Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Getting & Staying Wealthy Getting wealthy and staying that way are two different skill sets. To get rich you need plenty of optimism and be a risk taker. To maintain riches requires paranoia and conservatism - the opposite traits, it took to build wealth in the first place. Most people are good at one but far less are competent at both. Bill Hwang was a hedge...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Billionaires & Sports Franchises People wonder why billionaires buy sports franchises, because, other than massaging their egos, sports teams are thought to be a money pit. Well, not so according to recent sport franchise stats, which tracked six decades of transactions across the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL. Team valuations have compounded at roughly 13% per year...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Natural Gas Prices For the first time in decades, North American natural gas is moving from surplus to shortage. Demand has grown partly because of the increased number of Liquifidied Natural Gas Plants that export this super cooled fuel overseas. Our increasingly electrified world, with its EV’s and data centres, is using ever greater amounts of gas to creat...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Companies That Switch Businesses Sometimes companies jump from a dead end business, into one that is trendy and attracts lots of dollars from young, inexperienced investors. A good example is Donald Trump Media and Technology. This company dabbles in social media and crypto currency. Those activities haven‘t worked out that well, so the company is trying to b...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Shrinking Public Markets The number of stocks that publicly trade in Canada has been shrinking for decades. In 2008, Canada had 3520 companies listed on its two major exchanges. As of the end of 2024, that number had shrunk to 2114 - a drop of 40%. This trend reflects more companies choosing to stay private rather than face the increased regulatory burden of...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Kids Need Motivation There is a reason that wealth seldom makes it past the third generation. In the real world a person gets educated for a trade or profession, starts at an entry level, and then works their way up over decades. Why do this, some ask, when you can just wait it out until you receive your big inheritance, and then live happily ever after havin...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Radio Bubble One of the most significant inventions of the last century was the radio. Just like AI today, people knew it was going to be life changing, but in the 1920’s no one had figured out how to make any money from its use. Investors piled in and pushed stocks like RCA into the stratosphere on the belief the rally would never end. By the close of th...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Oil Glut Currently the world is producing about 2 1/2 million barrels of oil per day more than it is consuming. That glut is expected to at least double this year, and is making investors gloomy on the sector. Lower prices means lower profits and lower stocks. But falling oil prices also have an upside. Refiners of crude increase their profits because their f...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - AI & Your Shopping Habits As AI gets more and more consumer data about you, it can build a profile to determine how much you would be willing to pay for a product or service. This is likely to take more money out of your wallet, than make things cheaper. A recent study by Carnegie Mellon University, concluded that personalized rankings, using AI-algorithms, i...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Bubbles Have An Upside Asset price bubbles often wipe out investors when they burst, but they can also present a huge upside for the economy over the long term. Take for example the fibre optic bubble in the late 1990’s. Investor enthusiasm and excess capital built out so much infrastructure, that prices collapsed, taking decades of rising demand to soak up e...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Trump & Mid Terms Canadians are concerned that President Trump still has three more years left in his term. This gives him plenty of time to damage our countries economy with his aggressive trade policies, especially since the Republicans control the White House, the senate and the House of Representatives. The thing that could slow Trump down are the mid ter...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Copper Used In Data Centres Growing demand for copper is coming from an unexpected source. Huge data centres, such as the ones using Nvidia’s high end computer chips, can cost a billion dollars and need up to 50,000 tons of the orange metal per facility. With copper prices over $13,000 per ton, the price tag for the metal used in just one of these mega data c...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The CRA’s Lack of Service The Canada Revenue Agency recently announced a program to improve their call Centers. And there is a lot that needs to get better. A recent performance audit found that agents were only providing accurate information to callers 17% of the time. Customer service was also dismal. Only 5% of the calls were answered within 15 minutes and...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Public Sector Advantages In the last decade, the public sector is where the biggest job growth has been. Government employment between 2015 and 2024 expanded at an annual average rate of 2.7% per year, while private sector employment grew 1.7% per year. Government jobs now make up 21% of Canada’s total. The only place this hasn’t been true is in the province...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Confidence Is A Mirage When humans are certain about a positive future event happening, they tend to invest aggressively. In the last quarter century, there were three periods when investors were super enthusiastic, preceding the tech bubble in 1999, prior to the Great Financial Crash in 2007-2009 and before the COVID outbreak in 2021. The bear market that fo...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Canada Loses A Bargaining Chip Trump’s capture of Venezuelan dictator Maduro, is not great news for Canada. Many US refineries are configured to process heavy oil. Currently much of that feedstock comes from Canada, because until recently, our main competitor, Venezuela, was under embargo, so very little of their oil reached the US. American intervention in V...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Winner Take All Technology is a sector where one player eventually dominates and competitors disappear. Google won the search war, Amazon the e-commerce battle and Meta the social media fight. Very often it is winner take all. The AI landscape today has some big players competing for dominance. Google’s Gemini 3, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Azure, Elon Musk...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - TFSA Info The amount you can put into a Tax Free Saving Account remains unchanged for 2026. The maximum is still $7,000. The sweet spot, is for those who were 18 or older as of 2009, and have never contributed to a TFSA. Because of the carry forward provisions, which allow for banking past unused contributions, and then using them in the future. This gives th...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Fear Greed Index Investors are a fickle bunch. Their emotions tend to ricochet erratically from bullish to bearish and back again. Understanding investor sentiment gives you an awareness as to what others are doing in the market. A good barometer of investor psychology is a website called feargreedindex.net. It uses market and trading indicators to plot a...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - RRSP Info This is the time of year when people concentrate on investing in their retirement savings plans. The new maximum contribution limit for RRSP’s in 2025 will increase to $32,490. If you are already contributing for 2026, the limit is $33,810. The deadline for putting money into an RRSP, to get a deduction for the 2025 tax year is March 2, 2026. The no...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - When To Take CPP The Canada Pension Plan is available starting at 60 and can be taken any time up to age 70. The income gap between taking CPP at 60, and waiting until 70, is an important consideration. If you start taking your benefit at 60, you will receive about $640 per month, at 65 this increases to $1,000 per month, and at 70 expands to $1,420. That’s a...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - New Years Resolutions New Year’s is a time for course corrections and fresh starts. January 1st allows us to reset the clock and make better financial choices. Sadly most resolutions won’t survive the end of the month. Often the reason is their size and complexity. When goals are to big, to hard, or to much work, we get discouraged and give up on them. The ke...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Debt & Gold Prices It used to be that the US government would step in with extra borrowing to stabilize the economy in times of war or financial duress. Since Covid, spending has gone crazy and the debt machine no longer has any brakes. Not only does the US have to find buyers for new debt, but past borrowing needs to be rolled over and renewed. Of the 37 tri...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - AI’s Power Needs One of the factors that could derail the Artificial Intelligence freight train is a simple lack of electricity needed to run all the data Centers that form its backbone. The demand for power is overwhelming supply and forcing some completed data centres to sit idle, waiting for additional capacity to be added. Currently it takes three to four...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Dividends & Performance Dividends, are cash payments a company makes to its shareholders usually on a quarterly basis. Looking at a companies dividend history can provide clues to its performance potential. According to Ned Davis Research, companies that start paying a dividend or regularly increase it, are the stars of the show. Stocks with new or rising div...