Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Kid Headache A lot of retirees are able to look back on a life filled with great careers, substantial charitable commitments, deep friendships and financial success. Yet their one sore point, is kids who never give them the time of day, except when they need the bank of mom and dad to bail them out financially. If you have this kind of relationship, do wh...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Six Minutes It just makes sense, to do your homework before making an expensive purchase. Car buyers on average, do over 10 hours of online research, and visit at least four dealerships before closing a deal. Home buyers spend approximately 124 hours over several months, researching and looking for a home before making a purchase. Contrast this to the average...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Vehicle Purchase Scams In the past, buying a car was usually done in person. You would meet the owner or go to a dealership and see someone face to face. Then would come the vehicle inspection, test drive and discussion about price. Today more and more auto transactions are taking place on line. The buyer never meets anyone and doesn’t see the vehicle until i...

AI’s Second Act Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Investors who are disappointed because they missed out on the recent huge gains made by AI stocks shouldn’t feel the party is over. We are likely early in the game - just finishing Round 1. Where AI models and supporting infrastructure get tested and developed. Round 2 is the global rollout. This is where Artificial Intelligence finds its prac...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Patience & Energy Investing The biggest spikes in oil prices historically, have always occurred as a result of wars, embargoes, or other political tensions in the Middle East. The reason is obvious. This area produces 30% of the world’s total crude, so any disruption sends prices skyward. What isn’t so obvious, is the timing of those disruptions. Most have ca...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Working Longer People are living longer, healthier lives. Over the past 50 years, average global life expectancy has risen from 62 to 75 years. Developed countries saw longevity increase from 72 to 82 years. This has many experts worried that those extra years in retirement, and the risk of lower government benefits, will lead to a financial crisis. Thankfull...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Alberta Advantage Revisited The Alberta advantage, is all about living in a place where you can earn more, and your cost of living, especially for homes and taxes, is less. This advantage really shows up in the amount people can save. Between 2019 and 2025, the average Alberta household was able to put about $65,000 in the piggy bank. BC, because of its h...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Share Buybacks & Stock Prices For well over a century, most of the gains from owning stocks came from the dividends they paid - up to 90% in fact. Then things began to change. In our present era, only 30% of gains come from dividends. The remainder, or 70%, now comes from share price appreciation. One of the reasons for this, is, companies are using more of t...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Dividend Growth Dividend paying stocks are a wonderful thing. But companies, that can both, pay and grow their dividends over time - are even better. Like many Canadian investors, I have banks stocks in my portfolio that have been owned continuously for decades. This sector has amply rewarded us for our patience. Many of these bank shares have grown their div...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Strategic Reserves & Supercycles During the Covid epidemic, global supply chains collapsed, leading to shortages of many critical goods. It is happening again with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. We are experiencing shortages in oil, natural gas, fertilizer, aluminum and sulphur. The country that has spent many decades preparing for this is China. They h...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Best of Times Even though the world has its problems, we are still living in the greatest period in history. Across the long arc of human existence, economic growth crawled forward at a rate of perhaps 0.1 percent per year. This was enough to support a very gradual increase in population, but not enough to improve the average persons living standards. The...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Orbital Data Centers Rocket companies are the next big thing among tech investors. They will provide the transportation needed to build data centers in outer space. The advantage touted by fans of orbital data centers, is that they can be powered by solar energy - which is available 24/7 in space. The disadvantages no one wants to talk about, are the incredib...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - We The People I recently watched a public debate on economic policy. The audience would cheer and applaud every time one of the debaters would blame politicians, the rich, or big business for the economic quagmire we are in. Over the 90 minute event, the one group that was conveniently ignored was the general public. You, me, the neighbour next door, the rest...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Old School Economics Current economic thinking is to narrow the tax base as much as possible and get fewer and fewer people to pay more and more. And secondly, the solution to everything involves spending lavishly and not fiscal restraint. I am obviously showing my age here, but I can remember not too far back when most nations pushed for policies that expand...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - A Needle In The Haystack Some sectors of the economy are fairly easy to determine, which individual companies in it, will be winners or losers. Other sectors like technology, bioscience and junior mining are very hard. The number of companies in these areas that become successful are small in number…but for the ones that make it…the payoffs can be huge. For m...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Investing & Ego Investing in stocks is no place for those who have never been wrong or can’t be bear to be wrong. Some people are wired psychologically with a need to be consistently correct. For people like that, investing will simply chew them up mentally. Investing is a messy business. You make lots of mistakes, and all those mistakes are very visible. Eve...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Why Markets Remain High The stock markets keep hitting all time highs in spite of tariffs, regional wars, trade embargoes and $100 oil prices. This is leaving investors wondering why stocks continue to levitate on what seems like thin air. The answer involves money flows into artificial intelligence and defence. The estimated cost to build out AI infrastructu...

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...