Large-cap Funds With a Canadian Focus

Article Excerpt

TRIMARK CANADIAN FUND $18.44 (CWA Rating: Aggressive) (AIM Funds Management Inc., 5140 Yonge Street, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario M2N 6X7. 1-800-631- 7008; Website: www.aimfunds.ca. Buy or sell through brokers.) uses a bottom-up stock-picking style (using fundamentals such as earnings, cash flow and low debt) that looks at valuation measures and then tries to pick stocks selling at a discount to long-term value. The fund’s 10 largest holdings are Thomson Reuters Corp., TD Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia, MacDonald Dettwiler, Time Warner, Willis Group Holdings, Alimentation Couche-Tard, Power Corporation, Toromont Industries and Molex Inc. The fund’s portfolio breaks down by sector as follows: Financials, 26.3%; Consumer discretionary, 20.1%; Information technology, 10.8%; Materials, 9.8%; Energy, 4.2%; and Industrials, 7.8%. Trimark Canadian Fund’s one-year loss is 13.6%, compared to a gain of 7.4% for the S&P/TSX Index. That’s largely due to its high weighting in financial services stocks, which have moved down lately on concerns over asset-backed securities and exposure to the U.S. subprime residential mortgage…