Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - High Auto Prices In 2025, China built nearly as many vehicles, as the next six largest, auto-producing, countries combined. This dominance is driven not by just low prices. Advances in factory automation, car design software, battery efficiency and faster development cycles are giving the Chinese gains in productivity, variety and quality that are leaving the...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Strait of Hormuz Solutions Free markets have a way of sorting things out. Take for example the Strait of Hormuz. 20% of the world’s oil passes through this 40 km wide channel every day. Iran has used threats to shut it down as a political club going back almost 50 years. That will soon end. Saudi Arabia is building a pipeline which will deliver 5 to 7 million...

Making Money Minute with Ron HiebTechnology Pushback People invest in technology, like robotics, self driving cars, artificial intelligence and datacentres with a view that they are an unstoppable tsunami. But we are starting to see pushback from groups legitimately worried about the impact this technology will have on their careers and lifestyles. Groups, are trying to block the use of self drivi...

Making Money Minute with Ron HiebeTrade Agreements Take A Long Time I am not sure investors have thought through, how long it could take Canada, to renegotiate the free trade agreement with the US and Mexico. The last round of USMCA negotiations officially began on August 16, 2017, and wasn’t concluded until September 30, 2018. It took 13 grinding months, regularly filled with intense political dr...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - A Very Narrow Rally If your portfolio has recently been suffering the performance blues , it is because most market sectors are sucking gas. The S&P 500, which represents a broad swath of America’s biggest and highest quality names, has seen 1/2 its recent gains come from 28 out of all 503 stocks. Most of these 28 companies are tech and Artificial Intelligenc...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Oil Shortage Impact Investors have pushed markets to new highs thinking that the oil shortage, caused by the US and Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz, is something we will have no problem dealing with. Yet the big impact of losing 13 million barrels of oil production a day is still ahead of us. Most countries have made up the shortfall by drawing down their...

Making Money Minute with Ron HiebeRents Are Declining Long suffering Canadian renters are finally getting some relief. Average rents in Canada declined 4.7% year-over-year in April, falling by $100 to $2,027. This marks the 19th consecutive month of declines. The biggest drop in apartment rents has been in some of the secondary markets next to Canada’s biggest cities. Richmond has declined -13.1%,...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Safe Havens People wonder why there are so few safe havens anymore. Places you can hide when markets are in turmoil. Recently, when markets drop, even the quality stuff falls with it. The reason for this, has to do with the tremendous levels of debt people are taking on to invest. When markets go south, investors are forced to liquidate securities to bring th...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Consistently Profitable Companies One of the best investment strategies, is to avoid owning shares in companies or industries that aren’t consistently profitable. A good example is the global airline industry. As a whole, between World War II and 2021, this sector lost more money than they made over the entire 76 year period. If it wasn’t for all kinds of gov...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Employee Financial Literacy As every manager knows, an employees personal issues often get dragged into the work place. Studies show that one in three full-time employees have money worries that negatively impact their productivity at work. If you are an employer, a cost effective way to improve employee performance, is by offering a financial literacy progra...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - A Clever Scam The most sophisticated internet scam I have recently seen, involves a fake email or text supposedly from your financial institution notifying you that money has been illegally taken out of your account. Of course, they need to contact you, to work on getting it back. You, obviously being too smart to be taken by this, call your bank directly. Ty...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Carney’s Aggressive Strategy Negotiations on our trade free trade agreement with Mexico and the US will start in just over a month. The stakes are enormous for Canada and Mexico, but much less so for America, so Trump feels he can play hardball with us. Mexico’s president, has chosen to turn the volume down and not react to Trump’s insults. Mark Carney’s stra...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Private Equity Lack of Liquidity Private-equity funds set limits on how much cash investors are allowed to withdraw at any given time. Because they hold illiquid assets, such as private company shares or debt, these funds typically let investors cash out only once a quarter. A problem occurs when requests to sell reach more than 5% to 7% of total assets. The...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert -Deficits Are Solvable If you found out your spending was 5% higher than your income, it wouldn’t take a lot of economic fine tuning to get things back in balance because the difference between what’s coming in and what’s going out isn’t that large. On a bigger scale, 5% is also the ballpark deficit gap most western governments face when they prepare their annu...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Dot-Com Comparisons Caution is a word investors should include in their current tech strategies. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index is a good proxy for the global computer chip industry. It recently experienced its largest 25-day rally since the 2000 dot-com bubble. In 25 trading sessions, the benchmark advanced 54%. This was its best 25-day performance sin...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Surprising Iran War Shortages When the 40 km wide Strait of Hormuz, just off Iran’s south west coast, is closed to shipping, we get a lesson on just how interconnected global supply chains really are. Most people know that 20% of the world’s oil passes through this strategic waterway. But there is so much more. Roughly 1/3 of all internationally traded fertil...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Good Times Never Last Most current investors have only known markets with rising stock prices. Equities bottomed after the Great Financial Crisis in 2009 and have been on a tear ever since. The concept that markets can go sideways or down for extended periods is beyond most investors comprehension. Yet history is full of examples. Stock markets went nowhere b...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Best Time To Invest Great investors seem to intuitively know when to invest aggressively and when to back off. Risks are elevated when markets keep hitting new highs, so this group typically moves to the sidelines and patiently waits. The rewards for investing when assets are overvalued and priced to perfection, just aren’t high enough to make it worthwhi...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - A Retirement Side Business For a lot of people, retirement brings up two big questions. How can I constructively fill my time and how can I afford it. Both can be answered by launching a home based business or side hustle. It can be fun to do and provide extra cashflow. To make this work, you want to start this business before you retire - the earlier the bet...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - A Retirement Side Business For a lot of people, retirement brings up two big questions. How can I constructively fill my time and how can I afford it. Both can be answered by launching a home based business or side hustle. It can be fun to do and provide extra cashflow. To make this work, you want to start this business before you retire - the earlier the bet...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Kid’s Are Expensive In 2025, the estimated cost of raising a child in Canada from birth to age 17 reached $293,000. That translates into about $17,235 per year. This estimate is based on a middle income, two parent family. If the kid decides to live down the basement, while getting you to subsidize their post secondary education, those costs can go much, much...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Canada Needs More Electricity Canada is facing an electricity shortage. Production peaked in 2017, and since that time we have added over 4 million people to our ranks - who also consume the stuff. Canada, in its bid to get the economy humming, wants to fast track the build out of factories, mines, refineries, liquified natural gas plants and data centres amo...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Lessons From Africa Forty years ago, the country of Zimbabwe, previously known as Rhodesia, was the breadbasket of Africa, with one of its richest and most industrialized economies. Then came decades of corruption, overspending and blatant money printing. Inflation caught fire, averaging 43 percent per year between 2009 and 2026. In 2008, things got so bad th...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - We Created Our Problems Trump can be an obnoxious bully, but we can’t blame him for the problems we created ourselves. We were the ones, who for decades, never contributed our fair share to NATO’s defence budget. Also, it was much easier to sell goods south of the border, so we neglected developing global trading partners or getting our act together with the...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Backdoor US Investing We all know people who are boycotting the US. They won’t invest in American stocks to send a message they are upset by America’s treatment of Canada. But in doing so, investors leave money on the table. America is a more dynamic and faster growing economy than Canada. One way to get around this roadblock, is to buy Canadian companies tha...