Income Trust Talk

As the latest addition to our family, Income Trust Trader doesn’t have as much history behind it as TSX TrendWatch and ETF TrendTracker.  For that reason, our latest redesign of this site hasn’t been a really major problem.

Sure, we’re using new blogging software to bring you these updates, and that has taken some getting used to. And, it will be a while before we can manually transfer at least the “best of’s” from our previous archives to the new blog history.  But it’s all manageable, and we hope you’ll appreciate the improvements.

We’ve adopted a significantly new approach to the data and charts we present to you each week.  Previously we experimented with a very compressed “Top 20 Income Trusts” weekly chart, based on an interesting extension of our relative trend analysis™ (RTA) that unfortunately confused many visitors to this site.
We have now opted to use an approach that will be more familiar to those of you who also visit our other sites.  Our new DATA & CHARTS workbook will have the same look-and-feel to it as our other sites have… trend and consistency data for income trusts in this case and a chart that will show you at a glance which ones have prices that are accelerating most quickly. We’ll be adding  features more specific to income trusts as time goes on, so visit at least weekly, if income trusts are an important part of your investment strategy.

Rather than focus on a continually changing group of fast moving trusts (as we have before), we’ve chosen instead to present you with our analysis of those trusts that are constituents of the S&P/TSX Income Trust Index… currently representing 60 companies. This is quite comparable to the way we remain focused on the constituents of the S&P/TSX Composite Index at TSX TrendWatch.

You can invest in all of the income funds in the S&P/TSX Income Trust Index through a single exchange traded fund (ETF) if you wish, but we think you’ll get much better results if you take the time to select top performers within this 60 member population. You’ll learn more about this in subsequent updates.

For now, we’ll just mention that the ETF we’re talking about is the iShares CDN Income Trust Sector Index Fund (symbol: XTR) from Barclay’s Global Investors. It trades like a regular stock on the TSX, but is more like a mutual fund since it represents an investment in all 60 income funds that are constituents of the index.  Unlike a mutual fund, though, management fees are much lower.

So, this is generally the direction we’re taking. It will take a while to re-write our Visitor Guide to capture the new approach, and there may be other minor glitches here and there over the next few weeks.  Nonetheless, we hope you’ll appreciate the new strategy.

We aren’t neglecting those “power income trust investors” among you either. As a Premium Service, we’ll offer you (on a weekly basis)  our analysis of all of the income trusts for which we have enough data for our analyses. Believe it or not, we still have nearly 400 of them in Canada, in spite of our finance minister’s poorly thought out decision to eliminate income trusts by 2011.

And, who knows what might happen politically between now and then!