Archive for April, 2010

Week in Review – April 17–24

April 25th, 2010

Every weekend, we write a posting that summarizes interesting things happening in the blogosphere. It’s called “Week in Review” section. Here is the list of what’s happening this week.

ETFDb.com has a list of 10 common mistakes ETF investors should avoid. One of them is, no surprise, liquidity. ETFDb.com suggested that we should invest in ETFs that has at least 25,000 average daily volume and $2 million in notional volume.

Seth Godin has some advices on buying a house since everybody seems to be buying a house today. He suggested not to buy a bigger house just because of social power and self-esteem. We shouldn’t buy a house if doing so will keep us in credit card debt.

Million Dollar Journey has adviced us not to get trapped in 5-year fixed mortgage. We should always go to variable-rate mortgage or short-term mortgage.

Canadian Couch Potato had an explanation on why international ETFs show large tracking errors.

The Financial Blogger shared his experience on things you should to while negotiating the price of your house (while selling).

Canadian Capitalist explained on how US Estate Tax changes will affect Canadians.

ETF Dividend Yield

April 21st, 2010

We are currently developing a system to help us making decision for our investment. It is not an automatic trading system. It is just a customized stock screener and filter. It will be used for Relative Strength Investing as well. We will be sharing the system in this blog later when it is complete and stable enough. We don’t have the timeline yet since we just do it as hobby in our spare time.

Our first project is a simple ETF screener. We gathered a list of all ETFs traded in the US stock exchange. Thanks to MasterDATA who has provided a free CSV file containing the complete list. Then we use data from Yahoo Finance! to generate various customized screeners. One of them is generating ETF dividend yield.

excel  Click here to download table of ETF dividend yield (in CSV format)

 

Here is the 15 ETFs that pay highest dividend as of today.

Symbol Dividend Dividend Yield
EDV 13.962 17.95%
JNK 4.504 11.25%
DRW 2.522 9.30%
HYG 8.018 8.98%
REM 1.325 8.52%
PHB 1.548 8.51%
PGF 1.356 7.83%
PGX 1.038 7.49%
GRI 2.118 6.48%
PCY 1.652 6.24%
PFF 2.382 6.15%
LWC 2.197 6.11%
IFGL 1.772 6.08%
FFR 1.809 5.62%
HYD 1.702 5.56%

 

Links

Average Home Price in Toronto Surge 20%

April 21st, 2010

In our last posting, we had a rant about our house in Vancouver area. The property market seems to have fully recovered there, the average home price has even reached all-time high.

Today, we checked the property market in Greater Toronto Area from Toronto Real Estate Board. The chart looks pretty much the same. The average home price also has reached all-time high recently. What is more interesting is the fact the the price has jumped about 20% in the last 12 months.

Is the trend still healthy or is it in bubble yet? Let’s check chart below and apply Rule 72. The current price is about $450,000, and we have the half of that price, i.e. $225,000, in year 1998. It means it takes about 12 years to double the price. Using Rule 72, we can conclude that the annual price increase is about 6% (72 / 12). It looks that the trend is still healthy.

Note that the calculation above is just approximation. First of all, we just used the chart below without knowing the actual numbers. Secondly, Rule 72 itself is also an approximation. :)

Toronto Real Estate Board

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