Invest in Canada- eh?!

And it's confirmed yet again, Canada is the best place on earth. OK, so we don't have a tropical beach and income tax rates are somewhat daunting, but a new report from CIBC World Markets rates our companies as the place to grow your investment loot.

"Canadian stocks are likely to produce the best returns in light of what looks to be a longer-term bear market in bonds, and ongoing fiscal belt tightening in the U.S. and Europe," says John Smuel of the Financial Post FP Trading Desk this week.

Energy and gold shares, less inflation threat and a strong corporate Canada are what make Canada look like a safe place to stash your dough compared to the emerging markets and even the U.S. equity market.

Corporate Canada meanwhile continues to show signs of strength as well. CIBC’s new Leading Indicator of TSX Earnings (LITXE) shows that there remains room for further profits from Canada’s companies, even given the impressive performances seen in the past few quarters.

Senior economist at CIBC, Peter Buchanan, is reported as saying that "While (Canadian) stocks are by no means as cheap as earlier, above-trend earnings growth should continue to provide the market with some support”.

Canadian Venture Exchange: A Honey Pot for Savy Investors

In perusing the various internet resources for where, when and how to invest in stocks, the Canadian Venture Exchange aways seems to play in the top stock picks across nearly all sectors. These small companies have the tendency to make big jumps in stock prices in short periods of time when the stars are aligned in their favor. Of course some of smaller company stocks can just as quickly fall as they rise, but overall, the CVE is a unique breeding ground for these micro and small cap ventures.

My first experience in investing was a short term swing trade with Intertainment Media (INT on the Canadian Venture Exchange)--this is a little internet company with a big product called Ortsbo that translates social chat and networking sites like Facebook and others in real time as an embedded add-on. See it here. Their subscribership has ballooned over the last few months affording Intertainment the opportunity to compare their astronomical growth to the starting days of Facebook subscription. Sure, they will get swallowed up by some larger google-eyed mongol, but in the meantime, their little stock went from 16 cents to over 90 cents in a matter of days. Sliding back to around half this gain of late as some investors took their profits and ran, Ortsbo is still churning out user numbers that make this little tech play an attractive purchase.

And INT is not alone. There are hundreds of small penny stock mining ventures spiking, ready to spike or having already lit up the sky with a firework display of huge gains in this current bullish market.

Canadian Equities Lead the World in Long Term Performance

Overall, Canadian equity portfolios have outperformed US portfolios of similar diversity. Doityourselfinginvesting.ca reports their performance of Canadian Equities vs US Equities which shows 2.5% higher growth in the last 12 months and 144.3% higher growth over 3 years. Of course the equities are not identical, but the comparison is interesting. Taking a look at index funds, the TD Canadian Index e fund reports 6.02% performance over 10 years compared with a -3.26% performance over 10 years for the comparable TD US Index e fund. Japan's TD e series index fund produced -3.37% over 10 years and the International Index TD e series fund produced -0.66%. Hmmm. OK, so over the last 10 years, lots has happened and maybe we forgot a couple wars, flash crashes and pitfalls along the way. What about the simple 1 year bullish market post-recession recovery months that are still fresh in all of our memories. Here is the 12 month performance stats for these funds:

TD Canadian Index - e: 25.06%
TD US Index - e: 13.66%
TD International Index - e: 8.43%
TD European Index - e: 8.01%
TD Japanese Index - e: 5.61%
And the winner is...CANADA!

So what do we do with this information? It's simple--invite the world to invest in Canada. The best country on earth for so many reasons--except the tropical beaches...but you can always visit West Edmonton Mall and go surfing!

Happy Investing

Disclosure: the author owns shares of the TD e-series index funds: for Canada, US and Europe. The author currently does not own INT.V...but wants to.