Andrew Allentuck

Alberta farmers we ll call Hank, 63, and Ethel, 62, have raised elk and bison and grown grain for three decades in the foothills of the Rockies. Hank has also been an employee of the federal government. He retired with a full pension three years ago at age 60. They have one son with a […] Read more

Why buy bonds and, if you want to, how do you do it? We re not talking about Canada Savings Bonds, which pay approximately zilch, but about negotiable bonds that can pay enough to put dinner on the table and, for adept investors, a good deal more. Think that s impossible with two-year Government of […] Read more

The bond market has come to a fundamental divide. Canadian and American short term bonds pay so little and, in turn, money market funds and bank accounts too little, that off-farm fixed income investing has to be rethought. After all, getting a pittance on your cash is hardly a way to make a living. We […] Read more

As I write this column, a curtain of pessimism has descended on the much of the world economy. In early August, stocks in the U.S. and Canada, Europe and Asia collapsed following the downgrade of the debt of the U.S. Treasury from triple A to triple A minus by one rating agency, Standard &Poor’s. In […] Read more

It’s summer and world stock and bond markets are in the doldrums again. As I write this column, the S&P/TSX Composite is flirting with a 10 per cent decline year to date, the point at which a slump takes on the title “correction.” The problems driving down the world’s markets are real: the tsunami and […] Read more

Markets are soaring and investors, especially those who have waited on the sidelines for an opportunity to buy into recovering American banks or hot Canadian commodity producers, are frustrated. Halted only by the Japanese nuclear reactor explosions in early March that scraped a few hundred points off the S&P/ TSX Composite (now fully recovered) equity […] Read more

We are in the midst of a global financial crisis brought on by the many-layered disaster in Japan and the concurrent series of Middle Eastern crises that threaten the world’s oil supplies. For investors, whether farmers thinking about putting some money into stocks or bonds or mutual funds or older people who want to be […] Read more

For Canada, the economic news these days couldn’t be better. Commodity prices are soaring, so farmers in most regions are making a profit. But costs are rising, too. Oil prices are up dramatically, so drillers, upstream producers, integrated oils, oil well supply companies, etc. are happy. We’re shipping more coal and copper to China, more […] Read more

The stock market has staged a remarkable recovery since it hit bottom on March 9, 2009. In 2010 alone, the S&P/TSX Total Return Index (stock prices plus dividends) is up 26 per cent compounded annually. In most sectors what was lost has been recovered. On February 16, the S&P/TSX composite index rose over 14,000, the […] Read more

In British Columbia, a widow we’ll call Martha, 51, has taken over five acres of farm land. The operation is small and dependent on rainfall, but was profitable before the expense of the installation of an irrigation system. The single crop Martha raises, organic scallions, produced gross sales of $10,000 in 2010 on just half […] Read more