If you’re a U.S. citizen and you’ve been wanting to get into the Canadian markets but things were too expensive a year ago, or maybe you just don’t know enough about what’s available, I’ve got good news for you!  This is a list of five income trusts that trade on the NYSE and which are currently paying high double-digit yields!!

Add to yields of 20% or more your 25% stronger dollar and you’ve got a return of almost 45%!

This is an opportunity you don’t want to miss, especially since experts agree the greenback will fall again when all the chips are in and the markets improve.  So here’s the list.  I’ve owned all of these at one time or another.  Four oil and gas trusts, and one waste-management trust (a pretty good defensive play, since we always need waste management).

Arc Energy Trust (AET.UN) - currently paying about 15.60%!
Freehold Royalty Trust (FRU.UN) - currently paying about 19.5%!
Harvest Energy Trust (HTE.UN) - currently paying about 30.6%!! (Yes, a thirty percent yield!)
New Alta Income Fund (NAL.UN) - currently paying about 22.2%!
Pengrowth Energy (PGF.UN) - currently paying about 19.6%!

Not only are some of these names at a serious discount right now, but some, like Arc Energy, are extremely well-managed companies.  Pengrowth was the first oil trust in Canada.  These aren’t fly-by-nights.  Do check them out more on your own.  But these are my recommendations.  Harvest Energy, for example, just announced they’re going to buy back some shares, so you’ll want to time your purchase accordingly.

This is an open question to all of you.  I haven’t thought about this in a while, but I was recently reminded of it and noticed that we haven’t heard much in the way of updates on the Iranian oil bourse.

The last I heard, a few months ago, was that Iran successfully opened the euro-denominated oil-trading bourse in a limited fashion on some small island in the Gulf.  That was this year.  What’s happened since then?  Can anyone corroborate this information?

What’s the Iranian Oil Bourse?

Apparently, Iran (and, as some speculators thought, also Iraq at one point pre-March-2003) has been planning for some time now (since at least before the latest war in Iraq) to trade oil in euros rather than dollars.  The rationale behind the attention this story attracts is that presumably, if traded in euros, oil-traders would have less need to keep any US dollars in their foreign reserves.  Instead they would load up on euros for their oil-trading and they would drop the dollars they don’t need.

Once countries start selling their US dollars, it’s a problem for the US Treasury because there would be less people keeping the US debt-boat afloat.  It’s no secret that the US owes the rest of the world more than the rest of the world owes the US.  That debt is growing at an alarming rate.  The US borrows something like a billion dollars a day just to pay interest on all of its foreign loans.  I’d say you can look this information up and verify it yourself, but alas, they have stopped publishing M3, which is the figure that represents the sum total of all US dollars in existence.

Whether or not this has anything to do with the US interest in Iraq and Iran is beside the point, for now.  It’s a much better idea to just stay tuned to developments in the oil bourse itself.  So, send them my way if you have hard updates.  This isn’t a story that seems to be followed in North American media very well.

Here’s one of Jim Rogers’ latest interviews with Bloomberg (June 5, 2008). I always smile at these. He seems so annoyed and frustrated at talking with journalists and reporters. It’s as though he feels that it’s all so common sense - of course you should know that bankruptcies are signs of bottoms and that means it’s a good time to be buying into the airline industry!:) Betty gets him riled up about all the usual suspects: the Fed, Bernanke, the banks, what he’s shorting, commodities, food, gold, Soros, oil and more commodities.

“If People are Talking About a Bubble, I’d Like to Know What They’re Talking About… Sugar’s down 80% from its All-time High - What Kind of Bubble is that?”

I’m actually surprised that he does go into so much detail on all the stocks he owns and what he’s short and how much etc. on national broadcast. Betty even asks him if he’s short on Lehman Brothers. Turns out he’s short all of them through his investment bank ETF.