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Sooty's Table of Bargain Income Stock Candidates

The Short List of Bargains

Special Note: In 2011 all Income Trusts (except a few REITs) had to convert to normal stocks before 2010 ended. If they didn't they would be taxed as normal stocks but unable to get the tax breaks available to normal stocks. For this reason this table now is the "best dividend stocks available on the TSX".

If this is your first time here please read the (lengthy) explanation on how income trusts work. You should understand that Sooty is a "value investor" with a "buy and hold" strategy and a two year+ planning horizon. If you are a day trader with technical strategy looking for momentum or short plays you will find Sooty's strategy boring.

Please check out the breaking news for an update on the changes the government made to income trust tax status on October 31, 2006 and the "Future Tax Liabilities" showing on Balance Sheets in July 2007.

The following is a list of candidates for your investigation. Once again Sooty is NOT recommending you buy these (nor does Sooty expect a cut if you make a lot of money on them). You should take these candidates and do steps 3 through 6 of the "Steps in Finding Bargains" process.

Only the top 60 with a yield less than 17% are shown in the table (there is probably something wrong if the yield is above 15%). For a more complete listing download the TSX.csv.

Clicking the column header will sort by that column. A short comment about the column will appear if you move the mouse over a column header.



Table last updated . A spreadsheet of the performance information for all 1500 TSX listed companies is at this link.

How the Table was Created - a Programmers View

To acquire, convert, reconcile and store the information to support this site is a fairly involved process. It would be nice if standards for the semantic web were in place and Sooty's computers could talk directly to the information sources. I am sure one could purchase an information feed in XML format but that would violate the rule that one should not pay for advice on public information. Besides it is a lot more interesting to build the robots that scrape the websites, tinker with the parsers that strip out the data from the html, and design the database and analysis programs that find the bargain trusts.

Sooty does not have time to do the work by hand so the whole process is automated:
  1. At 8:00 PM Pacific Time a Java robot scrapes the TMX QuoteMedia site for a directory of listed stocks. For each stock it visits the stock's "Financials" page on www.theglobeandmail.com to obtain the home country and company web site.

  2. A Java database program reads the TSX directories and using the performance information from the "Balance Sheet" and "Income Statement" pages at www.theglobeandmail.com it loads roughly 70 performance measures into a MySQL database. This is tricky because the Globe and Mail only displays data that is relevant to a stock (banks don't have inventory) but the MySQL database needs all posible column headers. The Java program adapts by including new data types when it encounters it.

  3. A Java reporting program reads the MySQL database and creates Comma Separated Value (CSV) extracts with all the available performance values. It also selects the 10 highest yielding non-USA income stocks to display and writes the JavaScript code that makes the tables on this page work.

  4. About midnight the CSV and table JavaScript code fragment are uploaded to this page.
The whole process takes about an hour to complete with most of the time consumed by delays in acquiring web pages.