Andrei Ordine

Most of investors in Canada will hold stocks or ETF listed in US exchanges, and many of those stocks or ETFs pay dividends. Given the (overall) low expected returns on equity, the 2%-3% dividends on broad indices provide non-trivial contribution to the total return. This article is about optimizing the dividend treatment in your Canadian portfolio. In the ideal world, investors will receive the full dividend sent from stock or ETF / CEF ownership. Unfortunately for Canadian investors, this never happens when investing in non-Canadian (U.S.) instruments in the Canadian brokerage accounts. Probably the most annoying tax is the US foreign dividend tax. By default, the U.S/ taxman deducts 30% of dividends paid to an "alien", for example, on your SPY positions - they are sent directly to IRS. Fortunately, Canada has a tax treaty with U.S., which limits the withholding tax to 15%, but to get that lower rate, a Canadian investor must file the form FW8FEN:  https://www.irs.gov/pub...

In the previous posts, I wrote about several versions of a simple financial contract to be implemented on the Ethereum network. The contract was easy to run back in the summer of 2016, but things changed in September and October. This post is about the events and the current situation on the network. What has happened to the Ethereum network? The easy way to understand this is by imagining the Ethereum network as an email system, where each person can send emails, and each email is broadcast to anybody else, creating a long "email chain". The consensus algorithm ensures that everybody agrees on the sequence of emails. In essence, the system is designed to cryptographically evidence and verify this chain.  Early on in the network history, the emails or transactions were easy to send and process, and the transaction fees were low. Unfortunately, the ease of my access to the Ethereum chain also meant that spammers, hackers, or other enemies could easily spam the network w...