Every Wednesday, Patrick McKeough, editor of The Successful Investor publishes his “Investor Toolkit” series on his TSI Network. These weekly updates are designed to offer specific investment advice ... which you can accept or ignore as you like.

Written in jargon-free English, each update provides a fundamental piece of investing strategy, and shows you how you can put it into practice right away.

Last week, for instance, McKeough warned about some of the dangers in putting too much faith in a company's history of dividend payments. Too many investors think of a stock with a good dividend history as the next best thing to a government bond.

Shopping, reading, gaming, working, researching, banking. 

Today we do just about everything from the convenience of our computers.

As a matter of fact, Canadians spend an average of 30 hours per week connecting to the online world.

So it's no wonder that more and more Canadians are investing online too.

A few years ago, veteran market strategist Laszlo Birinyi told the New York Times that we were in the early stages of a classic bull market. Since then, the S&P 500 has returned more than 50%. 

In fact it's up some 124% off the lows and is nearing nearing record highs.

And that's not about to change anytime soon, he says: “The bull market probably has between a year and three years to go. I can’t time it. I can only point out the trend.”

And he's not alone in that view. What the big rally hasn't done is cause stock valuations to hit nose-bleed levels that put the bull market at risk, says Jeffrey Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financial.

"There might be some ups and downs, but we will likely have another leg up in this bull market," says Kleintop. "Bull markets end at higher stock market valuations."

Talk about a long wait. After numerous delays, Research In Motion is finally set to show the world its next-generation BlackBerry 10 operating system and its first new BlackBerry in almost two years.

A hit would inject new life into RIM, while a tepid response could sound the death knell for a Canadian icon that's been shunted aside by the likes of Apple and Samsung. 

Investors have been betting on the former, evidenced by the fact that the company's stock price has more than doubled since last fall, though it's still nearly 90% below its 2008 peak of $147.

Scotiabank's Gus Papageorgiou thinks it can go higher, providing about a third of current subscribers upgrade and the company can get 4 million new users overseas, especially in countries where the BlackBerry has remained popular.

Ovum analyst Jan Dawson doesn't see that happening, however.