Stock Talk

With commodity prices falling off and the Federal Reserve signalling they will pause on future interest rate hikes, the dynamics of a falling US$ and rising commodity prices including oil could be in play. I decided to do a quick analysis of CNQ which is considered among the big players in the Canadian Energy scene to see if there may be an opportunity to jump in.

Yes it been a full 4 years since I opened up my Robo Advisor account. For those new to investing, a Robo Advisor is a new wave of wealth management companies that invest on behalf of others using an online platform and a combination of algorithms and computer coding to buy and sell specific investments and manage portfolios. Four years ago these firms were just stepping into the investing concious...

The way 2018 ended in the markets with culminating in the Christmas Eve massacre followed by the post-Christmas bounce, it looked like 2019 would be more of the same. Turned out the market continued to bounce high and at one point erased most of the damage of last year. In this episode, I share the Investment “Decisions” that I made in January.

I always get questions from people about investing. In this episode I share a few questions and offer my takes: Is stock picking more art than science? How do you come up with different investment ideas? What is the first metric you look at when you research a stock? What are the tricks in investing in the stock market?

One of my motivations as an Investment Coach is to make people more street smart when dealing with the investing industry (banks, mutual funds, wealth management companies, brokers, robe-advisers etc). Even though more people today are investing on their own, the reality is you cannot invest in a bubble, and whether you go the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) path or work with someone, you will still have to...

December brought more pain and angst in the markets. It forced me to make some tough decisions and take some losses, but it didn’t dissuade me from staying true to my investment ideology and my search for buying quality investments at a discounted price. In one case I had to do a 180 and retract my decision.  Decisions Taken: New Position: Bought shares in Vanguard FTSE Canada All Cap ETF (Ticker:...

Luxury retail stocks were taking a pounding along with the broader market. Stocks like Tiffany had been falling from the $140’s to the mid $80’s. Tiffany is a stock I’ve held in the past and had on my watch list to look at if it were ever to fall back. So with the tumble I did a quick analysis to see if there is an opportunity to jump in which I share in this episode.

Happy New Year indeed! It seems like many investors are more than happy to turn the page on a new year and fast! So much for the Santa Clause rally. The markets continued to roll over as 2018 wound down. While it will definitely crimp some of my returns for the year. I actually viewed it as an opportunity to do some Christmas shopping. This is the type of shopping I like where the money I spend on...

Throughout the year I’ve shared with you the investment decisions I’ve made. It’s important to me that as someone that teaches people how to make better investment decisions, that I model the concepts and principles I teach. Well it’s that time of the year where in this episode I walk it back and see what I did right and more importantly what I did wrong…and what if anything did I learn from the e...

One of the most under performing asset classes so far this year has been German equities. As of this writing, German stocks were down over 20 percent year-to-date. Everyone complains about the weakness in the Dow Jones indexes, but the German markets have been in a serious downfall. This despite some of the most well-known and dominant global companies like Daimler Benz and Seimens. The German eco...

There was a fair bit of hand wringing going into October, a month where there have been historically some iconic stock market meltdowns. The market was starting to show some signs of fatigue. At one point the S&P 500 index crossed below its 200 day moving average which hasn’t happened in literally years. Interest rates keep tracking up. The Mad King continued to elevate the trade trash talking and...

With Emerging Market stocks taking a hit, I thought it would be a good time to explore building up a position in the sector. In the episode I evaluate several ETF's to determine which would be an appropriate one to add to my portfolio.

It’s a golden age for investors. Never at any point in history has it been this cheap to get into investing. Management fees and trading commissions have been falling over the past 20 years, thanks mostly to technology which have improved speed and efficiencies of transactions. In the last year or so, the competition over lower fees has been quite intense with ETF companies like Vanguard and Black...

Amazon has been one of the “It” stocks for the last decade. It has had an epic run.  If we were to look at Amazon from a 1st level thinking perspective, the conventional thinking behind buying Amazon is that they are disrupting retail. Any space Amazon enters, be it grocery, streaming, pharmaceutical drugs, diapers is met with fear and doom by the existing players. 1st level thinking would tell us...

With summer done, I was thinking I may be due to make a few investment decisions, but it was quiet month with one selling decision which I wasn’t counting on making anytime soon along with one decision to buy more shares and one new stock I added to my portfolios. At the same time, I was faced with a decision that challenged some of my personal values and given the times we’re in, I don’t think I’...

In Part 1, I shared some thoughts on a recent report by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) outlining the challenges the financial services industry is having in getting Millennials to invest. The OSC report had a great opportunity to address those investing pain points, but like so many financial literacy initiatives, the messaging is not clear, consistent, and understandable. The report iden...

My motivation in starting my own practice to teach and engage people on investing revolved around financial literacy. I thought that if I could improve someone’s financial literacy, they will have a better chance at becoming a successful investor. I was always a big supporter of financial literacy programs, especially in schools. It made sense and I thought it was the right thing to do. The realit...

I continue on with my analysis of video game stocks with a quick dive into Take Two Interactive. They are known for their Grand Theft Auto franchise.

Continuing on in my analysis of video game companies is my review of Electronic Arts. EA is more known for its sports games such as Madden Football and FIFA Soccer. It seems like a natural fit for EA to leverage their sports expertise into the E-Sports domain. In this episode I do a quick mind map analysis to see if EA is worthy of adding to my portfolios.

We’re half-way through the year and so I thought it would be a good time to check back into my ROBO portfolio to see how it’s doing and if there is anything interesting going on. Three and half years ago I decided to try an experiment and find out for myself. I setup an account with one of the big Robo Adviser firms and invested $5000 of my own money into it. My goal was to go through the process...

The cornerstone of my investment coaching practice is to teach and engage with people on how to educated and ultimately successful investment decisions involving stocks and Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s). It’s one thing to teach this stuff. It’s another thing to model the behavior and it’s a totally different thing to actually demonstrate tangible results. Several years ago I decided to dig up my p...

You can't go one direction in the stock market these days without hearing something about Tesla. It has become the classic retail stock. Their CEO has said a few things recently that have had the markets in a tizzy. I've never really looked at Tesla stock because just eyeballing it, it looked overpriced. Well I thought with all the hysteria going on that maybe this is a good time to dive in and ha...

Just because it's summer doesn't mean you lift your foot off the investing pedal. I ended up making several moves in June as some of my positions had crossed my return threshold and I had to make some decision on whether to hold on or sell and bank the profit. I also made a decision to add another stock to my portfolio as well as remove a hedging  position.  Decisions Taken: Bought more shares in...