 years now since RBC Direct became the first big bank discount broker to offer a US Dollar RRSP. The next year, BMO InvestorLine followed suit and allowed clients to segregate the US dollar investments in their RRSPs. While TD Waterhouse (now called TD Direct Investing) reacted to these moves by implementing an auto wash feature, it is disappointing to note that the broker still does not offer a true US Dollar RRSP account. It is doubly disappointing because TD Direct’s customer service representatives had been hinting to clients that a US Dollar RRSP is in the works and expect it to launch in the first half of 2013.
It is easy to quantify the cost of sticking with TD Direct Investing when some of the competition offer true US Dollar RRSP accounts. The automatic washing helps in saving on currency conversion charges when selling a security denominated in US dollars and buying another USD security even on different days. But, due to the lack of a true US Dollar RRSP, US dollar dividends received by a TD Direct Investor are forcibly converted to Canadian dollars and charged a fee of approximately 1…