The January 3rd market rally, which saw the Nasdaq post its largest-ever gain, gives hope that there’s still intelligent life on planets TSE, Nasdaq and CDNX.
One thing that analysts agree on is that volatility is here to stay. The days of phoning your broker when you get around to it are rapidly giving way to online trading from home, office, the cottage, even wireless devices.
A recent development will speed up the execution of online transactions.
Until early last year, Internet stock trades had to be reviewed by a human being to ensure that the transaction conformed to the investor’s stated goals. This resulted in delays and customer complaints, as they saw fast-moving stocks get away from them, no matter how fast they pushed the buy or sell keys.
So, in April 2000, the Canadian securities administrators announced that they would grant relief from this “Suitability Requirement” to dealers who are not in the business of giving advice. This change is a great boon to online brokers like E*Trade Canada, who say right on their Web page that they “have never advised or made recommendations to our clients regarding the purchase or sale of securities.”
Online customers must consent to having their transactions routed directly to the exchange, but you’d be a fool not to.
According to Colleen Moorehead, president of E*Trade Canada, “virtually 100 per cent of our clients have chosen this route because it makes no sense to have a person trying to second-guess their trading decisions.”
She also notes that online trading has driven the cost per transaction down considerably, and that her firm provides lots of research, but does not, repeat, does not give advice.
There are plenty of places where you can get advice, and a veritable avalanche of investment information. Delayed stock quotes are ubiquitous, and you can even get some undelayed quotes, without paying a fee, by signing up at freerealtime.com. You will be subjected to some investment-related advertising, but the price is certainly right. And if you’re the kind of person who actually enjoys getting unsolicited email, firms such as Canaccord will send you a daily heads-up on the market action.
A recent Morning Coffee from them contained major market numbers, plus a discussion of more than a dozen stocks that had done interesting things the day before. They round it out with a macroeconomic analysis and key news releases.
Being Vancouver-based, they do a nice job of covering Canadian companies. They also send out a Daily Letter which contains, of all things, the actual phone numbers of the analysts who write the recommendations.
So for example, we see: STRONG BUY ATI Technologies Inc. (ATY : TSE : $10.00 : Issued 229.4M) By Jonathan Hykawy, PhD, (416) 869-7922. He then proceeds to tell you why he feels this way.
Nobody really knows if Hykawy’s advice is going to be any good (you could go check today’s price of ATY, since he posted this recommendation on Jan. 4), but at least if he hypes a doggie you can pick up the phone and let him know.
Now, what if you want even more market information and you’d like it from the horse’s mouth? A good place to start is www.q1234.com, which has a Canadian focus and claims on its Web site that it’s endorsed by the Toronto Stock Exchange as “a model service for open disclosure on the Internet.”
I used it recently to listen to the quarterly earnings presentations of a number of companies in the comfort of my den. You can often pick up a lot from the tone of a CEO’s voice and the questions that are answered (or not answered).
The TSE’s Web site also provides live Web casts of the weekly Learn and Lunch sessions which are held in its Toronto offices. There’s also a nice archive of previous presentations.
With the beating many people took in the roller-coaster markets of the year 2000, you may be saying: “I’m not touching that nest egg, even if the next Bre-X in the early days comes my way.”
Well, you can still have fun, though not a lot of profit, by playing one of the market simulation games. They have some of the excitement of the real thing and zero risk. The TSE periodically hosts an Investment Challenge where you get to play with $100,000 of fantasy money for an eight-week period and the prizes are in real dollars!
Other stock games can be found all over the Net. But try the TSE’s first, because the prize money can only be won by legal residents of Canada. Hey, it’s not every day you get a tip like that.
Web Watch:
www.etrade.ca
www.freerealtime.com
www.canaccord.com
www.q1234.com
www.tse.com
www.cdnx.com
www.nasdaq.com
