Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert

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...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Costs of Home Ownership When comparing the cost of home ownership in the 6 biggest cities in Canada, Edmonton and Calgary come out as the most affordable. In Edmonton, the share of household income needed to cover ownership costs is 33.2 percent. Calgary comes in at 41.6%. In Edmonton’s case, home ownership costs are 1/2 those of Toronto and 2.7 times less ex...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Walmart Recession Indicator When economic times get tough, people change their shopping habits and start looking for bargains. This results in a pickup among discounters like Walmart and Costco and a decrease in traffic to luxury retailers. The bigger this downward shift in consumer spending, the more likely the economy is to experience a significant slow...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - AI & Crime The advancement of Artificial intelligence will provide science, business, government and individuals with productivity tools no one thought possible even a decade ago. It will also give criminals the ability to crack the the technology firewalls used to protect our financial system. The US government is so concerned about AI’s ability to exploit t...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Newbirds Crazy In 2021 a company called Allbirds went public. They made shoes out of marino wool and other natural materials that were all the rage of the tech bros at the time. Move the clock forward 5 years, and you find a company that is on the ropes, and whose shares have lost 99.6% of their original value. But then, a couple of weeks ago, a miracle happe...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Going Back Is The Problem A lot of excitement was generated when America said it would use its navy to force open the Strait of Hormuz and give the hundreds of ships still trapped there access to international waters. That effort will certainly help to temporarily ease the shortfalls in fertilizer and crude that have been bottled up, but it doesn’t address th...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Pipelines Are Less Risk Oil keeps moving above $100 US every time there is negative news on the Iran war and then it sinks on any glimmer of hope that there could be peace. These price swings are so hard to predict, that even professional oil traders find it hard to make money. A safer way to get exposure to the energy sector, is to look beyond oil and gas pr...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Wars & Elections What will determine the fate of the global economy and the direction of its stock markets, is how long the stalemate between the US and Iran continues. Trump is facing an increasingly hostile electorate. The majority of whom don’t want to be involved in a war with Persia, and don’t like the pain energy prices are having on their wallets. Unle...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Job Vacancy Rate Another way to look at Canada’s labor market is by counting the number of job postings that haven’t found anyone to fill them. This is called the job vacancy rate and as of January, there were 492,400 jobs that were open. Nationwide, this averages out to 3 unemployed persons for every job vacancy. These numbers go from highs of 5.4 unempl...