Target liquidation sale ‘underwhelms’ + MORE Feb 5th

(Getty Images / Jose Luis Pelaez Inc)
It’s rare in this beat to find something really new. But as fee-only financial planner Sandi Martin recently wrote in her blog, the advent of a new breed of online investment services known as robo-advisers is “news regular investors pursuing findependence should be paying attention to.”
Robo-advisers use online portfolio management tools to assemble low-cost portfolios of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for retail investors who don’t want to do their own asset allocation and rebalancing. The great part is they do this for a fee of just 0.5% above and beyond the low fees embedded in the underlying ETFs.
Much has been written about these new “light advice” providers in the past year. But rather than reprise them, I opted to talk to their customers instead.
I expected their clients would come from three places. First would be price-conscious investors moving down from high-priced mutual funds or wrap accounts. Second would be already cost-conscious users of discount brokerages and ETFs who realized their own limitations as investors…

Brave shoppers found most items discounted by only 10% on the first day of the Target liquidation sale (Photograph by Romana King)
It looked like a regular Saturday morning at the mall—only it was Thursday morning and all cars were parked in front of the local Ajax, Ont. Target store. Shoppers had lined up, some as early as 6:00 a.m., to get inside on this, the first day of Target Canada’s liquidation sale.
Once inside, shoppers quickly dispersed to various parts of the store—only to be met with less than stellar savings.
“It’s not really a good deal,” said a father of two boys as he examined the 20% off Lego toys (he chose not to be named). “Not when you compare the prices to Toys’R’Us.” But when asked if he would wait before buying he quickly shakes his head. “If I wait until it’s 30% off there won’t be any left.” Given that half the shelves that stock Lego are already empty, he may have a point.
Other shoppers in the toy aisles were similarly unimpressed…

WASHINGTON – Few members of Congress appear willing to move toward a bipartisan update to the 80-year-old, Depression-era law that top U.S. regulators say gives them the authority to regulate the Internet.
That means that communications legislation written in 1934 will likely be used to regulate how Internet service providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast do business with content providers like Google, Netflix, YouTube and Amazon.
Many people say too much regulation and imposing taxes on Internet commerce could chill investment. But consumers also support the idea of an open Internet and “net neutrality,” in which service providers don’t manipulate or block web traffic.
On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler announced a plan that would put Internet service in the same regulatory camp as the telephone.
The post Congress hesitant on how to regulate Internet service, leaving FCC to rely on 80-year-old law appeared first on Canadian Business.

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Canada is vulnerable because of its high levels of household debt and could face a crisis if the economy takes a sharp downturn, a new report from McKinsey Global Institute says.