A new year is upon us, and with it a new President and many, many new questions for the average investor to ask him or herself or their local MP or Congressman. There are many people out there, politicians not the least of them, that point to the present financial crisis and recession and cry “see THIS is proof that capitalism is the wrong way to go.” I say that's a silly thing to use as evidence.

On July 3, I posted the article “HOD ETFs – A Bearish Indicator For Oil?” suggesting that the exponential increase in trading volume that we were seeing in the new Horizon Beta Pro HOD ETF (the one that offers 200% downside exposure to the daily change in crude oil prices) could be evidence that a substantial correction was coming. July 3rd was when oil hit its all-time high of $145. Since then, spot oil prices have declined by roughly 70% and HOD volume has dropped substantially (see chart below).

First, I want to apologize for the lack of content going up on our site here. Life has been rather busy for the Bullish Dividends Family. I am in the process of selling our house privately, and a family member that was very close has sadly passed away. Today though, I thought I'd go over some of my initial thoughts with selling our house through the ByTheOwner.com service. We have not sold yet, but we have received a lot more 'action' then I originally expected. Our house has been listed a little over 3 weeks now, and we already have two parties which I think will submit offers to us within the next week or so. Some might not think this is very good, but you only have to look at the current market situation, and the fact that we are in the midst of the holiday season which is a time most people put house hunting on hold.

On November 25th Bank of Montreal (TSE: BMO) reported their Q4 results and the numbers weren’t all that bad, on the surface anyway. They reported EPS of $1.18, slightly ahead of analyst expectations and ahead of last year’s earnings. Revenue was also ahead of expectations, the tier 1 capital ratio was a solid 9.77% and there was no sign of a big write-down. So, low and behold, everything looks pretty good… could this possibly be the bottom?

An integral aspect of fundamental analysis involves performing what many would call “ratio analysis”. This involves calculating a number of different industry standard ratios and comparing them to various benchmarks. The benchmarks can be the ratios of other competitors, industry average ratios, or industry “rules-of-thumb”. There’s no set procedure for performing ratio analysis because it all depends on the type of company you’re analyzing – certain industries have industry specific ratios. Regardless, this article will give you an overview of some of the standard ratios and what they may tell us about a company.

In this article I’ll group ratios into four categories used to evaluate the different facets of a company’s performance and overall condition: liquidity, operating performance, leverage, and equity valuation.

The volatility is at a record high, and for active traders, that can either be very good or very bad. Of course, for active traders, direction of the markets doesn't matter all that much because you can short stocks, currencies, ETFs, and also exercise calls and puts on options and so on. (actually the calls and puts part is a whole other can of worms altogether because they can be in the money one day, and out the next, thanks to the huge swings) Anyway, what makes the present market situation either very good or very bad what makes volatility such a double-edged sword – it'll make some systems brilliant and others useless. Sometimes technicals and their parameters seem to be the crystal ball everyone wants, and others that worked last week got shaken to bits. (lingo: shaken in and out of positions because of false or too-late signals) And there's no way of knowing ahead of time what parameters will suit the market conditions ahead of time, or what types of technical studies. There, as they say, lies the rub.

Banks have always been one of the cornerstones for Dividend Based Investing, because they are dividend paying behemoths. They all like to increase their dividend payments regularly and they generally have some of the best yields to go along with these regular increases. Obviously, the banks have been hit pretty hard recently, and although I still don't believe this crisis is over, I thought I'd start doing some analysis on the banks, to see how they stack up in my fairly unforgiving dividend analysis. So, first of is a bank I have always favoured as a dividend pick.

About the company:

Here is Bank of Montreal's description of what they do, which can be found on their website here