Portfolio Update: Canadian Western Bank Purchased Again

Posted on March 3rd, 2015 (5 votes, average: 2.60 out of 5)

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For those new to the blog, I like to keep my readers up to date on portfolio changes. One of the reasons I started this blog was to educate others, but also to improve my own investing. By keeping an open book of my portfolio and changes to it, I hope to generate discussion so others can see how I put my investing philosophy into practice. For the most up to date portfolio changes follow my twitter account as I will usually tweet first and then follow-up with a blog post.

On February 23, 2015 I decided to buy Canadian Western Bank ( TSE:CWB Trend ) again as it had dropped another 10% from my target buy price of $30 to around $27. I picked up shares for an average price of $26.93. I first bought shares in the company on December 16, 2014 at $29.33. With my latest purchase I was able to average down bringing my cost base to $28.45.

Canadian Western Bank is a regional Canadian bank in you guessed it Western Canada (mainly Alberta and BC). They have managed to increase

Warren Buffets & Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Business Acquisition Criteria

Posted on March 1st, 2015 (6 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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Every year Warren Buffet, the famous investor who runs Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A Trend ), issues a letter to their shareholders. These letters offer a unique opportunity to peer into the mind of arguably one of the best investors of all time. The 2014 letter, dated February 27, 2015 was of particular interest because it marked the 50 year anniversary of the company.

These letters are long, but worth the read as they offer a variety of valuable information that can make you a better investor. The 2014 letter can be read here. and you can see previous year’s letters here .

As I read the letter a lot jumped out, but of particular interest was Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s acquisition criteria found on page 23. The company is known for its ability to buy great businesses that lead to market beating returns, so naturally I wanted to compare what they do to my own investment strategy. The following is a quote from the letter that shows their six criteria.

BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC.

ACQUISITION CRITERIA

We are eager to hear from principals or their representatives about businesses

14 Canadian Dividend Growth Companies with Consistently High Earnings Growth

Posted on February 7th, 2015 (16 votes, average: 2.56 out of 5)

To start with I used Morningstar annual EPS data for a decade found in its Key Ratio tab for each company in the January 31, 2015 version of the Canadian