Stock Talk

While my core investing ideology revolves around buying quality businesses, I also try to structure my portfolios to have exposure to certain business themes that are evolving in business. In the past, I've developed themes in the areas of water stocks, luxury/discount retail stocks, and even investing in a world of Trump. We live in a time where having the most market share does not necessarily translate into being the leader in the market. Market share is nice but if you can control the distribution channel in how products are accessed by customers, you can build a durable competitive advantage, which is something Warren Buffet loves. If you wanted to sell a product, you would need to go through the gatekeeper who would charge you a fee to get into their operating system (OS)  or ecosystem. Traditionally that would have been a department store or some kind of physical retail store in a mall. This is changing. The distribution channel in the 21st century has become online. The Internet.

Whoever can offer a compelling online platform/ecosystem/operating system will have a durable competitive advantage as consumers will stick to and out of convenience be loyal to an operating system. Consequently, the stock market will put a premium on those companies that own the OS for a specific sector or industry.

In this podcast, I set out to try to figure out who the next great stocks are or could potentially be the companies that will own the OS for the Pillars of Companies I often refer to when I try to figure out what stocks to buy.

Over the last 20 years the biggest disruptor in investing has been technology. Technology has enabled more people to access investing services in variety of ways from executing trades, to accessing investment research, to tracking the status of their investments in real-time. It has also lowered the costs of investing. At the same time technology has also enabled some bad investing behaviour. In this episode, I offer some hot takes on how a new service by one of the leading online brokers could potentially enable investors to engage in behaviour that could negatively impact their portfolios.

One of the values I feel strongly about as an investment coach is that I practice what I teach…and be transparent about it…good AND bad. It’s one thing for me to coach people how to make better decisions and develop and teach courses on how to buy and sell stocks and ETF’s. It’s another thing to model the behaviour. Throughout the year I’ve shared and tweeted (#trade2017) with you the investment decisions I’ve made throughout the year. Well it’s that time of the year where we set scroll down the page and see what I what I did right AND more importantly what I did wrong (and believe me I did some stuff I'm not happy about)…and did I gain any insights that will help me become a better investor?

I came across this wonderful blog post by Morgan Housel of the Collaborative Fund where he shares his take on the 4 most important fundamental investing skills. It's a fantastic article (I've read 5 times already and I'll probably read it another 20!) in that it really reinforces a lot of the principles and ideas I've tried to develop in people who are getting into investing. In this episode, I review his article and offer some additional takes and perspectives.

I thought I would be done speaking to this passive investing (sorry I mean low-cost investing) versus active investing debate for while, but it just keeps pulling me back in!

After my recent episode where I tried to bring a bit of a reality check into the whole passive/low-cost investing, another revelation has been presented to us. This time by none other than Vanguard, one of the pioneers of low-cost index investing. Recently the company said that they would be releasing a new line of actively managed ETF's. 

Wait...what! The company of John Bogle who has been firm, consistent crusader for index investing is now changing teams and going to the Dark Side? 

If this is really going down then Bogle will join other passive-investing ambassadors such as Burt Malkiel and Rick Ferri, who have pounded the table (and sold a few books) about the virtues of low-cost index investing and now seem to be OK with the concept of picking stocks. 

In this episode, I offer my takes into the latest passive investing flip-flop.

When I started my consulting business, my main work centred around doing investment analysis on Canadian stocks and companies. My main motivation at the time was that it was very hard to find credible, independent, and unbiased financial analysis. Back in the mid 90's, the investment industry was rife with conflicts of interest. Investment reports was more of marketing copy for investment banks to promote their IPO's. Sell recommendations were few and far between. It's been almost 20 years since that insanity. Some regulations were introduced after the Dot Com, Nortel, and Enron meltdowns. Has anything changed? Is investment research better now? In this episode I share some recent stats that appear to show that investment analysts continue to shoot blanks.

Passive investing has been the rage as more and more money has shifted away from traditional actively managed portfolios to portfolios that track broad based indexes. There's enough evidence that it can be an effective strategy, but is a passive strategy really that passive? When you look underneath the hood of ETF's or index funds, there is really not much that's truly passive about them. A lot of it has to do with the indexes that the ETF's are tracking and benchmarking to. It has changed how I look at passive oriented products and I will  refer to them in the future. In this episode (iTunes), I'll take a deeper dive and try to give the straight, honest sh$t about passive ETF's and index funds.

Continuing off from the last episode, I share my thought process and rationale that went into my decisions to buy shares in Winpak and Nordstrom. As always, I incorporate my 8 questions framework that I teach in my Everyday Investing program.

October was pretty active month for investment decisions, especially as the market continues to surge and set records on an almost daily basis. Because of this I had to break up this post into a couple of smaller posts. In this first of a 2-part series, I share my thought process that I was going through with several investment decisions that involved buying more stock as well as a decision where I decided at first to hold my position but eventually I decided to sell and incurring a loss.