Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - EV’s & Oil Consumption Electric vehicles are taking a small but growing bite out of global oil consumption. EV’s saved us from using about 1.7 million barrels of oil per day in 2025. That is up from 400,000 barrels per day in 2000. Over the next decade, this is expected to grow 5 fold to 10,000,000 barrels per day. This conversion will reduce global oil deman...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Experts & Oil Prices On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched massive air and missile strikes against military targets and government compounds in Iran. Oil immediately spiked to $110 US per barrel, and it was feared, it would quickly go to $200 per barrel unless the fighting ended soon. Well here we are 6 months later, the conflict hasn’t...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Baby Boomer Sell Off Baby boomers started retiring a decade and a half ago. Ever since, there have been dire warnings of a pending stock market collapse as boomers sell off investments to support their retirement lifestyle. Though prophecies of doom continue, markets haven’t cooperated. Boomers have a high percentage of their portfolios in stocks. Yet ins...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Telco Threats Canadian telecommunication stocks used to be considered top choices for risk adverse, income investors. Those glory days are long behind them. Over the last 5 years, BCE and Telus are down 50% and Rogers has lost a third of its value. Government rules have made it harder to be profitable, and the latest technology threat is satellites. The newes...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Time & Compounding Compounding has been described as the 8th wonder of the world. Yet few people understand the power of compounding, and how using it, can turn a little bit of regular savings into a whole lot over time. Take for example a baby who starts investing from birth. Imagine this kid putting a little bit every day into an investment growing 10% annu...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Alberta’s Tax Burden Alberta’s tax beef with the Federal Government is based on how much more our citizens pay to the Federal government than other provinces, and how much less of the tax pie stays in Alberta as a percentage compared to other provinces. In Alberta, 67.3% of the taxes collected go to the Federal government. The average across the country is 56...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Bear Market Timing If you visit financial websites, you will have noticed increasingly shrill pop up ads describing current investment conditions as a speculative bubble. They conclude that since stock prices are historically overvalued, a crash is imminent. No one disputes the high prices, but predicting the exact timing of a crash is debatable. In the mid 1...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Which AI Platform Will Win When you go to a car show, everyone crowds around the 1000 horsepower exotic super car with the European pedigree and million dollar price tag - oohing and aahing. Yet, what they buy when they go to a dealership is the Chevy or Toyota SUV that can be stuffed full of pets, kids and groceries. The economic and practical wins out most...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Trump’s Lack of Strategy The way Trump has conducted the conflict with Iran so far has been an embarrassment, both for him and the country. You can’t substitute war strategy with election propaganda. When oil goes up he is afraid it will cause inflation which voters hate. He then threatens to bomb Iran into the Stone Age if they don’t comply to his peace term...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Financial Noise Watching financial news, unleashes a fire hose of information - most of which is totally useless in helping you plan and achieve your financial goals. Separating the valuable from the noise is almost a full time job. The other downside, is that a diet high in financial news creates a time mismatch. Most of us are thinking about strategies that...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Tungsten Subsidies Tungsten is an incredibly strong metal with the highest melting point. This puts it in demand for cutting tools, wear resistant parts, munitions, and aerospace components. The problem is a supply bottleneck. China produces 80% of the world’s supply and has put a squeeze on exports. As a result, prices have increased 9 times in the last 18 m...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Micro Betting The second fastest growing economic sector in America from 2019-2024 was gambling … and sports betting was the hotspot. In 2017, Americans legally bet $4.9 billion dollars on various sports. In 2025, it was over $160 billion. During those 8 years, it grew 32 times larger. To keep fans interested, formats continuously change. The next big trend l...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Tech Concentration Risk Global markets have been difficult to profit from if your portfolio is properly diversified across different asset classes and securities. Most sectors currently are treading water, and only a few stocks are providing the majority of the gains. In the first 6 months of this year, US markets gained 10.2%… 9.1% of which came from technol...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Past Performance & The Future Investing is based on the cult of performance, but as is so often repeated - past performance does not guarantee future results. Take for example, the services that rank mutual fund managers on a scale of one to five stars - with five stars being the highest. It seems intuitive that picking a five star fund would be the logical i...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - AI’s Big Promises Our current bull market is effectively one gigantic bet on Artificial Intelligence. Since Chat-GPT was launched in November 2022, AI-related stocks have accounted for 75% of market gains, 80% of market profits, and 95% of capital expenditures in the US. The single most important issue determining whether this bull market will continue, is ba...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Boomers & Home Prices If you are thinking that your dream home is beyond reach - that could change given time. Demand for mid to higher end homes is likely to be lower as demographics shift. Baby boomers are aging, younger generations are smaller in number, birthrates are low, and policy changes have thinned immigration. This will bring a lot of housing units...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Tech Spending & Growth Massive investments in technology were the major driver of US economic growth in 2025. Harvard economist Jason Furman, calculated that technology investments accounted for 92% of Gross Domestic Product growth last year. Other research suggests that AI data center buildouts contributed more to the economy than all consumer spending in Am...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Alberta’s Tax Freedom Day We certainly pay a lot of taxes. Even in Alberta where the burden is less than most other provinces, tax freedom day didn’t come this year until May 25th. If the average Canadian family had to pay their taxes first each year, before keeping any for themselves, tax freedom day would be the date on the calendar you would actually start...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - New Issue Profitability The new issue market is heating up again. Lots of companies are deciding that the timing is right to transition from private to publicly owned. Coming to the market for the first time and issuing shares is exciting because it gives investors the ability to participate in new opportunities. The important question - “Will these new issue...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Canada’s Poor Economic Performance Canada has become a world leader. Unfortunately it is in the areas you don’t want to be ranked. Our nations finances have deteriorated faster than any country in the G7 over the last decade. And if we expand this comparison to a larger group of the 40 most advanced economies worldwide, the results are very similar. Canada ex...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Battery Storage Companies that specialized in making lithium ion batteries have had sluggish sales growth the last few years. The problem is both from the batteries high cost and their limited capacity. But that is changing. As costs have come down and storage capacity gone up, batteries have found a whole new market besides electric cars. It has become econo...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Trump - Mid Term Lame Duck It appears that peace talks between Iran and the US are going nowhere. This also seems to be true regarding Canada’s free trade negotiations with the United States. One of the reasons both are stalled could be the American mid term elections in November. If current polling of voter preferences is even remotely accurate, the Democrat...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Dividend Aristocrats & Kings One of the ways to measure how durable a companies profits are, is to look at its dividend history. Dividends are the portion of a companies earnings that get paid out to shareholders in cash. The premise, is, that unless profits are going up, the company eventually runs out of money to increase the dividend. In the US, there are...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Tariffs & China America’s annual trade deficit with China today stands at roughly $202 billion US dollars. That is down from its peak only four years ago of twice that much. For Europe the numbers are going the other way. Their current $360 billion dollar trade imbalance with China has grown by 89% over the last decade. Europe, used to ridicule America for th...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Immigration & Employment People are seeing, how slowing immigration growth, has helped ease home rental costs. Yet, very little has been said about how slowing population growth has also boosted Canadian employment numbers. Baby boomers are retiring in hoards. Last year saw 26k workers retire every month. That gap has to be filled. Caps on temporary residents...