The Globe and Mail attempts to identify profitable Canadian companies with growing earnings in its Thursday, April 7, edition. The Globe's Ian Tam writes in the Number Cruncher column that a key metric when looking at company profitability is its return on equity, which is a measure of a company's operating earnings divided by the total shareholders' equity. It answers the question: How much profit is a company creating with the money invested by shareholders? For this column Mr. Tam focused on this metric by ranking stocks on: trailing 12-months return on equity; three-year and five-year average return on equity; and five-year earnings-per-share growth rate. To qualify, stocks needed to have a monthly dollar trading volume of $3-million or more. Mr. Tam's profitable companies with earnings growth are Hardwoods Distribution, Newmarket Gold, Wi-LAN, Magna International, Nobilis Health and Altus Group.