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[music] >> Hello, I'm Greg Bonnell. Welcome to MoneyTalk Live, brought to you by TD Direct Investing. Every day, I'll be joined by guests from across TD, many of whom you'll only see here. We're going to take you through what's moving the markets and answer your questions about investing. coming up on today's show, Nugwa Haruna, senior client education instructor with TD Direct Investing is going to take your questions about how to get more out of the WebBroker platform. Moneytalk's Anthony Okolie is going to take us through the latest Canadian GDP report. So here's how you can get in touch with us. Just email moneytalklive@td.com or fill out the viewer response box under the video player on WebBroker. let's get you an update on the markets. It's a bit of a mixed trading session out there on Bay and Wall Street as we head into a new month, which will be tomorrow. 20,172, down 87 points right now on the TSX, little 5/2 a percent. we have earnings coming up, we are in the thick of banks earning right now. ScotiaBank delivered a miss. Scotia down to the tune of almost 5%. Athabasca Oil, I'm noticing a firm being in the price of West Texas intermediate, the American benchmark crude. Just about three bucks, it's up not even a full percent to the upside. South of the border, we got bond yields at their highest since last fall. Got the market trying to figure out where the Fed is headed in the middle of all this. Still lots of corporate earnings as well. It's been a mixed session, particularly south of the border, with the S&P 500 in positive territory. Right now it's down just 1/10 of a percent. The tech heavy NASDAQ was green earlier and is hanging onto it. It's modest. Up 15 points right now, little more than 1/10 of a percent. It still earnings season. Norwegian Cruise Lines get with a disappointing report to the street and those shares are down about 11% right now at this hour. That's a market update. The latest Canadian GDP report shows the economy stalled in the last quarter of the year and actually contracted for the month of December. Joining us now with all the details, Moneytalk's Anthony Okolie. >> Thanks very much. Canadian GDP surprised to the downside in the fourth quarter with a flat print versus market consensus of a 1.6% increase. Keep in mind, in the January monetary policy report the Bank of Canada actually expected an increase of 1. 2%. This comes in well below their expectations. Now, this decline comes after five consecutive quarters of growth, as you can see in the chart. The new estimate points to rebound in January, modest at 0.3%. This report clearly shows that it's certainly a deeper slowdown in Canada as higher rates begin to take a toll on the economy. Now, when we dig into some of the numbers, when we dig into the GDP growth, there was a slower accumulation of inventories by businesses. There was also a decline in business investment which fell for the third consecutive quarter. The drop was led by lower spending on things like computers, computer equipment, industrial machinery and equipment as well. Not surprisingly, housing investment dropped again in the fourth quarter. Statistics Canada noticed that this was widespread, with declines in new construction which was down by more than 1%. Fewer people were doing home renovations, that was down 2.6% during the quarter. There were some bright spots in this report. Consumer spending actually roseby 2% quarter over quarter than spending on durables. Specifically, Canadians were buying new trucks, vans, SUVs in the quarter. Meanwhile, spending on services slowed but it was still up a pretty healthy 1.3% quarter over quarter. Despite some disappointing data on the consumer spending side, overall the economy is on a downbeat. >> Some interesting details there beneath the headline. We have lived through almost a full year of aggressive central bank rate hikes. The whole point is to tame inflation and slow the economy. What is the thinking of what the Bank of Canada will make of this? >> I think expectations coming into this report was for another solid gain. TD Economics believes that the Bank of Canada probably feels vindicated, maybe a bit relieved about its policy rate pause given the weak data and it also gives the BOC's added cover to look into market strength ahead of next week. TD Bank expects the Bank of Canada to sit on the sidelines and keep rates flats and no changes in terms of the Bank of Canada's policy rate. >> March is not around the corner but tomorrow. Thanks Anthony. Moneytalk's Anthony Okolie. He will come back later in the show with another look at the state of the consumer and spending in this country and how it my player for the year. We are going to get into questionsabout how you can better use the WebBroker platform. Nugwa Haruna is going to come to discuss that. And a reminder that you can get in touch with us any time. Just email moneytalklive@td.com or fill out the viewer response box under the video player on WebBroker. Right now, let's get you updated on the top stories in the world of business and take a look at how the markets are trading. There is a multibillion dollar deal in the oil and gas sector today. Baytex energy is buying American company Ranger oil in a cash and stock deal valued at $3.4 billion Canadian. Ranger oil is active in the Eagle Ford shale region of Texas. Baytex is a plans to start paying a dividend after the deal closes. Target managed to grow holiday sales by a modest 1%, but the US retailer is warning consumers are still feeling the pinch of inflation. Target is forecasting tepid sales growth this year as shoppers buy fewer big ticket discretionary items. Groceries, household essentials and beauty products were the standard performers and that most recent quarter. It appears people are still meeting online despite the pandemic receding into the rearview mirror. Zoom Video Communications beat earnings expectations in its most recent quarter as these hybrid work arrangements kept videoconferencing in high demand. Zoom also says it's working to integrate artificial intelligence into its platform. A quick check on the markets. The last trading day of the month. It has been a money-losing month for Bay and Wall Street. After that strong start the year in January. Right now you're 77 points in the hole on the TSX, a little bit more than 1/3 of a percent. South of the border, the S&P 500, can't decide whether want to be modestly positive or negative, right now it's down for ticks. We are joined now by Nugwa Haruna, Senior client education instructor with TD Direct Investing, taking your questions about the WebBroker platform. So great to have you in the studio. >> It's always a pleasure being here. We are typically communicating by zoom so it's nice to be here in person. >> It's always better we can talk to each other face-to-face. Of course, usually you come on for a short segment, maybe for five minutes, now the entire show is dedicated to it. We have a ton of questions for you. >> Let's do it. >> One of the viewers was saying I was researching fixed income ETFs and I came across a category called inflation protected fixed income. How is that any different from the regular fixed income ETFs? >> I'm not surprised that the question actually has inflation and it because we are constantly talking about inflation in the last few years. When you think about regular fixed income products, they are called fixed income. So investors will purchase a security and what tends to happen is you will receive a set payment throughout the lifetime of that security and then when that security matures, you get your principal back. On the other hand, you get things called inflation protected securities or in Canada they are called real rate of return bonds. How those work is that your Prince was actually tied to the CPI, and that gets reset semiannually. Inflation goes up, the principal amount actually goes up, which means the coupon payment goes up. So investors will want to hedge their portfolio against inflation. You were able to do that using inflation protected securities. So we are going to hop into WebBroker and I will show investors where they can actually find fixed income. So inflation protected fixed income funds. So once in WebBroker, an investor will click on research and will focus on exchange traded funds today. Under investments, I'm going to click on exchange traded funds. Once here, I'm going to flip over to the tab that says categories, and when we are on this page, keep in mind that whichever countries like you see here, that will represent the ETFs you are looking at. Right now we are on the US traded ETFs. Under categories, we can scroll down and we will just be looking at these different categories just to pull up the inflation protected, take some time to scroll down. It shows so there are lots of categories investors can explore when they are on this page. I promise I will get there. >> We are building tension, right? [laughing] >> Yes. So you will actually find the inflation protected bonds. There are 23 of those exchange traded funds. So investors can click on that, go over to that page and since you are dealing with exchange traded funds, investors are able to purchase this. There are no holding periods. If you make this purchase on WebBroker, it's 999 to buy and to sell. That would be the main difference between inflation protection securities versus regular fixed income securities. > Of course, in this environment, we have been so concerned about inflation because it was quite hot last year. They want to cool down inflation. He said that it was semiannually they would reset, they can reset in the other direction to you is the central bank actually wins its fight. > That is a very good point to point out because if in the economy there are deflationary pressures, that principal is actually adjustable. So since it's been adjusted up in times of high inflation, it could be adjusted downward, which also means and that the coupon payments which are fixed will be based on the new principal amount which would be lower. That something else that investors want to keep in mind. > Interesting stuff. Let's get to another question. We have plenty of them. If you are says I have a company stock I am following right now. How can I keep track of the company's financials in WebBroker? >> Right, so companies release financial statements every quarter, as well as at the end of their fiscal year. They are required to do that. So they will really use three different kinds of financial statements: there will be at the balance sheet statement, which is the net worth of company, there is the income statement which is known as the profit and loss statement because it shows the revenues and expenses of the company, and finally there is the cash flow statement. So investors can actually track this information in WebBroker to see how the company is performing. Let's hop into WebBroker and we will take a look at this. Once in WebBroker, we can click on research. Under investments, you can go stocks. So once you are on your stock page there, I'm going to pull up something you talked about today, the Bank of Nova Scotia. Let's pull at BNS. So when I pull up this dog, if I want to explore those financial statements, under fundamentals, I'm actually able to see a tab here that says financial statements. So once I click on that, as we mentioned, these companies will release financial statements either annually, actually annually and quarterly. So if I want to see the annualized version, I can see that up to five years in the past. I can also see the quarterly information. So as I mentioned, you can see the income statement which is the profit and loss statement which shows once again at the revenue, total expenses as well as net income for the company. You are able to see the balance sheet which shows the total assets, how much the company owns, total liabilities, how much the company owes, and then total shareholder equity. And then finally there is the cash flow statement which gives investors an idea of how well the company is managing its cash positions to fund its operations. Now, these numbers can be intimidating for investors when they take a look at this and then they say, I'm seeing millions and billions of numbers. What does this mean? That's where the idea of ratio analysis comes in. It investors can use some of the ratios they will find in WebBroker, so things like the earnings-per-share or the price to earnings ratio, which you would find if you are in WebBroker, still under the fundamentals tab, under the industry comparison or pure comparison, and then investors can use this information to try and gauge the profitability of the company, how liquid that company is, just to keep track of how well the company is performing. >> Obviously, if you're following a company and you are interested in it, you probably have a good idea when those refreshed financial statements are going to land, but on WebBroker you can be reminded via the news function when your company has some news. >> You can use the alert feature as well with in WebBroker if you want to get information on things like the earnings. We talked about earnings today. If you want to know if a company has an earnings announcement coming up, you can set an alert within my broker for that. >> Let's go to another question. This one about retail small investors. How can a small investor invest in fixed income? Fixed income is a bit different, right? the equity space, we understand that as retail investors. Fixed income is a bit more completed. >> Right. I'm not surprised that fixed income is very popular once again. We are dealing with high interest rates, so fixed income, as I mentioned, will tend to pay a fixed income over a certain lifetime with that specific security. So typically, if an investor is thinking about fixed income, they may think about bonds. And when you think about bonds, specially buying bonds within WebBroker, you may need at least $5000 in order to start investing. Some investors don't have up to $5000 or that's putting all your eggs in one basket and they want to be able to diversify. So there are different options investors can explore if they are starting with smaller amounts. I will start by mentioning GICs, guaranteed investment certificates. Within WebBroker, investors have access to that. For instance, if investors are considering short-term GICs, which would be GICs that expire in less than a year, or even long-term GICs, they may be able to find GICs with a minimum of $500. So much lower than the $5000 threshold for bonds. Then there is the option using fixed income funds, so could be mutual funds or exchange traded funds. Let's go into WebBroker and take a look at what some of these options are. So I'm going to click on research. And under research, this time, under tools, I want to go to the screeners tool. The screeners tool is a feature that lets you filter for information that's important to you. So we will do that under the exchange traded funds tab. Once we are here, we are going to create a custom screen. We are going to start from scratch. So we will go fund category. And I'm going to click to add that criteria. So once I schooled them, I'm just going to click on the drop-down. So going to go on that journey again. We are going to be looking out for and what I love, as I show this, it shows you there such a variety of different options for investors when they go on here. So there's something for everyone. So once on here, I will start to see different options like the Canadian corporate fixed income. But I actually just want to find Canadian fixed income because it encompasses all those different kinds of fixed income products. So when I click on there, I see there's 98. If I want, I can still go through this drop-down, I won't do that to us again… [laughing] I can go through that drop-down and find US fixed income categories as well. But we will stick with the Canadian one that we have right now. There are 98 options there. And if you want, you can also include mutual funds to your screen results and leave that turned on as well. We are going to view the 98 matches. This list is mutual funds as well as ETFs. The main difference for investors that are having this consideration is that some mutual funds, actually mutual funds will have a minimum purchase amount. so it could be 500, it could be a thousand, so there is still a minimum threshold to get in. There also minimum holding period. Investors want to take that into consideration. On the other hand, if they are changing ETFs, there is nothing like that. They can buy may be one unit, two units. But they want to be aware that within WebBroker, when you are making that purchase, there is a commission of 999. So whatever works best for you, you are able to practice that within WebBroker. >> As always, make sure you do your own research before making any investment decisions. we went to back your questions for Nugwa Haruna on how to better utilize the Whataburger platform in just a moment's time. And a reminder that you can get in touch with us any time. do you have a question about investing or what's driving the markets? Our guests are eager to hear what's on your mind, so that is your questions. there are two ways you can get in touch with us. You can send us an email anytime at moneytalklive@td.com or you can use the question box right below the screen here on WebBroker. Just writing your question and hit send. We will see if one of our guest can get you the answer right here at MoneyTalk Live. We are back with Nugwa Haruna from TD Direct Investing, taking your questions about how to get more out of the WebBroker platform. Nugwa, always a popular show. Lots of questions coming in. Let's get to a new one. How do you screen for monthly dividend stocks? >> Yeah, so there's a lot of income questions. As you know, dividends are payments that investors who buy stocks from companies may receive. I will mention that even though companies may pay dividends from their earnings, they are not always guaranteed to do so. Companies are not obliged to do that, which means that if they are making dividend payments, they can cancel it without any notice. Companies that have paid dividends in the past may not continue paying dividends in the future. While in WebBroker, an investor may not be able to filter by month or quarter to see how often companies are paying dividends, but there are other things investors can take into account if they are considering companies paying dividends. We will go back to the screeners tool, a right popular and powerful. >>you can't screen for the future, right? If we could do that, it would be a different tool. You can see what happened in the past. >> We are going to screen for the past and see just how well companies have been able to maintain dividend payments. In WebBroker, we are going to click on research. Under tools, we will go back to the screeners tool. This time, we are going to focus on stocks. Once here, I'm going to click over here where it says screening. It typically will already have a screener built-in. I'm going to clear all of that, and we are going to choose specific criteria that are important to us. So starting off, I'm going to go to more criteria. I will start off with dividend coverage. The reason I'm using dividend coverage for this is that dividend coverage essentially tells investors we know that companies are paying dividends out of their earnings. But how many times out of those earnings can companies afford to pay dividends? For instance, if a company had earnings of $15,000 and$5000… Investors want to know just how well a company is doing and how much of their earnings they are using to pay for dividends. In this case, we will go with let's set a minimum of 200%. We want companies that can pay their dividends at least twice with the earnings that they last reported. Once we do that, we will see that we have 1500 companies. That is still quite a lot. Let's add some more filters there. I'm going to go up more criteria again. In this case, we will go to dividend yield. With the dividend yield essentially is is the annual dividend that was announced by the company divided by whatever the market price of that stock is. So give an investor an idea of what their percent return could be. So in this case, you will go for percent. I will mention something about the dividend yield though is that that number maintained and it may change if the market price drops. So it may look more attractive when it may not necessarily be that the dividend has gone up, it's just the stock value has dropped. Something to keep in mind if you are using them. At this point, we have 395… Let's add one more thing to this. I'm going to go to more criteria again. This time I'm going to go to dividend growth rate five-year average. >> This is an interesting one. >> Yeah. For an investor, you want to see has this company been paying dividends and has been growing the dividend payment? Has been able to maintain the dividends it's paid going forward? In this case, I'm just going to put may be a 1% growth rate there. So we have now dropped to 134 companies. I know you can scroll down to see these companies and these companies are rated from 1 to 34 based on the three criteria that we use. As you can see, Aberdeen emerging markets equity income fund is the highest rated. It has the highest when it comes to dividend coverage, yield and growth rate. There are still a lot more things to consider when exploring this. Some investors might want to add earnings-per-share. Information like that. But this could be one way investors could filter. I do want to add something additionally. If investors maybe don't want to use the screening tool, there is another option that they may consider. This time, under research… > Before we leave the screen, should be think about saving? That's a mistake I make all the time. >> Yeah, so if I like what I have done here, once I exit this page, I will have to re-create it. So I can just click on save just appear. Then, I can enter my screen name. I can just, I will just call it dividend coverage. And you can add a description if you are interested. You can also set alerts if you are interested in doing that. I'm going to save my screen. Because Greg mentioned that, I will show you where you can find your saved screens. Once you saved those, under the little star you have here, you may be able to find all the different screens that you've created. Thank you for bringing that up. > I want the audience to learn from my mistakes. Sometimes I make a killer screen, navigate away and it's gone. And I don't remember how I did it to re-create the magic. I interrupt your flow. Let's go to the next stage. > No worries. Thank you for calling that no. Investors may also consider using… There is an index they may consider using. So under research, under markets, we will go under indices. Once I am on this page, we will do the different major indices but we will focus on the sector indices in this case. And we are going to focus on the Canadian sector indices. There is that Canadian dividend aristocrats. This is actually a list of companies that have, in the last five years, pay dividends and have increased their dividends at least once in those five years. So an investor looking for companies paying dividend, I know we want companies that were paying dividends monthly but once again, if you want to look more historically into a company's ability to pay dividends, then they may be able to score the companies on this list. So once I click on here, I can scroll down and look at the members of this Index and then if I want, I can filter this table by, for instance, the dividend yield, knowing that these companies have paid dividends for at least the last five years and have done some kind of increase into those dividend payments at that time. >> Fascinating stuff. Look at another question. Someone wants to talk about structured notes. How can I find information on structured notes, how to see their yield, payment frequency and how to buy them in WebBroker? >>right, so structured note, they are actually security that investors use. They may not be as popular some we have talked about today. They are a fixed income product. They have features of a bond, so things like a maturity date. So when a structured note is issued, it will mature. They tend to have coupon payments. And investors who are considering them may also consider them because there are two kinds of structured note. There is a principal protected, where the amount you put in, you are guaranteed to get the principal at the end, but then there also the principal at risk. So that is where we tie in another feature of structured note is that their performance is tied to an underlying asset. It could be an index, and so if that index performs well, the investor who is using a principal at risk structured note may end up receiving their principal and then some. Let's go into WebBroker and take a look at where investors can find structured notes. So in WebBroker, if you are thinking about researching structured notes, you are able to find them under trading. Under the buy sell here, we are going to go to new issues. Once that happens, you are able to find different kinds of structured note here. For instance, when you see things like the equity linked notes. We will focus on one of those today. We will focus on this one that says the TD Canadian utilities index linked auto callable coupon notes. It says principal at risk. I know right off the bat when I click on this, principal at risk. So I'm going to click on it and once I come on this page, this information on the page itself but you can actually get some additional information on the product notes. So we are going to pull up the product information that has some great information for us. So I'm going to click on that. This will pop up. I'm going to make it slightly bigger. I promise we will not read all six pages. [laughing] >> A special three hour edition of MoneyTalk Live today. >> I'm just goingto show that this is linked to utility assets. This asset is auto callable which means that when certain criteria are hit, the company that issued the structured note, which in this case is TD, have the right to call back the note and return your principal. And I can also see with the potential coupon payment annually is. It's 9.5%. It's important to note that this is call potential for a reason. This is going to be paid semiannually so essentially 4.25% every six months. So let's talk a little bit about how the structured note works. We see that it's going to be issued on March 7. It's going to mature in seven years. So there is your maturity date. We see the underlying asset it's linked to. And then when we talk about the auto call feature, how does that work? With structured note, when they are issued and tied to underlying assets, however the asset is trading is considered 100%. Asset trades above 110%, just gonna scroll up so we can see that, the auto call feature is at 110% or more. When that asset goes to 110% or more, the issuer, TD in the situation, has the right to call back the note and return your money to you. On the other hand, if the timeframe of the structured note's the level that we are tracking drops and as long as it stays at 75% or higher, so 75% or hundred and 10%, the investor will receive their coupon payment. If it stays that way at the end of their note, they will receive their principal back. If the value of that structured note… Sorry, the value of the underlying asset drops beyond the 75% level, the investor runs the risk of not getting a coupon payment. . That happens at the end of the lifetime of the note, they may end up experiencing a loss in their overall principal. So considerations that investors should keep in mind. A great thing about the product notice that it shows you all this information graphically. I know there are a lot of numbers here. You may say, this is so much. But he gives you the evaluation dates of when that level is being checked and the determination is being made if you will receive a coupon payment and then the final valuation date which is March 1 will determine how much of your principal you're going to get back. So just one last thing. We will scroll to the third page here. There are some great examples. So the first example we see here, after the structured note was issued, it traded below the 75% mark. So at each specific point when the valuation of the note was taken, it was below the 75 point marked, so the investor did not receive any coupon payment and that timeframe. The final valuation date which we've determine was March 1 was also below the threshold of 75%. So the investor would lose whatever part of the investment is below the 100% level. On the other hand, I will give you an example. On the other hand, if at the end of the lifetime of the note, even if sometime during the lifetime it dropped below 75% in the investor didn't get paid, at the very last evaluation dates, if that level is above the 75% marked, the investor receives the full principal back as well as receiving coupon payments along the way. The thing with the structured note is that it could enhance your overall income but there is also risk involved if you are using the principal at risk structured note. >> Once in a while, we get questions about structured note. For most people in the chair, it's not their wheelhouse. Clearly we have that expert in the church today. That was a pretty impressive primer. Look at another question. If you are asking how can I buy in at a price and sell at a price all in one transaction. For example, by it to, sell it for. Can you do that? >> Yes. A reason why an investor may consider this could be for efficiency. it could also be at that I purchase a specific security and I hope the price goes up and I want to sell it whenthe price goes up but I forget, how do I make sure that I am managing my portfolio well? So investors may consider using a conditional order, that's what we call them. In this case, it would be called a one triggers another. So let's go into WebBroker and explore the one triggers another conditional order. So once in WebBroker, I'm just going to click the buy sell button here. So once I do that, I'm going to type in a stock. I will keep using the same stock, the last stop we talked about here, so BNS in this case. So when I pull up the stock… I'm sorry, I'm going to go to strategies. Let's make sure we are being efficient. So we are going to go to strategies in this case. So once we click on strategies, we are going to find our one triggers another. As the name entails, you will put into orders to the system. The first one has to go through for the second one to go through. Once you click on it, you will see the difference between the basic order to get that I accidentally just pulled up and this one. You will notice with this one that there are two places to place an order. This is the first order and this will be, right underneath, the second order. Let's keep using our stock here. We are going to pull up the specific stock. So when I do that, I could say I want to buy the stock at a specific price. So the last price it sold for was $60. Maybe I'll say I want to buy it for $60. Sorry, that's quantity. Let's say I want to buy 100 of the stock. I will end up using a limit price. The limit price let's me set the price I am willing to pay for the stock. If I decide to use a market order, then I am fine paying whatever price the market values the stock at. But since the question was very specific, I want to buy at a specific price, sell at a specific price, let's put a specific price here, which in this case will be $60. Then I can set my timeframe on how long I am willing to wait for this order to go through. In this case, I will just say good till cancelled, which for Canadian stocks is 90 calendar days. It's going to sit in the system. If it gets executed, it will get filled. If not, it falls out of the system with no cost to the investor. Once I've done that, I can also set a second trade ticket and I'm going to do it for the exact same stock. but what I want to do in this instance… If I want to do it is a standard order it wouldn't go through because the system would say that you don't of the stock. So once I put sell, but the same quantity which is 100 and once again I will use that limit price. And I will say if I bought it at 60, may be I want to sell it at $80 so that I am making a gain of $20. I'm also gonna set my good till for cancel, so another 90 calendar days, and once I do this, I can preview my order, put my order in the system. So what's going to happen in this case is that the first order has to go through, so that's why it's called one triggers another. Once that happens, the second order then becomes active in the system and if the stock price does rise to $80, then the transaction will go through. I will mention though that as you noticed, these are two separate order tickets. This means that the investor wants to be aware that if both orders go through, it's going to be 999 each time the order is filled. >> I was going to ask you about that but you got it in there. Nugwa, we will give you a break. You can't rule out a question. We'll get back to your questions for Nugwa Haruna on the web broker platform in just a moment's time. As always, make sure you do your own research before making any investment decisions. And a reminder that you can get in touch with us any time. do you have a question about investing or what's driving the markets? Argus are eager to hear what's on your mind, so send us your question. there are two ways you can get in touch with us. You can send us an email anytime at moneytalklive@td.com or you can use this question box right below the screen here on WebBroker. Just writing your question and hit send. We will see of one of our guest can get you the answer right here at MoneyTalk Live. Canadian consumers have started the year on a pretty strong no, according to the latest research from TD Economics. Our Anthony Okolie has been digging into the report to talk about some of these trends. Anthony? >> Thanks very much, Greg. TD's latest debit and credit card spending data actually points to signs that Canadians are continuing to spend. As the chart shows, spending continued to rise in nominal and inflation-adjusted terms. Sales in January are coming off a strong month in December as retail sales rise about half a percent month over month. Sales were up for cars on… And it wasn't just goods that benefited in December as the next chart shows. Both goods and services spending saw broad-based acceleration in December and January. We saw service spending in things like restaurants and bars that edged higher along with health and personal care stores in December. That service spending trend continued into January. Also, many households got provincial government checks at the end of last year which was meant to ease the strain of rising prices. They also benefited from lower daycare fees so that contributed to the strengths and the consumer as well. Now finally, spending on housing related items was fairly subdued last month as well is in December. Somewhat surprisingly, spending on housing related items, things like furniture, building materials, home furnishings, appliances, that showed some modest improvement in January but it's still running below the year ago level which is in line with the slowing housing market. We have seen the BOC aggressively hike interest rates which has put a lot of would-be buyers on the sideline. Based on recent data, TD Economics is that it's not yet apparent that consumers are pulling back even as rates and inflation remain elevated this renewed resilience has led them to upgrade their outlook for consumer spending in the final quarter of 2022. Greg? > What about the year we are in? You said there's a lot of interesting things happening here. Aggressive rate hiking cycle, the cost of borrowing has gone up substantially in just years time. what do they think for this year? > I think consumer spending is going to show significantly this year but growth is expected to average about half a percentage point higher than what they projected three months ago. If we recall, the projection for the first quarter, consumer expenditure rose by .8%. They are looking for slightly higher growth there for the second quarter, .1% against slightly higher growth there because continued consumer resilience as we start the year 2023. > Fascinating stuff. Thanks. >> My pleasure. >> Moneytalk's Anthony Okolie. A quick check in on the markets. The last trading day of the month. whether you are looking at the TSX Composite Index of the S&P 500, it has been a money-losing month as far as February is concerned. Of course we had that strong pop at the top of the year. At 20,280, we are down 52 points on the TSX, down Cordova percent.Baytex down to the tune of almost 9%. First Quantum I noticed earlier getting a bid to the upside. There are some pockets of strength as well as weakness in the market today. Same as everyday. The S&P 500, let's take a look, seal the broader American market is doing. managing to eke out a gain of six points at this moment, though it's in a choppy session. The tech heavy NASDAQ has been positive. It's up 1/3 of a percent. Occidental Petroleum, and earnings miss but it is increasing the dividend and it's just sort of flat, up about 13 1/2 cents. We are back now with Nugwa Haruna from TD Direct Investing, take your questions about the platform. lots of questions. I will throw a few more at you. Why can't I open the action note summary for detailed information? I don't even understand the question. It's all yours. >> This is a report published by the TD Securities team that is available within the Whataburger platform. Let's actually go on there. It sounds like the person asking the question is struggling to letter. So in WebBroker, we are going to click on research and on our markets, we are going to go to reports. Now, this is a report that is made every trading day, so Monday to Friday, and he gives you an idea of what's going on in the markets today as well as a summary of all the intraday action notes that were made throughout the day, and the previous day. What happens is when you click on this, it is a pop up. So there is a possibility that the person trying to access this may have a pop-up blocker on their computer. So one way to get around it may be to right-click, if you are using a MacBook, double finger click or control click on there. So I'm gonna right-click and then open it in a new tab. Otherwise, if you click on it directly, it pops up as a separate window. As we are talking about it, we might as well take a look at the action note summary here. As I mentioned, it's published every morning. You are able to see information such as what TD analysts are saying about specific companies. If they are changing their ratings for specific companies, you can see that on there as well. For instance, you can see for MEG energy Corp., there was a change in the 12 month price projection targets by the TD analysts here. It went up from $20-$23. Then we see a summary of some of the intraday action notes released yesterday during the trading day. If you want to focus on any one of these reports, you can. I'm going to look on the one that was released today. It actually brings us to a page explaining why our analysts increased their 12 month price target for this company. You will see the event that happened to and the reasoning behind it. For an investor that wants to see more detailed reports, at the top rate here is as full report. You can go on there. When I click that it takes you to the full report. Then, you can review what the TD analysts had to say about the specific company. Hopefully, the viewer is able to control click or right-click on the system and that will help us pop up. >> That make sense. Pop-up blockers can make you run into problems on your browser. We're going to school use one more question. How do I purchase a GIC? We get this question a lot. >> Yes. So GICs. To buy a GIC with in WebBroker, I am able to click on the research tab. Under investments, and wind click on the GIC Rate Sheet's. So once I do that, I'm going to be brought to the page where I can buy a GIC. So please keep in mind that to place your GIC orders, you can see that here, 9 AM to 4 PM Eastern time. There different kinds of GICs that you can find here. See you can find your short-term GICs, anything expiring in less than a year. You will find your long-term GICs. You will also find cashable GICs, so GICs that you can get out of after a specific time frame. It could be 30 days and you're able to cash out without penalties and there are marketing to GICs which are linked to the performance of a specific index. So your return may vary if you purchase a market linked to GIC but there is typically a guaranteed minimum. We are just going to focus on buying a long term GIC. I went to click on the first one that we have here. Something else I will mention, investors, when they buy these GICs, can choose how often to receive their interest payments. If you want to receive your interest payment monthly, the rate you would get may be different than if you choose to receive your interest payments annually. That's another consideration to keep in mind. I'm just gonna go with the annual here. So when I click on there, I will be brought to this page here and it gives me an idea, a summary once again of the annual rates, the minimum and maximum I can purchase, and then an investor can enter the amount of how much they want to provide, in this case the minimum is 5000 there. You can put the order through. >> I'm not sure if that maximum of 3 million would be constraining. >> It is. Because it is a one year GIC… >> There different kinds of investors out there are different kinds of funds on the floor. [laughing] >> Yeah. There different reasons investors may consider GICs. You know you are locked in. Especially if you have a long term GIC and you want to get out, there will be a penalty charged. That's where the idea of using may be a cashable if you want to keep your position a little more liquid than getting locked in but then again, if you are using cashable, those rates are lower than if you are locking yourself in, the different considerations there. >> Always such a pleasure to have you here. Always educational. I learned a lot today about the platform. Can't wait to have you again. >> Always a pleasure being here. So glad, so happy you guys invited me on the show. >> Our thanks to Nugwa Haruna, senior client education instructor with TD Direct Investing. Stay tuned. On tomorrow show, Daniel Ghali, senior commodity strategist with TD Asset Management will be taking your questions about commodities. You can get a head start on this question, just email moneytalklive@td.com. That's all the time we have for the show today. Thanks for watching. We will see you tomorrow. [music]