Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Growth Stocks - The Ups & Downs The top 20 US growth stocks had blistering performance over the last 40 years, earning an annual return of 19.3% a year. This handily beat the S&P 500’s 11.8% per year. However, big returns were accompanied with big volatility. These 20 stocks went through rough patchs during their 4 decade history, that drove their share price...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Oilsand Productivity Gains For most of their existence, companies that processed crude from oilsand deposits, had some of, if not the highest production costs among global competitors. Now, due to cutting edge use of robotics, artificial intelligence, self driving vehicles, and dramatically reduced shut downs for maintenance, that has changed. Oilsand produce...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Robots & Reshoring People don’t believe that the reshoring of manufacturing back to the US will work, because labor costs are too high, making products here uncompetitive in price. And that is true. But what about if labour is replaced by machines? Artificial intelligence and robots have made incredible advances in the last few years. Machines don’t need brea...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Mag 7 Performance Stock market returns have been overwhelmingly influenced by a small number of companies. Over the past decade, the S&P 500’s performance has been driven almost entirely by the “Magnificent 7”: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. During this 10 year period, the MAG 7 group of tech stocks has had an annual average comp...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Trump’s Unpredictability People think that Trump’s repeated u turns on tariffs, deadlines, peace initiatives and trade strategies is a symptom of a deranged mind. They might be right. Or it could be that Trump is using unpredictability as a strategy. Keeping people off balance and not knowing how to respond, often gives him an advantage when negotiating. I ha...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Financial EQ Versus IQ A prevailing myth is that the greater a persons IQ, the better they will do financially. Research shows that EQ, or emotional maturity, is much more important to wealth creation than IQ. We all know lots of people who are pretty average intellectually but have done amazingly well financially. IQ isn’t something we can do much to improve...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - A Tempest In A Teapot Canadian’s don’t like being bullied and are upset by Trump’s overtures to make Canada the 51st state. These emotions have spilled over into the news cycle and have blown Trump’s tariff threats way out of proportion to their economic impact. Our central bank says 100% of energy exports and 95% of other exports are free trade compliant. Th...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Voters To Blame America’s equivalent to our Canada Pension plan is in a sorry state. Most estimates have it running out of money in 10 years or less. If that happens, the average US pensioner will see a cut in their benefits by over 20%. Citizens blame government leaders for not having the courage to do anything about it. But the real problem is the voter. An...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Dining Out Most of you remember a time when dining out in a restaurant was a big deal. Like most things, times and preferences have changed. Today, nearly 75% of all restaurant traffic happens off premise - meaning that almost 3 out of every 4 restaurant orders are taken to go. As usual Millennials and Gen Z are driving the trend with 6 out of 10 of them usin...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Buy The Haystack In some sectors it is hard for even professionals to spot companies early in their corporate lives that will become huge winners - think Microsoft, Apple or Amazon. John Bogle, an early pioneer in ETF’s and low fee mutual funds, had some great advice. He said, “ instead of trying to find the needle in a haystack - just buy the entire haystack...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Selling & Tax Sometimes people want to sell a stock because they are worried markets will drop significantly and their profits will disappear. But before hitting the sell button, it is worth taking some time to do a simple calculation first. If you are sitting on a big profit and think a pullback will be temporary, figure out how much the sale will cost you i...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Making It & Keeping It Making money is hard. But keeping it is even harder. The Forbes 400 is an annual list of the wealthiest American’s. Unfortunately getting on the list and staying there involve two entirely different skill sets. Roughly 20% of the names, drop off the list per decade for reasons other than death or family turnover. Extinction is a big fac...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Disruptors Get Disrupted Remember when Blockbuster Video burst onto the scene. They disrupted the movie industry with a simple premise. People loved the convenience of renting movies they could watch from home. At one point the company expanded to 25,000 stores. Then along came Netflix. It began to disrupt their business with even more convenient home streami...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Chinese Vehicles Western auto manufacturers typically redesign their vehicles every 5 years and their trucks every 10. Meanwhile, Chinese developers have slashed vehicle development time by more than half - to as little as 18 months. This gives them a huge competitive advantage in both costs, and the newness and variety of vehicles they have in their showroom...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Robots Are Coming If you want a sneak peek at what a workplace dominated by AI and Robotics will look like, your window into that future, is a typical Amazon fulfilment centre. Roughly 75% of Amazon deliveries are now assisted by robotic systems. The number of packages that Amazon ships per employee has soared from 175 in 2015 to 3,870 today. Amazon will soon...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Electric Vehicle Repair Rates It is logical to assume that since electric vehicles have simpler power trains, they should require fewer repairs than those with internal combustion engines. According to J. D. Power, the real world experience is quite different. Owners of cutting edge, tech-filled battery electric and plug in hybrids are seeing problems that re...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Canadian Crude & US Demand The problem with horizontal drilling in shale formations is the high rate of production decline these wells experience. This is tolerable when prices are high, but when they drop below $60 per barrel, which is the breakeven point for a lot of shale drillers, new production dries up. This is currently what is happening in the US. Few...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Thinking Two Dimensionally When investing in oil and gas stocks, we often think price increases are good and price declines are bad. But that is one dimensional thinking. When prices go up, of course energy stocks will rise. But when prices decline, a whole other category of businesses do well. Capturing those moves is two dimensional thinking. Winners in a d...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - ariffs & Markets Markets are trading at all time highs. Traders seem to be ignoring all the threats out there. Tariff’s can lead to trade wars and if not managed properly bring on a nasty recession and bear market. There are two opinions as to why this is happening. The first is that we are in a bubble where greed and FOMO, the fear of missing out, are distor...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Stocks & Inflation If you buy a 10 year, fixed rate bond, the investment will pay a steady return and at maturity you are promised to get your principle back. The hidden risk with fixed income, is inflation - which in Canada has averaged 2.65% over the last decade. It slowly gnaws away at your returns. One way to protect against inflation is by owning stocks....

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Disasters & Insurance If Trump hasn’t scared you off buying a winter home in the US sunbelt - maybe this will. The natural disasters that took place the last few years have caused insurers to see a lot of red ink. Huge claim payouts forced them to dramatically jack up insurance rates. Take Florida for example, a favorite snowbird destination that has seen its...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Solar Growth After decades of rosy predictions, solar usage is about to hit prime time. Estimates have solar power generation surpassing nuclear in 2026, wind in 2027, dams in 2028, gas in 2030, and coal in 2032. At its current growth rate, solar capacity is doubling about every three years—and by a factor of 10 over the next decade. By 2035, solar could be e...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Black Markets The world’s shadow economy, or black market, includes everything from street vendors to illicit drug trade. It is that grey area of finance where government has no control, and does not tax. Globally, the black market is huge - generating an estimated 12.5 trillion dollars annually in revenue. In places like Brazil, India and China, the shadow e...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Copper One of the tried and true ways of convincing new investors to part with their money is to tell them what they are buying is going to be the next big thing. Take for example the metal copper. Since the dawn of Tesla, and their market transforming electric car, the experts have been saying there will be a huge shortage of this industrial metal and prices...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Hang On To The Winners At an annual general meeting in 2013 Warren Buffett gave his shareholders some insight into his stock picking process. He said that over his life, to that point, he had owned between 400 and 500 companies. Out of all those picks, the bulk of his profits came from just 10 of them. His partner Charlie Munger added, that without those 10,...