Top Stories Today

July 25 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories from selected Canadian newspapers. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

** Toronto mayoral candidate John Tory has written to the city's integrity commissioner, asking whether her investigation involving current Mayor Rob Ford will be completed in time for the October election. (http://bit.ly/WOuNm2)

** Two children and a woman on her first overseas trip are among five Canadians missing after an Air Algerie flight carrying 116 people across the Sahara desert changed course to avoid a storm, disappeared from radar and crashed. (http://bit.ly/1zbrN16)

Reports in the business section:

** If BlackBerry Ltd Chief Executive John Chen is worried about International Business Machines Corp and Apple Inc combining their efforts in enterprise technology, he's not letting on. In an interview with the Financial Times, he likened the team-up to when "two elephants start dancing," and suggested that his drive to transform the troubled handset maker is making the company nimble enough to compete with all. (http://bit.ly/1um0JNM)

NATIONAL POST

** A United Nations committee has told Canada it should free the man with no name - an immigrant who has been detained for seven years because the Canadian government can't identify who he is, or to where he should be deported. (http://bit.ly/1jYWEKA)

** An Ottawa doctor who caused a public health scare in 2011 after her endoscopy clinic failed a health inspection has agreed never to practise medicine again. Dr. Christiane Farazli was publicly reprimandedThursday by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons for disregarding the safety of patients and ignoring the fundamental principles of infection control. (http://bit.ly/1keQtCS)

FINANCIAL POST

** Malaysia's Petroliam Nasional Bhd is seeking potentially billions in tax relief from the Canadian government in exchange for opening new markets for Canadian natural gas, as it inches closer to a final investment decision on a British Columbia export terminal. (http://bit.ly/1lCLl6i)

** Making improvements to its fresh food business helped Loblaw Companies Ltd stay at the leading edge of a brutally competitive grocery sector in the second quarter. (http://bit.ly/1rQgwQn) (Compiled by Arnab Sen in Bangalore)

Can’t decide where to invest? Neither can the pros

If you are agonizing over where to invest your money, you aren’t alone. An investment conference finds the pros divided.

 

By: Gail MarksJarvis Chicago Tribune, Published on Sun Jun 29 2014

If you are agonizing over where to invest your money, you aren’t alone.

The pros are there with you —nervous about stocks and bonds as clear opportunities become fuzzy in both. As the best and brightest fund managers talked at Morningstar’s three-day conference in Chicago last week, they repeatedly expressed reservations.

They see Treasury bonds vulnerable to the inevitable climb of interest rates, and corporate and high-yield bonds paying so little interest that there isn’t enough insulation to protect investors if the economy suddenly weakens or if investors get cold feet. After the unrelenting climb of stocks since 2009, the pros see a stock market so pricey that stocks appear vulnerable to any bad news for the economy or companies.

But the difference between you and professionals who run mutual funds is that fund managers are hired to do something with clients’ money, no matter what. While sitting on cash rather than stocks or bonds might provide security in an iffy environment, cash earns no interest, thanks to monetary policies designed to get people to choose riskier options. Even though many pros say they are flummoxed by a market in which everything from stocks and bonds to currencies and commodities have all become pricey because of the trillions of dollars’ worth of stimulus poured into the markets by the Federal Reserve and counterparts in Europe and Japan, fund managers are doing what they think they must: deploying money where they can make a case for satisfactory results even though they expect high prices to hold back future gains.

They are emboldened by the fact that prices are high —but not outrageously high.

Related: Why the Bank of Canada has an interest rate dilemma

After all, even though pros have worried about bonds and expensive stocks for months, the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock market index has managed to bestow gains of 5.5 percent this year while bonds haven’t incurred losses. There hasn’t even been a correction (a short-term downturn of 10 percent in the stock market) for 32 months. Such a long stretch without a sizable dip in the markets has happened only four other times, according to David Rosenberg an economist with Gluskin Sheff in Toronto.

Considering the high prices of stocks, some fund managers who specialize in stocks also are holding substantially more cash than usual. Even those scouring the world for investments are having difficulty finding stocks cheap enough to buy.

Dennis Stattman, who heads BlackRock’s asset allocation team, said stocks of large Japanese companies that sell to the world are significantly cheaper than U.S. companies.

European stocks have climbed significantly simply because the “European Central Bank took off the table the fear of banks failing,” Stattman said.

Meanwhile, Michael Hasenstab, chief investment officer for Franklin Templeton global bonds, says two of his favorite markets for bonds have been Poland and Hungary, and he’s comforted that the continuation of stimulus from the U.S. Federal Reserve and counterparts in Europe, Japan and China will power many emerging markets.

Gail MarksJarvis is a personal finance columnist for the Chicago Tribune.