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personal finance reader

The best of the Web on money, markets and all things financial, as chosen daily by Globe and Mail personal finance columnist Rob Carrick.

Bubble Trouble In Housing

The federal agency Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. sees a soft landing for the country's hot real estate market, not a correction. For a decidedly more worrisome view, check out these two commentaries. One is an analysis by Bloomberg News of the Toronto condo market, the other a slideshow of under- and over-valued global real estate markets. Canada takes the Number Two spot in the over-valued group (behind Belgium).

The $33.84 iPad

Introducing Quibids, an auction website where stuff is sold at crazy low prices. How is that possible? QuiBids collects a small fee from each bidder. I checked the Q&A section and it looks like they ship to Canada.



Spotlight On ETFs

The Canadian Couch Potato blog examines a new dividend exchange-traded fund, the XTF Morningstar Canada Dividend Target 30 (DXM-TSX).

A look at the risks of investing in "synthetic" ETFs, where derivatives are used to produce the returns of a particular index, rather than holding the actual stocks. A prominent synthetic ETF in the Canadian market is the Horizons S&P/TSX 60 Index ETF (HXT-TSX), which is one of cheapest-to-own funds anywhere.



More Money

Tune into my Facebook personal finance community for more talk about investing and other financial matters. I'm also on Twitter.



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