These safety-conscious stocks remain buys

Article Excerpt

TD BANK, $77.49, (Toronto symbol TD; Shares outstanding: 1.8 billion; Market cap: $141.7 billion; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; Dividend yield: 5.0%; www.td.com) merged its 43%-owned U.S. online brokerage firm TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. (Nasdaq symbol AMTD) with rival Charles Schwab Corp. (New York symbol SCHW) in October 2020. TD now owns 12.0% of the combined firm. Schwab is also a bank, and it continues to lose depositors who are shifting their funds to banks that pay them higher interest rates. As a result, TD expects Schwab contributed $234 million (Canadian) to its earnings before unusual items for the fiscal 2023 fourth quarter, ending October 31, 2023. That’s down 30.1% from $335 million a year earlier. To put those figures in context, TD earned $3.73 billion, or $1.99 a share, in the quarter ended July 31, 2023. Schwab has now converted 80% of TD Ameritrade’s accounts to its own platform. That should help it retain more of those clients. In fact, it ended the third…