The Diane Francis Inside Guide to Canada's 50 Best Stocks

Sarah Robertson is an editor in the College Division of Nelson Canada.

This is not a book for beginners, nor is it intended to give investment
advice. The author likens it, rather, to “an extensive racing form,
written by someone who’s been paid for years to hang around the
track.”

Francis’s top 50 stocks—culled from a database of 420 blue-chip
companies—are an eclectic mix of small and monolithic, cyclical and
defensive, dividend-paying and speculative. Each has outperformed the
tse during the past 10 years, with returns on equity of 15 percent or
better. Other criteria Francis looked for included superior management,
institutional support, and capacity for survival in a rapidly changing
economic climate (the author’s best guesses as to the 10 dominant
economic trends of the 1990s, from both global and Canadian
perspectives, are outlined in the introduction).

The stock profiles are concise gems of lucidity. Bearishly inclined
readers, in particular, will appreciate the “Caveats” section that
concludes each write-up. No real surprises among Francis’s top picks.
Some have lost their shine in recent months, none so dramatically as
Laidlaw, which has seen its stock price plummet in the wake of various
legal entanglements—exemplary of the incalculables that make the stock
market, to return to the author’s analogy, a veritable horse race.