Stock Talk

Starbucks stock was getting crushed the last few months. Weak forecasts, some not so great PR events started taking the stock down. It got me interested to see if it may be worth picking up as it seems to be out of favour by Wall Street. Here's my mind map video that walks through my though process that led me to buy shares in Starbucks.

Fitting into my theme of investing in companies that can own the OS, JD.com is positioning itself to become a real player in online retailing. It has been one of the big players in the China market and it is looking to branch out to other parts of Asia. It is very aligned with other players like Tencent and Walmart and aggressively building out its retail ecosystem channels. The stock has been fal...

MGM has not been on my watchlist and I really wasn't thinking about getting into casino stocks but with a recent Supreme Court decision that essentially legalized sports gambling in the US I thought was a game changer movement that could really put gaming companies in a strong position to move. I did a quick scan and MGM appeared to be not the most producing gaming company but what drew me was man...

I've had Johnson and Johnson on my watch list for a long time. I've held it in the past and I got a pretty good return on it. After I sold when it was in the $70's the stock kept on moving and literally doubled. I thought I may never get back in but the stock since the start of the year has been falling and it went down into the mid $120's when I thought it would be good to take a look again. In t...

April was calmer in terms of investment decisions compared to the past few months. With markets zigging and zagging at a much more frequent rate now, opportunities to buy some stocks and ETF’s have presented themselves. At the same time there have been some opportunities to bank some healthy profits. That’s the way markets go. Opportunities don’t set a time to arrive. They show up when they want t...

As an Investment Coach, I spend a good amount of time working with people who are new to investing. Often one of the first questions I get from someone who is new to investing is "I want to learn how to invest are often in the form of: What stocks should I buy?" or "I have $10,000 I would like to invest. What stocks should I buy for the next 10 years?" I've been asking myself lately, why people be...

This is the third and last in a series of episodes where I walk through my investment decisions I made in March. In this episode, I share my thought process that lead me to buy shares in Southwest Airlines.

In Part 2 of my Investment Decisions series podcasts for March, I walk through the thought process that led me to my decision to buy some shares in Big Lots.

After the mini-meltdown in early February, stock prices boomeranged and made back a good chunk of their losses. In some cases the bounce was pretty big and it forced me to make a few decisions. There were a few days where the market tanked pretty big and I used them as opportunities to open some new positions. Like the previous month, I've decided to break down my decisions into 3 parts. In this p...

RANT ALERT: Another annual Real Estate Wealth Expo has made its way through my home town. This year some serious star power was on display. Baseball players, Pop Musicians, and Dragons were regaling attendees and their slightly open wallets with tales of how to escape the rat race and live the 6-49 lifestyle. People leaving these events usually seem to feel they are on their way to financial indep...

I've referred often to the stock market as the Teflon Stock Market because it seems that any small or major socio-political-economic event that gets occurs is casually brushed off by investors. Nothing seems to stick to this market. The day the Mad King got elected the market went down 1500 points but after digesting it, it went on to set record high's on an almost daily basis. I also think about...

In this final instalment of my Investment Decision series podcasts, I shares my thought process that went into buying shares of Priceline (now called Booking Holdings) during the February mini-meltdown. When the market was going haywire in early February, I was watching to see if any stocks that I had on my wish list, were suddenly attractively priced. Priceline was a stock I've had on my wishlist...

In this third instalment of my Investment Decision series podcasts, I shares my thought process that went into buying shares of Baidu during the February mini-meltdown. When the market was going haywire in early February, I was watching to see if any stocks that I had on my wish list, were suddenly attractively priced. Baidu had made a big move downward, so I reviewed my notes to see if the fundam...

In part 1, I shared my investment decisions to buy more shares in stocks I already owned as well as my decision to sell a portion of my short position on the S&P 500 index. During February I also took advantage of the pullback in share prices to add a few new stocks to my portfolio as I felt they had now become attractively priced. I will share my evaluations for each stock, all of which involve a...

As we finished January it looked like the stock market could do no wrong. Investors were all-in on stocks. Investor sentiment was downright giddy. Cash positions were at generational lows. Everything was awesome. Then February arrived. The first few weeks were dramatic. There were days when the Dow Jones Industrials were down 1500 points. 500-800 intraday swings were almost becoming normal after l...

In the second part of my review of Morgan Housel's terrific presentation at the MicroCap Leadership Summit, I share his takeaways on the remaining two historical cases he cites that can teach us a lot about investing.  In this part of his presentation he talks about State of the Union speeches and the Wright Brothers. Some really insightful perspectives.

I have to be honest, I'm getting a bit of bro love for this Morgan Housel of the Collaborative Funds. He just keeps hitting his blog posts out of the park. I may be projecting a bit of Confirmation Bias here and I'm fine with it because go to the heart of what I do as an investment coach. I've referred to his posts many times here and I recommend you check out his blog. A lot of times, we can lear...

Three years ago I decided to try an experiment. 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 and blog about my experience and more importantly, try to find if using this type of service can generate better returns than if I did it myself or used a traditional adviser. I said that we need a good five year...

We start a new year with hope that the investment decisions we make will lead to positive outcomes, hopefully this year, but if not then at some point in the future.  The year has started off with a bang as the markets around the world have surged and continue to set records. In this episode, I share the thought processes I was using that lead to my investment decisions this past month.  DECISIONS...

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 t...

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 t...

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 d...

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 re...