Three top picks for 2018

Article Excerpt

Here are our #1 stocks for 2018. There’s one for each of our portfolios— Conservative, Aggressive and Income. Each of the three offers a particularly attractive combination of long-term growth at a reasonable price. We expect their plans to keep expanding will further spur their gains in 2018 and beyond. BCE INC. $58 (Toronto symbol BCE; Conservative Growth and Income Portfolios, Utilities sector; Shares outstanding: 900.4 million; Market cap: $52.2 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 2.3; Dividend yield: 4.9%; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; www.bce.ca) is Canada’s largest telephone provider, with 6.4 million customers in Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and the Atlantic provinces. It also has 3.8 million high-speed Internet users and 2.8 million TV subscribers. In addition, BCE is Canada’s second-largest wireless carrier, behind Rogers, with 9.0 million users. The company also owns several media businesses: CTV Television, specialty channels (most notably, TSN, Discovery, Comedy and Space), pay-TV services (the Movie Network and HBO Canada, among others), and over 100 radio stations. In March 2017,…