Canada – Page 40

Brokerage firms in Canada – Interactive Brokers Review

The choice of brokerage firm for individuals is not that relevant of a decision unless if you are a very active trader (and hence want to reduce your commissions or want fancy charting packages to give you a better read of your tea leaves). Ultimately, most brokerages provide the same core services, with some nuances to distinguish them.

I personally use two brokerages: Interactive Brokers and Questrade. In the past I also used BMO Investorline for my RRSP, but eventually migrated that to Questrade strictly on the basis of transaction costs.

Interactive Brokers

I have used Interactive Brokers since they were allowed to open in Canada in 2002. They are the best brokerage firm available to retail investors, bar none. They have automated practically every aspect of the service they deliver. You can also trade any electronically-traded product on the planet for an extremely low commission – if you make liquidity-providing trades (i.e. you don’t buy at the ask or sell at the bid) you can trade Canadian stocks at roughly 50 cents for 100 shares, and US stocks for roughly 30 cents per 100 shares. They have four “killer features” which I consider significant in my decision to stick with them:

a. You can trade nearly any financial product on the planet through their system, in any currency, and it is all seamlessly integrated. The only product which they do not trade for some strange reason are TSX-traded corporate debentures. Once you enter in your trade, they have an automated executed system which will route your order to the best available location. They support order types of any imaginable variety – including “conditional” orders and time-based orders. Their trading software, TWS, is very, very powerful.

Just note that while you can trade securities in far-off exchanges (e.g. out in Asia or Europe) doesn’t mean you should be!

b. Currency exchange. I am kind of amused at discussion forums asking where you can get the best rates to converting currency – most brokerages charge a 2% spread. With Interactive Brokers, the spread is the market, which is usually around 0.0001 for the CAD-USD pair. For people that do cross-currency transactions, this amounts to substantial cost savings.

c. Security. Once your account gets above a particular balance, IB will mail you a digital device in the mail, which is required to authenticate your login whenever you try to access your account. This is an ironclad way of security, even if somebody compromises your username and password, they still cannot compromise your account until they have the physical device. I generally feel that my money in Interactive Brokers is absolutely secure. Also, they are publicly traded, so you could judge whether they will be going into a financial meltdown (like E-Trade did) – but they are managed quite conservatively and survived 2008 very well.

d. Very inexpensive margin rates. For those that want to borrow money, you can do so at rates that are nearly impossible to get elsewhere. For example, right now you can borrow Canadian dollars at 1.768%. If you borrow more than $120,000, your rate is 1.268%. If you borrow more than $1,100,000, your rate is 0.768%. These are variable with the bank rate, so after July, this will likely increase. Credit available with Interactive Brokers is such that if you intend on borrowing money, it becomes a very simple procedure to dump securities into Interactive Brokers and withdraw the cash, which creates a self-secured tax-deductible loan vehicle.

Contrast this with the purchase of real estate, and getting an HELOC – the HELOC will have a higher rate, guaranteed.

The only trick with using margin, however, is making sure that the collateral (the assets backing up the loan) don’t lose value!

There is no point in borrowing money elsewhere when Interactive Brokers makes it so cheap. It brings up the real possibility of leveraging up in various fixed income securities and doing what every other bank on the planet is doing – which is made possible by Interactive Brokers – again, just make sure the assets you invest in don’t lose value.

The disadvantages of Interactive Brokers, however, are significant for most financially unsophisticated individuals – you have to know exactly what you are doing, otherwise you will likely make an errant trade and lose money. The TWS is not an easy-to-learn piece of software and nobody is going to be there to hold your hand, although there is ample documentation to read if you wish to self-educate. Other disadvantages is they do not do RRSPs or TFSAs (or anything else registered) – it takes them too much paperwork and compliance costs so they will not offer them. They do not offer TSX-traded debentures, which is something readers of this site will know that I have dabbled with. Finally, they do have ‘inactivity’ fees, where you will be charged a minimum of $10 a month minus the amount of commissions that month. So if you only rack up $3 of commissions for the month, they will dock you another $7. This is a minor amount, but for people with small accounts, Interactive Brokers is definitely not for them.

Customer support is done through a ticket creation system – one of their reps will look at it and give an appropriate response. It is rare that support will be needed, but all of the times I’ve had to send an inquiry, the response time was very prompt. For people that like talking on the phone for support, however, I doubt they will find Interactive Brokers adequate at all – they don’t hold the hands of their customers.

Getting money in and out of the account is easily performed through EFT. For larger quantities of money, they also support wire transfers.

In summary, Interactive Brokers is a very powerful brokerage – If Interactive Brokers offered RSP/TFSA accounts and offered TSX-traded debentures, I would be using them for everything. I would not recommend them for everybody, however.

I did this review without remuneration.

Canadian Fiscal Monitor January 2010

This is about nine days late, but the Ministry of Finance released the fiscal results for the 10 months ended January 2010.

Of particular note is a massive increase in corporate income tax collections – up a whopping 74% for the month of January 2010, from January 2009. Although month-to-month results will be quite volatile in this category, for the 10 months from April 2008 to January 2009 and April 2009 to January 2010, corporate tax collections are still down 23%. This will inevitably be better in the 2010-2011 fiscal year.

The spending side of the ledger continues to be very high, with 12% growth for the 10 months to date.

Athabasca Oil Sands IPO valuation – summary

I am reading plenty of news how Athabasca Oil Sands is planning a very large public offering. According to their final prospectus, they will raise $1.35 billion @ $18/share of gross proceeds and about $1.26 billion net.

Since this got on the media’s radar, it should be a foregone conclusion that the option to purchase more of the offering will be exercised, so the final offering should be around $1.55 billion gross, and $1.45 billion net. The following analysis assumes the latter will be the case.

Note this is just a summary analysis. It only scratches the surface, but it covers what I figure are the salient details.

After the offering, they will have about 400 million shares outstanding, and assuming an $18 purchase price, this is a market capitalization of about $7.2 billion.

What exactly would an IPO subscriber be purchasing? This is why looking at the prospectus (all 288 pages in its full glory) is a valuable exercise. The company is a development stage company that has interests in a few tar sands near the Fort McMurray area of Alberta. They are currently not performing, but they are expected to come online in a few years, per the following schedule (page 8):

It would be reasonable for an investor to think this company will be producing net losses until around 2014-2015 when their oil sands projects come online.

After the offering, the company will have about $2 billion in the bank and about $400 million in long term debt. Thus, it will mostly be capitalized with equity and should have sufficient room to finish most of what they need to by 2014 – they will have to raise a little more money between now and then.

Page 78-84 of the prospectus contains some significant assumptions and analysis of the company’s estimated reserves. The first chart is based on a discounted net present value given the best estimates:

What this says is that if you have a 10% cost of capital and bought this company’s resources at the various sites for $11.2 billion, it would be a neutral decision. Of course, assumptions such as whether the company will be able to realize the “best estimate” or something better or worse is something for an investor to determine. Also, the following assumptions on future oil prices are made:

Roughly, it is assumed that (the media-quoted oil price source – there are different prices for different classes of oil) oil in 2010 will be US$80 in 2010; that the CDN/USD exchange will be 0.95, and that oil will increase $3/barrel until 2014, and then up 2% from there.

If projected oil prices are lower than this, you “lose” as an investor. If projected oil prices are higher, you “win”.

My quick take is that there are other companies out there using steam-assisted gravity drainage technologies to extract oil from tarsands. It takes a little (and I literally mean this; a little) research to figure out who those players are (beyond Suncor) and looking at their economic profiles. I can safely say that if I were offered shares of Athabasca Oil Sands at the IPO price, I would pass from a valuation perspective. From a market perspective, however, it would be worth considering strictly to sell it off at a post-IPO price. It kind of reminds me of the internet stocks in the late 90’s.

Once this company does go public it would not surprise me that they would get a valuation bump, and other similar companies that already are trading should receive bumps as a result. I have seen this already occur, probably in anticipation of the IPO.

If you had to invest into Athabasca Oil Sands and not anywhere else, I would find it extremely likely there will be a better opportunity to pick up shares post-IPO between now and 2014.

Posted bank mortgage rates irrelevant

I noticed there was a headline yesterday that a few of Canada’s major banks were raising posted rates on 5-year fixed rate mortgages from 5.25% to 5.85%.

This is completely irrelevant news. The reason is because posted rates are about as valid as the MSRP sticker price you see when you try and buy a new car – they will certainly sell it to you for that price and be very happy to make a bloated margin, but with some simple negotiation you can bat down the price to a more acceptable level.

I do not know why banks even bother with “posted” rates anymore – there must be a reason why they don’t post their most competitive rates. I am guessing it is because they don’t want to appear to be in direct price competition with each other.

Going to a mortgage broker or even looking at ING Direct’s site gives you a better reflection of what market reality is – it has not budged from 3.69% and 3.89% for a 5-year fixed term, respectively.

In reality, what happens is that the market establishes mortgage rates on a fixed spread over the 5-year government note rate:

The 5-year rate has hovered around 2.4% to 2.9% over the past 10 months; the 5-year fixed rate mortgage (at ING Direct) has hovered between 3.79% and 4.49% in the same timeframe.

Analysis of RESPs

The Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP) is a tax sheltered vehicle that is designated for parents to save up for the education of somebody – usually this is the children of the people contributing to the RESP, but in theory you can define anybody as a beneficiary of the plan. Eventually when such people take higher education, you can designate proceeds to the beneficiary in question, and the beneficiary will take the income contributions as taxable income. Presumably because they are young and have less income, they will pay little to no tax on the proceeds.

For the rest of this post, I will define the beneficiary as just “children”.

Benefits and disadvantages

The benefits can be summed up in three points:
1. Transferring income while avoiding attribution;
2. Income tax deferral;
3. Canada Education Savings Grants.

The disadvantages can be summed up as follows:
1. Risk that your children will not seek higher education.
2. Requires financial skill to self-manage.
3. Fees.

The competing choice is funding money outside the confines of an RESP and giving it to the children when they go to school, or to give some portion of money to children and having them invest it in their own names.

Analysis

To put the conclusion first, my general analysis suggests that RESPs are only useful if you intend to fund part or all of your childrens’ educations and you are very convinced they will be going to an eligible higher education institution. In other words, I would not contribute to an RESP until they are, at the latest, 15 years of age when you can detect whether they have enough ‘scholarly’ potential to warrant it and you have sufficient after-tax funds that won’t put a hole into your own personal finances.

If you discover your child does not want to attend upper education, you can move the RESP proceeds into an RRSP, but there are non-trivial conditions attached with this transferability. Otherwise accumulated income taken out the RESP is taxed at your marginal rate plus 20%.

From a financial perspective, the RESP enables you to avoid attribution by indirectly “giving income” to your children, and also shelters growth of funds from taxes (which will eventually be taken as taxable income by the children). Contributions are not tax deductible and principal withdrawals are not taxed. The excess of principal payments is taxed.

The Government of Canada will chip in some money via the Canada Education Savings Grant, which will contribute 20% of the first $5,000/year contributed, to a lifetime maximum of $36,000 contributed. So in theory if you contributed $4,500/year ($36,000 total) for the first 8 years of your child’s life, the CESG would result in an extra $7,200 in the account. If your family income is less than $77,769/year, the CESG grant will be 30% of the contribution amount. If your family income is less than $38,832/year, the CESG grant will be 40% of the contribution amount.

The CESG is a material benefit when investing in an RESP, functionally acting as an instant 20% return on investment. Using the “contribute until the last moment” strategy, the CRA helpfully points out the criteria that must exist in order the RESP to receive the CESG:

However, since the CESG has been designed to encourage long term savings for post-secondary education, there are specific contributions requirements for beneficiaries who attain 16 or 17 years of age. RESPs for beneficiaries 16 and 17 years of age can only receive CESG if at least one of the following two conditions is met:

* a minimum of $2,000 of contributions has been made to, and not withdrawn from, RESPs in respect of the beneficiary before the year in which the beneficiary attains 16 years of age; or
* a minimum of $100 of annual contributions has been made to, and not withdrawn from, RESPs in respect of the beneficiary in at least any four years before the year in which the beneficiary attains 16 years of age.

This means that you must start to save in RESPs for your child before the end of the calendar year in which the beneficiary attains 15 years of age in order to be eligible for the CESG. The CESG and accumulated earnings will be part of the educational assistance payment paid out of the RESP to the beneficiary.

Assuming your child enters into upper education when they turn 17, the safest strategy appears to be determining how much money you intent on contributing and dividing them into $5,000 amounts. If you have $5,000 to contribute, then put that into the RESP the year your child turns 15, and put it in a 2-year GIC which matures when they are ready to enter higher education. If you have $10,000 to contribute, put $5,000 into the RESP when they turn 15 (into a 2-year GIC), and another $5,000 the following year into a 1-year GIC. This way, you will realize a 20% gain plus whatever the return on the GIC is.

This strategy requires no financial sophistication other than the effort to find a fee-free RESP provider that gives good fixed income rates and taking out the appropriate GIC with the specified maturity date.

The RESP gives the contributor full liquidity capability – they can withdraw principal at any time, but they would have to refund the CESG in the process. Still, the availability of liquidity is a crucial factor in an investment decision, and having the ability to get back your principal (e.g. let’s say you lost your job when your child was 6 years old and the RESP is hardly going to be a high priority at this time compared to an education that may or may not happen in 11+ years) is very important.

I cannot find good justification for employing other investment strategies concerning RESPs – for example, if immediately after the birth of a child the parents open up an RESP for the child. In this scenario, the primary risk is that the parents will need the money at a future date and a more pressing reason than the far-off goal of purchasing educational credits for children. The other risk, of course, is not knowing whether the newborn will be attending such an institution. Also, because of the long timeline, such investments are likely to be more risky in nature, requiring a level of financial sophistication to invest in the proper stocks and bonds. Finally, the benefit of avoiding income attribution could be entirely avoided by transferring the funds to the child’s name and investing the proceeds in securities that will yield capital gains (as capital gains will be attributed to the child, while income will be attributed to the parent).

Thus, the “get the CESG as late as possible” strategy is likely the only real viable strategy for the RESP.

A final note on scholarship trusts

It is my opinion that most education scholarship trusts are terrible, terrible, terrible investment vehicles compared to the strategy presented above. In addition to paying fees that are ridiculously expensive, you are surrendering liquidity, and also surrendering the flexibility to get your money whenever you want if your child goes to school. For example, if your child decides to enroll into a two-year trades program, you will receive significantly less money than if he/she enrolled in a four year program. In particular, I will single out the largest of the scholarship trust companies, Canadian Scholarship Trust, as being financially counter-productive to any parents’ wish to actually pay for their children’s educations via an RESP. It is my opinion that companies like those are what give other educational scholarship companies an incredibly bad name.

It is true if you jump the hoops just perfectly (i.e. making your monthly payments from an early date, never missing payments and having your child continue with a 4-year education) that enrolling in such a plan would be a net plus, but the risk taken is phenomenally higher than the simple strategy presented above. The performance of the Canadian Scholarship Trust has also not been that much higher than a GIC – the 5-year performance from October 2003 to 2008 has been 4.5%. You can read this and the rest of the gory details on their prospectus document – a document that I suspect most of their subscribers don’t read, mainly because if they did so they would quickly realize what a bad deal they are receiving.