Top 5 Asian Companies To Buy For 2014

Mild selling, in Asian equities, permits us to add to our portfolios with several new Asia-based buys, explains fund expert Doug Fabian. In his Successful Investing, he highlights two foreign dividend plays.

WisdomTree Australia Dividend Fund (BATS:AUSE) seeks investment results that closely correspond to the price and yield performance, before fees and expenses, of the WisdomTree Australia Dividend Index.

That index is fundamentally weighted, and measures the performance of high-dividend yielding companies in Australia. The index is comprised of dividend paying companies, incorporated in Australia, with a minimum market capitalization of $1 billion.

The index also is made up of the ten largest qualifying companies from each sector, ranked by market capitalization. AUSE basically gives us the best-of-the-best stocks in Australia.

It also gives us additional exposure to Asia, as many of the companies in AUSE are suppliers of goods and capital to places such as China. We have added the fund to our growth portfolio.

Hot High Dividend Companies To Invest In Right Now: Vanguard Consumer Staples Etf (VDC)

Vanguard Consumer Staples ETF (the Fund), formerly known as Vanguard Consumer Staples VIPERs, is an exchange-traded share class of Vanguard Consumer Staples Index Fund. The Fund employs a passive management or indexing investment approach designed to track the performance of the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) US Investable Market Consumer Staples Index (the Index). The Index is an index of stocks of large, medium and small United States companies in the consumer staples sector, as classified under the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS). This GICS sector is made up of companies whose businesses are less sensitive to economic cycles. It includes manufacturers and distributors of food, beverages and tobacco, as well as producers of non-durable household goods and personal products. It also includes food and drug retailing companies, as well as hypermarkets and consumer supercenters.

The Fund attempts to replicate the Index by investing all, or substantially all, of its assets in the stocks that make up the Index, holding each stock in approximately the same proportion as its weighting in the Index. The Fund also may sample its target Index by holding stocks that, in the aggregate, are intended to approximate the Index in terms of key characteristics, such as price/earnings ratio, earnings growth and dividend yield.

Advisors' Opinion:

• [By Chris Versace, Editor, PowerTrend Brief and PowerTrend Profits]

  That, to me, says they're going to favor inelastic goods over elastic ones, so when you think of the things that we need each and every day, toilet paper, toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo, household cleansers, that sort of thing, that's what brings me into (XLP) and (VDC).

Top 5 Asian Companies To Buy For 2014: Canadian Utilities Ltd (CDUAF)

Canadian Utilities Limited is a holding company. The Company is engaged in Utilities (pipelines, natural gas and electricity transmission and distribution), Energy (power generation, natural gas gathering, processing, storage and liquids extraction), and Technologies (business systems solutions). The Company operates in threes segments: TCO Electric, ATCO Gas and ATCO Pipelines. ATCO Electric is engaged in the regulated business of transmitting and distributing electricity to 245 communities as well as rural areas in east-central and northern Alberta. ATCO Gas is engaged in the business of distributing natural gas throughout Alberta and in the Lloydminster area of Saskatchewan. ATCO Pipelines is a regulated business engaged in the transmission of natural gas in Alberta. ATCO Pipelines receives natural gas on its pipeline system at various gas processing plants and transports it to end users within the province or other pipeline systems for export out of the province. Advisors' Opinion:

• [By John Heinzl]

  Contrast that with a company such as Canadian Utilities (CDUAF), whose eight price targets range from $40 to $42. (The stock closed Friday at $38.08 [Canadian]). Such tight clustering of targets indicates that analysts have a high degree of conviction about the company's future earnings, which isn't surprising for a utility that throws off predictable cash flows.

Top 5 Asian Companies To Buy For 2014: Lancaster Colony Corporation(LANC)

Lancaster Colony Corporation engages in the manufacture and marketing of consumer products focusing primarily on specialty foods for the retail and foodservice markets in the United States. The company operates in two segments, Specialty Foods, and Glassware and Candles. The Specialty Foods segment produces and sells food products, including salad dressings and sauces under the Marzetti, T. Marzetti, Cardini?s, Pfeiffer, and Girard?s brands; fruit glazes, vegetable dips, and fruit dips under T. Marzetti brand; Greek yogurt vegetable dips under the Otria brand; frozen breads under New York BRAND and Mamma Bella brands; frozen Parkerhouse style yeast dinner rolls and sweet rolls, as well as biscuits, under the Sister Schubert?s, Marshall?s, and Mary B?s brands; premium dry egg noodles under the Inn Maid and Amish Kitchen brands; frozen specialty noodles and pastas under the Reames and Aunt Vi?s brands; croutons and related products under the New York BRAND, Texas Toast , Chatham Village, Cardini?s, and T. Marzetti brands; and caviar under the Romanoff brand. This segment markets its products through sales personnel, food brokers, and distributors to retail, club store, foodservice, and industrial markets. The Glassware and Candles segment produces and markets candles, candle accessories, and other home fragrance products in various sizes, forms, and fragrance in retail markets to mass merchants, supermarkets, drug stores, and specialty shops under the Candle-lite brand name. This segment also sells candles, glassware, and various other products to customers in commercial markets, including restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and schools. The company was founded in 1961 and is based in Columbus, Ohio.

Advisors' Opinion:

• [By Rich Duprey]

  Specialty-foods maker�Lancaster Colony� (NASDAQ: LANC  ) �announced yesterday�its second-quarter dividend of $0.40 per share, a 5% increase over the $0.38 per share payout it's made the last two quarters. It marks the 200th consecutive dividend payment it has made putting it in elite company, as only 16 other companies have�increased its regular cash dividend each year for 50 consecutive years.

Top 5 Asian Companies To Buy For 2014: Solarwinds Inc.(SWI)

SolarWinds, Inc. designs, develops, markets, sells, and supports enterprise information technology (IT) infrastructure management software for IT professionals in various organizations in the United States and internationally. The company offers enterprise-class IT management products, including Network Performance Monitor, a server-based fault and performance management platform to minimize network downtime; Network Performance Monitor modules, a series of add-ons; network configuration manager to automate the processes of network device discovery, network inventory management, and network change management; user device tracker, a server-based switch port management tool; scalability engines to increase the scale of a number of the products; and enterprise operations console to provide web-based views of various instances of Network Performance Monitor modules and Application Performance Monitor. Its enterprise-class network and IT management products also comprise Applic ation Performance Monitor, a server-based availability and performance management system for applications and server infrastructure; patch manager to automate the process of deploying, managing, and reporting on patches and configuration settings; and synthetic end user monitor to capture the user steps of any web application and monitor the end-user experience; storage manager that combines reporting, monitoring, and notification on the performance of storage resources; backup profiler to provide a consolidated view of the status of backup operations; virtualization manager to manage various aspects of virtual server infrastructure; and log and event manager to automate the collection and interpretation of logs. In addition, the company provides free tools, such as desktop, laptop, server-based, or internet-based applications; and tools and toolsets for specific solutions of routine and complicated tasks. The company was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Austin, Texas .

Advisors' Opinion:

• [By Hilary Kramer]

  Next Page

  Tech Stocks That’ll Survive: SolarWinds (SWI)

  SolarWinds (SWI), contrary to what you might think from its name, is not a solar company. It is a software company with a presence in both virtualization and security, and offers solid profit potential thanks to dedicated customers and a growth rate that is already outpacing the overall industry.