I have started to check out the home page of MSN lately.  There is a lot of questionable stuff on there.  There is a stock review company that has a lot of articles on there.  Being interested in stocks, I checked them out several times.  I have to say that they give some Foolish or at least unrealistic advice for ordinary people.  The advertisement that got me a bit hot was one where they recommend that if you had a $1000.00, you should buy the 3 mentioned stocks.

For an average person starting out $1000.00 is a realistic amount of money.  I started with $500.00. The 3 stocks they recommended were Canadian National Railways (CNR TSX), Tropicus .com Inc (TOI Venture), and BMO S&P/TSX 60 Index ETF (ZIU).  There is nothing wrong with any of these companies. Both CNR and Tropicus are down to where they might be a good deal.  ZIU is almost at a 52 week high so not sure that now is a good time to buy.

My problem is that if you only have a $1000.00, the number of shares you can buy is very small. CNR today (Dec 16 2025) closed at $133.42 a share. You would only get 7.5 shares. TOI closed at $123.70, giving you 8 shares, and ZIU closed at $71.10 giving you 14 shares. If you wanted to buy all three with your $1000.00  you could only get 2 to 3 shares of each. I am not sure that doing that would be the best thing for your portfolio.

A few days later, there was almost the same advertisement, but this time you needed $5000.00 to buy the 3 stocks they listed. Kinaxis (KXS, TSX), Constellation Software (CSU, TSX) and Shopify (SHOP, TSX). Again, nothing wrong with these companies, but KXS closed today at $176.38, which would give you 28 shares ($5000 divided by $176.38). CSU closed today at $3,260.00, which would give you 1.5 shares. Shopify closed today at $224.35, which would give you 22 shares.  Both KXS and CSU are down, with SHOP being near its high.  With $5000.00 you would only be able to buy 1-5 shares.  If you want to buy all three.  Again not really good for your portfolio.

I feel that if your going to offer an opinion, it should at least be REALISTIC.  That’s what we try and do on this site.