Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - When Risk Gets Riskier Bull markets follow a predictable pattern. In their early stages, money flows into high quality investments. As they become overvalued, investors look at the next rung down for things that haven’t yet participated in the rise. These are usually lower quality and higher risk. This self reinforcing loop continues until even the most volat...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Valuing Bitcoin Bitcoin has traded between a high of $123,000 and a low of $63,000 over the last 12 months. The question is, how do you value whether it is cheap, and time to buy, or expensive, and time to sell. Bitcoin has no physical assets, no sales, no profits or patents. Nothing that gives us a set of metrics, or way to calculate its worth. Its value, is...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Gold’s Golden Era These are very exciting times for holders of gold stocks. Four years ago, the spread between a gold miners production costs, and what they could sell their product for, left them with a profit of about $600 US per ounce. Today with gold around $5000, their profits have ballooned to $$3500 per ounce - almost 6 times higher. These are the bigg...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Estate Sale Bargains Virtually every time I go shopping on Amazon or at a retail store, I came away with sticker shock, shaking my head in disbelief at how fast prices have climbed in the last few years. This unaffordability, has caused a resurgence in discount, next to new, and second hand transactions, as people look for ways to stretch their dollars. One a...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Seven Trillion Dollar Question To make Artificial Intelligence a functioning global reality, requires enormous resources. The cost for all the AI programs, data centres, computers, semiconductors and electrical generating infrastructure is expected to reach 7 trillion dollars over the next decade. What no one seems to be asking, is where are the profits g...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - USMCA Will Be A Grind Canadian’s have pushed stock markets ever higher. Pricing them to perfection and assuming that nothing could happen to disrupt their rosy economic outlook. People for the moment are ignoring the very difficult round of trade negotiations with Mexico and the US, starting in less than four months. Trump has made numerous derogatory remarks...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - USMCA & Opportunity Under the USMCA trade agreement, the U.S., Canada and Mexico must meet on July 1, 2026, to determine whether to extend the treaty for another 16 years, negotiate changes or withdraw. If they cannot reach consensus, the agreement continues with annual reviews until its scheduled sunset in 2036. Expect there to be a lot of sharp disagreement...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The US Policy Uncertainty Index It might be tempting to seek safety when markets get rattled, but high levels of uncertainty can actually be positive for stocks. There is an index which tracks how investors feel about out the economic times they are in called the U.S. Economic Policy Uncertainty Composite Index. Research over a 40 year period between 1985 and...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Who Is Right? The best descriptor I have heard summarizing the investment outlook for 2026 - is a dumpster fire. The world seems to have gone crazy. Trade friction, a global arms race, regime change in Venezuela, threats of it in Iran, and endless wars in Ukraine and Gaza, have made the world an uncertain place. Even though the year has gotten off to a chaoti...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Incomes Need To Catch Up The government has put the brakes on record numbers of people immigrating into Canada. Fewer bodies have lowered demand for everything from health care to groceries. Slower population growth has the effect of reducing inflation and increasing affordability. The good news, is this decision has helped Canadian rents fall 5 months in a r...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Silver Demand Silvers dramatic price moves are a classic example of supply exceeding demand. Silver has few peers when it comes to conducting electricity. Its use in electric cars, solar panels and data centres, means that industrial products are now by far the biggest driver of demand. On the supply side there has been little incentive to produce more, becau...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Copper Miner Reluctance If copper usage is expected to increase dramatically, why aren’t miners doubling or tripling their efforts to find and develop the resources necessary to keep up with demand. The answer is simply profit. Miners need the price of copper to stay above $11,000 a tonne on a sustained basis to break even on new mines. Currently the orange m...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Federal Debt Last year Canada enjoyed hitting a number of financial records. The stock market, residential real estate and household wealth reached all time highs. The one crown we shouldn’t be proud of, is our Federal Debt. That wall of red ink, according to the Fraser Institute, climbed to an inflation adjusted 2.35 trillion dollars last year. This is the h...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Recycled Silver Investors are continually bombarded with stories that metal production is not meeting demand and as a result, big shortages and skyrocketing prices are the future. Silver is a good example. The amount of product coming out of the mines has not kept up with demand for the last 5 years. The problem with these numbers, is they conveniently leave...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Beyond the Magnificent Seven All investors want to talk about is Artificial intelligence, data centres and computer chips. It is like nothing else exists….but it does. European banks, for example, have outperformed America’s Magnificent Seven over not just one, but the last five years. Many markets in Asia, Europe and even South America beat the US last year....

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Silver Profits If you want to understand why silver stocks have gone crazy, just look at the math. Last year silver prices averaged about $28 an ounce, and it cost about $20 an ounce to pull the metal out of the ground. At those prices, silver miners were making money, but no one was getting rich. Fast forward one year, and we find that production costs haven...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Sport Betting Fraud One of the risks of sports betting is fraud, and it has just raised its ugly head. The US recently charged 20 people for operating a betting ring that fixed US College and Chinese Professional basketball games. This group bribed players between $10,000 and $30,000 to deliberately underperform in order for their teams to lose and for fraudu...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Gambling Is Not Investing The lines between gambling and investing are becoming more and more blurred. In the US there are now platforms that let you bet on the outcome of a football game and then with the proceeds turn around and trade your favorite stock - all on one site. Yet gambling and investing are very different activities. Betting on who will win the...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Currency Risk The Trump administration has made it very clear that one of its major economic goals is to lower the value of the US dollar against other countries currencies. Devaluation is often used by nations to reduce the cost of their exports and make prices more competitive on global markets. So far Trump’s strategy seems to be working, as the US greenba...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - 24 Hour Stock Trading If you are a working stiff who likes to manage your own investment portfolio, one of the drawbacks, has always been the hours the stock and bond markets are open for trading. That 6 1/2 hour window generally coincides with when most us are at work. This makes it difficult to access markets on a timely basis, when we are distracted by, or...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Natural Gas & Data Centres When data centres were just starting to roll out, the strategy was to determine a location and worry about the energy needed to run them later. Well that dynamic has changed. Growing demand for electricity means you have to secure supply first and build near it. Your billion dollar data centre will sit idle if it doesn’t have the ju...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Home Affordability Canada has a housing affordability crisis. Thankfully it only involves about 30% of the population and is focussed in two main areas - Greater Vancouver and Greater Toronto. In Vancouver it takes 89% of a households income to cover home ownership costs. In Toronto that figure is 65%. Beyond this tiny geographic area there are plenty of plac...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Oil Price Sweet Spot Oil prices are in the goldilocks zone of not to high, and not to low, but seemingly just right. NATO countries like current prices because it puts the squeeze on Russia’s war financing. Saudi Arabia likes it because as a low cost producer, it allows them to increase market share. Trump likes it for taking some of the inflationary pressure...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Government Bonds & Risk Investors historically preferred to own government bonds over corporates because of their perceived creditworthiness and low default risk. In many cases that perception is a thing of the past. Governments have taken on staggering amounts of debt and reduced their ability to support those interest payouts by lowering taxes. Today, inves...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Time vs Timing One of the great investment myths, is that really smart investors can consistently buy at the bottom. The chances of doing that with any regularity, are between slim and none. If you bought an Exchange Traded Fund that tracked the Dow Jones Industrial Average, your odds of buying it, at a one time low, are only 3%. The big money is made investi...