Over the weekend I had planned today to comment on the Chinese ban on mention of Winnie the Pooh, and on Weibo. This is because of an unflattering cartoon four years ago which compared the pudgy Chinese leader Xi Jinping with tall, slim Barrack Obama calling them Winnie and Tigger. Then in 2014 a cartoon showed Japanese Prime Minister Abe as Eeyore alongside a plump Pooh.
You are also now banned from making animated cartoons of the Pooh bear on Chinese sites. RIP is outlawed because it might refer to Nobelist Liu Xiaobo who died last week.
I was going to lead with this story about the renewal and extension of Chinese censorship which came out over the weekend from Asia, but it became front-page news in the Financial Times, so I have been gazumped. As China moves toward its 5-year congress we are not allowed to comment on Xi’s pot-belly and build. Or all Chinese leaders’ dyed black hair.
It makes our own rather vain president sound almost rational.
McAfee virus protection is removing the warning notice on our website, www.global-investing.com which called our site “risky to visit”. However they did not say why it was placed there in the first place. Our site was long called safe by Norton—and it is. The reason we were targeted (without being given a chance to explain) is that they decided my blogs are spam. Given that they go out in full only to people who pay a real price for them, this is astonishing.
Funds
*Today we are adding a new position to our funds, a Canadian ETF investing in loony-denominated floating rate notes to reduce our exposure to higher interest rates. It is iShares Floating Rate ETF, with the Toronto symbol XFR, managed by BlackRock which launched it 6 years ago, and covered by Morningstar. Its benchmark is the FTSE TMX Canada FRN Index, and it offers a DRIP for reinvesting your monthly dividends which I advise using. The fund holds under 50 positions and trades about 1000 shares per day max. Its fees and expenses come to 0.23% of assets held.
The fund is the best of a bad lot, having failed to match its benchmark from the get-go and doing dismally in 2016, the last year for which we have reports, earning 1.02% in C$s while the FT index it tracks gained 1.3%.
Half its investments are in Canada Housing Trust No. 144A, an institutions-only floating rate vehicle, in which it has invested no less than 57.29% of its assets. Its 2nd and 3rd largest holdings are under 10% in the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec, and 2.1% in the Province of Alberta. The rest of the pile is in Hydro-Quebec and Financement Quebec, jointly at 14% with the rest in the Bay Street banks’ FRNs: Bank of Montreal; CIBC; Toronto-Dominion; and Royal Bank of Canada.Bank of Nova Scotia is not included because it is more global and less North American than its fellows.
