A Quebec Telecom for March, 2024

 

I'm glad to see Spring marked in the calendar for March. Along with Fall, it's my favourite time of the year where temperatures are where I like them. Sort of a refresh for the rest of the year for me and thoughts of grilling on the BBQ.

In the Markets, the big banks of Canada reported earnings and all were decent considering what's going on with the current interest rates except BMO but the Bank of Montreal expects a better 2024. Reminds me of all the negative news about BNS, Bank of Nova Scotia last year and now more positive after their quarterly report.

Telecoms are on my mind starting March, 2024 with ex-dividend dates in the first half of the month. 

I own BCE and T, Telus but there's a lot of negative noise about BCE lately and see what the financial impact has on their layoffs, cuts and slashes moving forward. Scaling back their dividend "increase" from 5% to 3.1% starting this year didn't go over well with some investors. Hopefully when the smoke clears from that fallout, more positive results in 2024.

Along with buying more T, Telus this month, I'll add QBR-B, Quebecor headquartered in Montreal, Quebec. I've had Quebecor on my watchlist for awhile and they gained customers after taking over Freedom Mobile out west.

Quebecor primarily provides telecom services in Quebec, where it has roughly 1.7 million internet subscribers—equating to a penetration rate of about 50% in its footprint—and over 3 million mobile subscribers, including more than 20% wireless market share in Quebec. With the acquisition of Freedom Mobile in April 2023, Quebecor also has more than 1.5 million mobile subscribers in Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta.

QBR-B is undervalued and increased their dividend with their latest positive earnings report with an ex-dividend of March 07, 2024 and pay date of April 02, 2024.

Pipelines are another sector interest of mine and for March; PPL, Pembina Pipeline is coming across with encouraging financial stats. I'll get into that in my next article where PPL's ex-dividend date is coming up in mid March and about keeping track of a growing portfolio with dividend.watch I tested and could stay "free" but decided to go premium.

Biggest movers

Symbol Name Last Price 7D 1Y

PPL Pembina Pipeline 47.49 1.4% 8.7% No recent events  38.0% UNDERVALUED

What I write about with the stocks are my personal picks with my long term goal of accumulating dividends and growth, along with capital appreciation over the years. As always, not recommendations but do recommend investors do their own research with the stocks, ETFs (distributions) or a mix of both. 

Money Saver and Strategies

 

The February edition of the Canadian Money Saver magazine has the usual interesting content for a DIY investor such as myself.

Matt from dividendstrategy.ca has an update article in the issue about Beating the TSX 2023/2024.

The 10 top Canadian companies/banks in dividend yield on the TSX. I hold all except AQN, Algonquin Power.

My approach is different than what the strategy suggests. Rather than buying all in equal amounts at the start of the year, I buy through out the year where I don't have plans to sell at the end of the year, I hold long term and continue to hold stocks that were listed on the BTSX in previous years.

For 2023, BTSX had a total return including dividend of 7.77%. Considering it was a year of Banks, utilities and telecoms lagging mainly due to the high interest rate set by the Bank of Canada ... not too shabby.

Over the long term, the strategy works as charted in the article while there are dividend increases along the way from the stocks listed.

For ETF fans, the magazine starts out it's issues with the performance of it's Model ETF Portfolio with a list of 14 ETFs. Since I'm a long term guy ... there is an additional article in the magazine about how they work the ETFs ... 5% weighting for each unless some are outperforming for awhile. 

They started with $100,000 on October 2013 and time certainly flies with 10 years later and a gain of 101.38%, for a total of $201,375.48. Impressive. Annualised yield of 7.09% for 2023

Those are two approaches to building cash dividends of the many plans out there. Personally, I'm more interested in holding individual stocks with an increasing yield over the years with no fees that "most" ETF managers will charge. 

An example is Manulife Financial, MFC with a recent 9.6% dividend increase which kicks in this month, which was listed for 2023. 

I find the Canadian Money Saver a good addition to the Blogs I read on my sidebar and other investing sites. There are a range of topics in each issue.