The investor and the financial and regulatory system
Our site identifies certain aspects of the Canadian financial system which do not sufficiently take into account the interests of individual investors and encourages our readers to make their voices known when the occasion arises in order to change the rules. Some examples?
Revise the limits on ownership of Canadian chartered banks to encourage competition;
Encourage the establishment of a new major brokerage firm independent of the Canadian chartered banks, in conjunction with any future demand for a bank merger in Canada;
Change the habits of regulatory authorities who are not sufficiently concerned by the level of mutual fund management fees. One move in this direction would be to remove the prohibition on the sale, without further formalities, of U.S. mutual funds such as Vanguard in Canada;
Change the rules of the Bank of Canada to facilitate the direct purchase of Canadian treasury bonds by individual investors;
Permit individuals to directly purchase a single share from issuers in order to qualify to participate in issuer share purchase plans;
Establish rules for civil litigation against brokers and advisers for errors in sale documents and research, so that they track the rules applicable to litigation against issuers; a change in the law was recently adopted in Ontario facilitating litigation against issuers, but not against brokers and advisers;
Change the tax legislation which does not permit deduction of numerous expenses incurred by autonomous investors;
Require brokers and mutual funds to compute for their clients the annual return on their investments; and
Change the habits of regulatory authorities who furnish little information to encourage independent investing (for example, information on direct investing without use of an intermediary).
For a list of public regulatory authorities and politicians to contact to express your point of view, see the list established by a group which is currently attempting to change the taxation of real return bonds (http://canadianinvestor.tripod.com ).
Do you think it is possible through careful securities research, to reliably select market-beating portfolios? Wrong: the data show that although many investors do, in almost all cases this is purely the result of the randomness of the markets- in simple terms, dumb luck.William Bernstein
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Our site identifies certain aspects of the Canadian financial system which do not sufficiently take into account the interests of individual investors and encourages our readers to make their voices known when the occasion arises in order to change the rules. Some examples?
mutual fund