Tax-Adjusted Asset Allocation

Spreading investment assets across different types of assets in order to diversify and reduce risk is a fundamental investing best-practice, which we wrote about in asset allocation and again in the context of an investment policy statement.

Two factors - taxes and debts, such as a loan or mortgage - can dramatically alter your asset allocation. Beware, what you see may not actually be what you have! This week, we'll explore the effect of tax.

Now that the cumulative TFSA contribution limits are reaching substantial amounts (4 years already at $5000 per year plus a just-announced higher amount of $5500 for 2013, making $25,500 in total), it is likely many investors will have investments spread through TFSAs, RRSPs and perhaps non-registered taxable accounts as well.

Taxation differs amongst account types! 

TFSA - The entire value within such an account is tax-free. Neither the principal / initial value / contributions nor any accumulated returns of whatever type, such as capital gains, interest and dividends is taxable. There is no tax along the way, year by year or upon withdrawal. TFSAs are wonderfully simple - what you see in your account is what you have to spend at any time.

RRSP (or other registered retirement accounts like LIRA, LRIF) - The entire value of these accounts is taxable upon withdrawal. Think of this as the fact that the government is your partner and owns part of your RRSP (read Retail Investor.org's Nitty-Gritty of the RRSP Model for a cleverly presented and detailed explanation). The percentage the government owns is the percentage of your marginal tax rate at withdrawal, which varies by province and income level (rates available from Ernst & Young's tax calculator). Everything is taxed at the rate for ordinary income, which is the highest marginal rate. It doesn't matter what type of gains were made (capital gains, interest, dividends), withdrawals are taxed as ordinary income. Taxes are only applied upon withdrawal, not year by year along the way. This makes our estimation a bit uncertain since it is hard to know what your exact tax rate may be in twenty years during retirement given all the possible future changes from government or your own circumstances.

The point remains, however, that a big chunk of an RRSP balance is not yours to spend, nor do the asset balances or allocations within represent what you have in reality after taxes. For instance, Ernst & Young's tax tables tell us that a Manitoba taxpayer with $80,000 taxable income will pay about 39% of an RRSP balance to the government and thus only owns 61%.

This could be very significant if you have followed the oft-cited advice to put all fixed income assets into the RRSP only, as we show in our example below. Your net real after-tax asset allocation could be quite different from what you intend.

Taxable - Interest, dividends and distributed capital gains (such as from ETFs or mutual funds that will show up on T-slips issued by providers or brokers) get taxed all along the way year by year. That part is simple and straightforward - there is no looming tax liability and no adjustment required to see net ownership or asset allocation. However, another part is not so simple. Capital gains that have accumulated through price increases of any security over its Adjusted Cost Base (see previous post on ETFs and Mutual Funds: Calculating Capital Gains) are not taxable year by year. Buy and hold investors who keep the same investment without selling for years may well have a substantial capital gains tax liability. That tax liability does reduce net amounts so an asset allocation adjustment is required.

Example
Let's use a Saskatchewan taxpayer at the $80,000 taxable income bracket. The tax rate on ordinary income is 35% and on capital gains is 18%. Furthermore, the portfolio is spread across a TFSA, a RRSP and a Taxable account. All of the fixed income bonds are in the RRSP. We'll assume the investor has made, but not yet cashed in, a $5000 capital gain in equities held in the Taxable account.

The investor wants to have a balanced portfolio 50% in each of equities and bonds. But that's not the reality after tax. Equities actually make up 56% of the portfolio.

The fix is simple enough. Rebalance to reflect taxes - boosting the bond holdings in the RRSP by selling some of the equities will shift the portfolio to the intended allocation.

The other, probably sobering, implication to the tax adjustment is that the investor has considerably less - $53,400 or 27% less - money to spend in reality than the account balances would seemingly indicate. As ever, it's better to face this unpleasant reality than ignore it.

One thing this tax adjustment does not suggest is that TFSAs or Taxable accounts are better than RRSPs, despite the zero or much smaller adjustment. TFSAs and RRSPs in principle give the exact same tax advantage. We note this and discuss other account comparison and choice factors in one of our most popular posts - RRSP vs TFSA vs RESP vs Non-Registered Taxable Account?

Next week, we'll explore the effect of debt on asset allocation.

Acknowledgement:  This post idea originated in Bill Reichenstein's Tax-Efficient Saving and Investing from the TIAA-CREF Institute website.

How to Sharpe-n Your ETF Selection Process

Reward vs risk, that is a universal, pervasive, constant and critical trade-off and comparison that we must make as investors. There is plenty of descriptive qualitative assessment of reward-risk factors and indeed that is useful but how can we get a quantitative assessment and put a number on it?

Enter William Sharpe, Nobel prize-winner for his work advancing investment theory, with the formula he created in 1966 called by others, not himself, the Sharpe ratio. Sharpe himself gave it a more explanatory name, the "reward-to-variability" ratio. The "rewards" part refers to returns, or performance, composed of price changes and dividends. The "variability" part refers to the familiar ups and downs of price, the volatility, which is the finance industry standard used to characterize the riskiness of securities like stocks and bonds and by extension to ETFs.

Things are not quite so simple and uniform in application!
Unfortunately, the excellent basic idea was found to be too worthwhile to leave alone in its original form. The academics, along with Sharpe himself, got busy expanding and perfecting it, as related in the Wikipedia Sharpe Ratio article, which contains a link to Sharpe's own expansion and generalization of the concept.

Depending on the formulation used, the Sharpe ratio may be calculated quite differently according to choice of benchmark, and may sometimes show a reward-risk variant called the Information Ratio (for those interested, a couple of good explanations of the difference are Clarifying the Information Ratio and Sharpe Ratio on Seeking Alpha and Adding Value in Fund Evaluations on Advisor Perspectives). Thus, we should not be too surprised that the actual values, often for the same time period, differ from source to source as we see below in our sample of some ETFs. None of the sources give enough detail on how the figures are calculated to know exactly what is going on so we have to take them as they are and use them as we can.

Delving into the details and the math can get very subtle. Let's simplify for us mere mortals. The bottom line - when comparing ETFs, higher Sharpe ratios are better. In other words, when returns in the numerator are divided by the risk/volatility in the denominator, the greater the ratio, the better. Higher returns with same risk gives a higher Sharpe Ratio, as does the same return with lower volatility. That makes intuitive sense.

Sources for Sharpe Ratios
Here are some websites that publish Sharpe Ratios for ETFs. The usual place for the Ratio is under the Risk tab.

• Yahoo Finance - covers both US and Canadian ETFs but only has data for latest 3-year and 5-year periods (if the ETF has existed that long) i.e. no 1-year figures
• Zecco - only US ETFs; time period not specified but looks like 3-years
• IndexUniverse - only US ETFs; only for 3-years
• BMO Investorline - US and Canadian ETFs for 1-year and 3-years; access under the ETF Compare tool; must be a BMOIL client to access;
• TD Waterhouse - US and Canadian ETFs for 1-year, 3-years, 5-years, 10-years; access under the ETFs Fund Comparison tool; must be a TDW client to access;
• Other online brokers possibly have this capability too - check under ETFs 

Example table
We looked up a sample of commodity and Canadian equity ETFs to come up with the following comparison table.

Ins and Outs of using the Sharpe Ratios

• Look for patterns of higher results across sources and time periods e.g. in green highlighting iShares S&P/TSX Canadian Dividend Aristocrats Index Fund Common Class (TSX: CDZ) does best by quite a lot in both 1- and 3-year periods. However, as a dividend fund is it truly in the same category as the others in the list which are either cap-weighted (symbols XIU and ZCN), fundamentally-weighted (CRQ) or low volatility (ZLB)? We tend to think so but others may not. Note also how the barely year-old ZLB has an even better Sharpe Ratio than CDZ over the 1-year period. Will that continue? The 1-year blue highlighted Ratio in the table suggests that might be the case though it is early days. For an interpretation on how these types of ETFs might perform, see Tomatoes and the Low Vol Effect at Research Affiliates. It's interesting that much of the difference in Sharpe Ratio amongst these funds arises because of lower volatility (standard deviation) in CDZ versus XIU and CRQ and even lower volatility in ZLB (see our previous post on Low Volatility ETFs for a discussion of their promise). 
• Sometimes the data may be wrong - we cannot be sure but the vast difference of Ratios for BLND and BCM in Zecco from others in the category looks too dissimilar to be true (yellow background cells). Neither ETF is three years old yet but the rest of the data looks like 3-year figures. Maybe Zecco has mixed time periods?
• Sharpe Ratio is not the be-all and end-all - Other factors enter the picture in comparing and picking the best ETFs, as we have always done with our postings e.g. the latest on Commodity ETFs. Asset allocation and correlation, fit within portfolio goals, along with other risk factors (inflation and currency, default, management cost and taxes, required rate of return) all should play a role in ETF selection.
• The future may not be like the past - Using data that goes back only three years or even five is not a long history that proves superiority conclusively. 

Bottom line: The Sharpe Ratio is another useful tool in the investor's arsenal. 

Disclaimer: this post is my opinion only and should not be construed as investment advice. Readers should be aware that the above comparisons are not an investment recommendation. They rest on other sources, whose accuracy is not guaranteed and the article may not interpret such results correctly. Do your homework before making any decisions and consider consulting a professional advisor.

Best Pick Commodity ETFs/ETNs for the Canadian Long Term Investor

Our original post in 2009 on investing in commodities outlined the diversification and inflation protection arguments as well as the risks. Our next post on the subject in 2010 looked at the then existing ETFs and ETNs to pick out a favorite. It's time to have a look again as several other new funds have come on the scene and the performance track record is accumulating.

The Commodity ETFs and ETNs
The panoply of commodity exchange-traded products available in US markets, which are of course purchasable by the Canadian online investor through a discount broker, is found on both ETFdb and IndexUniverse. We restrict our search to broad funds that track a basket with multiple commodities. There are also many single commodity funds available that are better suited to short-term speculation on the price of oil or gold, for example but we are looking at the investment to go within a diversified portfolio with wide asset classes. The only Canadian offering for a broad product that includes multiple commodities is the iShares Broad Commodity Index Fund (CAD-Hedged) (TSX: CBR).

Here is how we narrowed down the sixteen or so funds from ETFdb's list to the four, along with CBR, that look to be reasonable picks.

1) Futures contract rolling method - We eliminated any funds that use the so-called front month rolling method, which replaces an expiring contract with the nearest-dated contract. As explained in the Ten Commandments of Commodity Investing on Commodity HQ, not using front month rolling is extremely important to minimize the negative return effects of contango. The fund provider iPath emphasizes this primary selection factor in its factsheet iPath Commodity ETNs, in which it suggests that a front month rolling fund such as iPath^® Dow Jones-UBS Commodity Index Total Return ETN (NYSE: DJP) is more appropriate to short-term trading. Note that DJP is the second largest fund by assets in the ETFdb list, illustrating that large and popular does not necessarily mean it is appropriate for a specific investing purpose and in our case it is not, so we have excluded it.

Beyond avoiding front-month rolling, it is more or less impossible to tell whose fancy rolling method will turn out to be best. UCI may, however, have slight edge since it buys futures up to three years out, which conforms to the ideas we uncovered in our 2010 post about the advantages of rolling contracts further ahead and less frequently. The usual caution applies - the future may not be like the past that created the data out of which the rolling method was conceived.

2) Index sector balance - We eliminated any funds  where one sector, energy being the problematic one, makes up more than 50% of the weight of the fund. Otherwise the fund's performance is dominated by that one sector. A prime purpose of owning a commodity fund is the diversification effect from the price evolution of various commodities. Our selections all exhibit a balance across multiple commodities. Again, that caused some high profile funds, including the largest of all, the PowerShares DB Commodity Index Tracking Fund (NYSE: DBC), to drop from our list.

3) Management Expense Ratio - Costs always matter, so the lower the MER the better. One of our picks, the UBS Bloomberg Constant Maturity Commodity Index Total Return ETN (NYSE: UCI), has the tied lowest MER of any commodity fund at 0.65%. MER is a big part of the reason our 2010 pick GreenHaven Continuous Commodity Index Fund ETF (NYSE: GCC) has dropped out of the preferred picks list. GGC's MER is 1.09%.

4) Credit Backing - Many of the newer funds are Exchange Traded Notes (ETNs) which rely on the credit-worthiness of the backing institution for capital protection (as opposed to the ETFs which rely on on the value of the portfolio holdings). All of the issuers are investment grade but UBS AG, backers of UCI and UBS DJ-UBS Commodity Index 2-4-6 Blended Futures ETN (NYSE: BLND), is getting towards the lower end of the scale with a Standard and Poors rating of only A. That is in contrast to the rock solid ELEMENTS Rogers International Commodity Index ETN (NYSE: RJI) whose Swedish Export Corporation backer's AA+ rating is higher than that of many governments!

Picks of the litter
Our preferred choices are as follows. Their key characteristics are shown in the detailed comparison table below.

• UBS Bloomberg Constant Maturity Commodity Index Total Return ETN (UCI)
• ELEMENTS Rogers International Commodity Index ETN (RJI)
• UBS DJ-UBS Commodity Index 2-4-6 Blended Futures ETN (BLND)
• iPath Pure Beta Broad Commodity ETN (BCM)
• iShares Broad Commodity Index ETF (CAD-hedged) (CBR)

Taxes for Canadian Investors
Taxes are not a differentiator for Canadians. Though US investors may be liable to pay annual income taxes to the IRS for ETFs, but not ETNs, it does not appear to be the case for non-US shareholders (note however, that this blogger is not a US tax accountant so it may be helpful to consult a tax professional). Since none of the funds, ETFs or ETNs, makes or intends to make any annual cash distributions, the only tax liability for a Canadian investor, and this would only apply within a non-registered account (i.e. not RRSPs, TFSAs, RESPs etc), would be capital gains to the Canada Revenue Agency upon sale of the fund.

All these ETFs and ETNs are considered to be US property and subject to US Estate tax provisions, which can apply to Canadians with US investments. See this TaxTips article on the subject but consult a professional to be certain if it applies to you.

Currency Hedging
Is CBR's hedging of the the US dollar worth it? We believe it is likely unnecessary and may detract from diversification but readers may wish to review pros and cons in our previous post on whether or not to hedge currency exposure and some historical results of hedging.

Performance, Correlation and Diversification Experience
How have the commodity funds fared? Have they delivered returns un-correlated  (and thus the diversification benefit) with mainstream equities like the US S&P 500 Index or the Canadian TSX Composite?

As our table shows for BCM, the recent correlation with the S&P 500 is much higher at 0.68 than the 0.3 (see Our Pick for a Broad Commodity Index Exchange-Traded Product) or less found in longer term calculations back to 1990. Several other commodity ETFs have correlations for the most recent 2-5 years in the 0.6 to 0.7 range. Such higher numbers are much less beneficial for diversification. If we eyeball the price movements of some of our funds against the TSX and the US' Dow Jones Index, we get the same impression, that they have been moving roughly in sync, though the commodity funds have more exaggerated ups and downs. The Beta numbers around 1.2 in the comparison table confirm the greater volatility (beta is a measure of stock price volatility relative to the overall market, with 1.0 the same as the market average and above 1.0 more volatile, below 1.0 less volatile).

1) vs TSX Composite (from TMX Money)

2) vs US Dow Jones Index (from Yahoo Finance)

The key question, to which no one really has an answer, will it last or will correlation go back down? Also, will prices of commodities continue their trend of upward price movement begun around the year 2000? The chart below from the latest BMO Capital Markets The Goods newsletter on commodities shows a considerable real return since 200 but flat for a couple of decades through the 1980s and 90s.

The basic decision of whether to invest in commodities may still be open to some question but we feel our above choices of funds will better suit the long term investor.
 
Disclaimer: this post is my opinion only and should not be construed as investment advice. Readers should be aware that the above comparisons are not an investment recommendation. They rest on other sources, whose accuracy is not guaranteed and the article may not interpret such results correctly. Do your homework before making any decisions and consider consulting a professional advisor.

Green Certification of Real Estate - Why investors should care

Investors with a particular interest in environmental sustainability, or those who just want to maximize their chances of picking money-making real estate REITs or stocks, should pay attention to green certification of buildings within the property portfolios.

Why does greenness matter to the investor?
The recent research paper Portfolio greenness and the financial performance of REITs by Piet Eichholtz, Nils Kok, Erkan Yonder on the website of the European Centre for Corporate Engagement found that in the USA greener REITs had higher Return on Equity, higher Return on Assets and higher Ratio of funds from operations to total revenue. The greener REITs's stock also had lower market beta, or volatility. The only somewhat disappointing result was that the green REITs did not exhibit excess or abnormally higher stock returns, a finding that the authors suggest is due to the fact that the stock prices have already incorporated and reflect the green advantage.

That there is a green advantage makes sense. Green buildings require proportionately less energy, lowering the impact of energy price shocks and stabilizing returns from properties. Energy is a big cost component. Buildings in the USA consume 74% of electricity and commercial property (which make up the holdings of real estate companies) makes up half of that. Greenness isn't just energy saving - greenhouse gas emissions, waste reduction and water consumption matter too.

Greener buildings have a longer economic life. Tenants prefer them and green buildings command higher rents (3% more per Eichholtz) and resale prices (+13%). There is less risk from the impact of future government regulation (is environmental regulation likely to get less or more we ask?). Green building certifications like the worldwide LEED (Canadian buildings listed here at Canada Green Building Council website), the US Energy Star, the Canadian BOMA BESt and various others in different countries, have rapidly gained acceptance.

The savviest investors, in the form of institutions like pension funds, are already paying close attention (as our previous post on Socially Responsible Investing noted). Some of the most convinced have extensive Canadian properties. The giant Canadian pension fund OMERS owns Oxford Properties Group, which assigns high priority to pursuing, reporting on and achieving sustainability in its business. Bentall Kennedy, owned in part by the BC Investment Management Corporation and CalPERS, is a world leader according to the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) - see the 2012 GRESB report. Bentall Kennedy's view in its 2012 Corporate Responsibility Report on the Global Reporting Initiative database is that "corporate responsibility is simply better business" and will eventually produce superior returns. Ivanhoé Cambridge, owned by Quebec's huge Caisse de dépôt, is another real estate heavyweight with extensive Canadian properties that is fully committed to sustainability and greener buildings. The same goes for Cadillac Fairview, owned by the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan.

The following chart from the Oxford 2012 Sustainability Report neatly summarizes how greenness can benefit the real estate company, along with its tenants.

How do the publicly-traded Canadian REITS and real estate corporations stack up?
Since the individual online investor cannot of course buy shares in Bentall Kennedy or other privately-owned entities, we looked at TSX-listed real estate shares, mostly REITs, along with a few corporations. Our comparison table shows what we found. Ideally, we would have wanted to get summaries by company of the green-certified proportion of their property portfolios and then to compare their financial performance to see to what degree green does best in Canada.

1) The data looks spotty and incomplete and the degree of green commitment is often hard to determine - Only one company, Brookfield Office Properties, publishes how much of its portfolio is green and it is impressively high considering that Eichholtz estimated that only 1% of US REIT properties were LEED-certified in 2010 and only 6% Energy Star-certified.

But there are a number of strange things we found. The BOMA BESt database lists no less than 57 green properties under Morguard yet the company's website and annual reports say nary a word on green, sustainability, BOMA, environment, corporate responsibility or other such catchphrases. It seems odd to be just doing it and not talking about it. Even harder to fathom is that the biggest Canadian REIT by far, RioCan, says nothing about green on its website or in its reports and there are exactly zero of its buildings in BOMA BESt. In a telephone call, a BOMA representative could say that there are a few RioCan properties in the process of certification. A call to RioCan unfortunately did not elicit a response. It is hard to believe that RioCan is paying little or no attention to greenness.

The other popular green certification is LEED and a list of certified buildings is on the Canadian Green Building Council website here. Unfortunately, the 2600 buildings, which includes single family homes, does not identify property owners, only addresses. Linking the addresses back to the companies would be a very laborious task.

2) Several companies appear to have a very strong commitment to greenness - That is shown by strong statements and specific sustainability/responsibility reports: Allied Properties REIT (AP.UN), Brookfield Office Properties (BPO), First Capital Realty Inc (FCR) and Primaris Retail REIT (PMZ.UN). It's not only words, they have more BOMA BESt buildings too. Dundee REIT (D.UN) seems, like the puzzler Morguard, to be another company of action not words with its high number of BOMA BESt buildings.

3) Green companies generally achieve reasonable return on equity (ROE) - The green-highlighted companies with the most BOMA BESt listings all sport a healthy ROE.

4) Green certification is not the only route to success - Three companies (highlighted in blue) with not a single BOMA BESt listed property - RioCan, Canadian Apartment REIT (CAR.UN) and Boardwalk REIT (BEI.UN) - have excellent ROE. Thus, a focus on greenness is not the only way to achieve high returns. Maybe these companies are doing the green cost saving measures, or others not specifically green, and not bothering with certification.

Nevertheless, green certification of buildings in real estate portfolios is a useful indicator of investing value for the investor. 

Disclaimer: this post is my opinion only and should not be construed as investment advice. Readers should be aware that the above comparisons are not an investment recommendation. They rest on other sources, whose accuracy is not guaranteed and the article may not interpret such results correctly. Do your homework before making any decisions and consider consulting a professional advisor.

Socially Responsible Stocks – Which ones are the solid money makers?

Last week we looked at the performance of ETFs holding a basket of stocks that meet the criteria of being Socially Responsible (SRI). The track record and the academic research suggest SRI stocks in combination on average get about the same returns as a benchmark cap-weight index. That's enough to satisfy one's conscience perhaps, but suppose we seek better returns. Can we avoid the duds and pick only the best stocks?

Defining what "Best" means ...
This week we drill down into the Canadian SRI stocks to see which ones look to be the best, in terms of:
a) consistent company performance plus
b) solid stock returns 
c) the most attractive value at the moment
d) considering also the desirability of low volatility and healthy growing dividends.

Narrowing Down the Canadian SRI Stock Universe
We start with all 71 Canadian stocks that pass screening for SRI criteria in two ETFs - iShares Jantzi Social Index fund (TSX:XEN) and Pax MSCI North America ESG Index ETF (NYSE: NASI). To get a table with lots of useful data, we plugged all 71 stock symbols into the Globe WatchList and then used its handy export feature to download the data into a spreadsheet on our PC for further sorting and entering additional data.

Step 1 - Consistent profitability - First hurdle for the stocks to pass - how many years out of the last five has the company made positive earnings. Our minimum is at least 4 out of 5 and no loss in the most recent financial year or trailing twelve months. Right away, we drop several companies with a negative return on equity (ROE) in the past year i.e. ROE can only be negative if the return/earnings are negative. Unfortunately, the WatchList table doesn't include ROE for the past five years so we had to look elsewhere. To do this, ADVFN's company information under the Financials tab (e.g. for Bank of Nova Scotia) has a nice graph of five-year ROE. For a handful of the stocks in our table, ADVFN doesn't have any data so we turned to TMX Money and the Financials/Income page for the stock to see the net income for the past five years (e.g. here for Pacific Rubiales Energy). Goodbye to a bunch more stocks (like Westport Innovations which hasn't made any profits in the last five years).

Step 2 - Dividends growing - Any company that cut its dividend, or failed to increase it at all during the past five years, we also deleted. We left one company in our list that had no increase - CGI Group - since it has a policy of not paying a dividend but it has been increasing earnings per share at a very healthy and steady pace over the five years. In several cases we had to clarify and correct data in the WatchList download by referring to TMX Money or to iTSX.ca, which gives easy quick access to dividend data.

Step 3 - Healthy fundamentals - Companies that had very low return on equity (under 10%), poor operating margin or high debt to equity ratio, also got deleted.

Step 4 - Reasonable stock returns - Companies with much poorer returns than two benchmarks - the XEN fund itself, or the iShares S&P/TSX 60 Index (TSX: XIU) - were removed. However, we did not set a strict cut-off since negative market sentiment that has caused stock price declines might well be reversed, especially when company fundamentals are sound. This dovetails into the last step, judging reasonable stock value.

Step 5 - Attractive stock valuation - The starting point measure of an attractive stock price is the price to earnings ratio (P/E), the lower P/E the better, other things being equal. We therefore eliminated stocks with P/E over the XIU benchmark figure of 18.3. It is thanks to BMO Investorline's (client access only) ETF Compare tool that we were able to obtain the P/E and price-to-book figures for XIU and XEN.

Beta, a measure of volatility, was also taken into account, with values under XIU's 1.0 being a plus. We allowed Potash Corp to stay in despite its very high beta of 7.4 due to compensating factors like very high ROE, operating margin and dividend growth rate with a quite low P/E.

Finally, we note the investment firm analyst ratings (keeping in mind the caveats of such), the majority being "Hold", and any insider buying or selling activity (recent data from TMX here; see also our post on why this can matter here)

The Solid SRI Stocks
We do not pretend that every one of the 27 stocks in the results table below will be a winner. Past performance is only a guide, not a guarantee. But we believe most will do well. Nor do we think there are many blockbuster winners. Our method has directed us to the steady solid performers. That would perhaps be enough to satisfy most investors, both in their pocketbook and in their conscience.

Disclaimer: this post is my opinion only and should not be construed as investment advice. Readers should be aware that the above comparisons are not an investment recommendation. They rest on other sources, whose accuracy is not guaranteed and the article may not interpret such results correctly. Do your homework before making any decisions and consider consulting a professional advisor.