Stock Talk

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...

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...

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 o...

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...

The essence of my coaching practice is to teach people to make more successful investment decisions. Investing is about making decisions. Should I buy, sell, or hold a stock or ETF? At face value, successful investment decisions are a product of improved education of the mechanics of investing as well as continuous engagement. This is great however it does not on its own lead to making consistent...

This episode is a total going down memory lane thing. 99 episodes ago, I dared myself to prop up my phone, open up Periscope and put myself out there for the world to see me um and ah'ing my way to babbling about investing. I thought I had maybe 3 clips of 3 minutes before I would run out of things to say. Somehow though, I was able to do it for a year before a colleague suggested that I try...

It appears that central banks around the world are either engaging or leaning towards increasing interest rates. At a first level thinking, rising interest rates spell trouble for stocks in the short to medium term, however as we've been living in a prolonged era of excessively low interest rates, an increase interest rates is actually a welcome event in the long term. In this episode I share my t...

Since the financial crisis of 2007-08, there has been a big proliferation of dividend oriented investing strategies. There is vast inventory of material that has been shared by  many that have benefited from adopting an investing ideology of investing in stocks that pay dividends. The two main drivers for the popularity of dividend investing has been uber low interest rates that has forced investo...

For some reason, we tend to gravitate to making decisions that are complex rather than going for a more simple elegant solution. We find the rational and thought process that incorporate words we've never heard of, lengthy math formulas, and fancy charts to be the validation that we need in order to take our investments to the next level. In the investment industry this is quite evident in the typ...

It's decision day again!. In this episode Aman shares his thought process on two recent investment decisions he made. One involved buying more shares in Disney and the other his decision to buy shares in Nike. Aman shows he uses the 8 questions everytime he evaluates a stock to determine if it's worth buying.

Investing thanks to computer processing power has allowed us to filter, slice, and dice ridiculous amounts of information to give us insights into the behaviours and financial performance of stocks. It is driving more and more of our decision making and I feel that at the expense of more qualitative elements that are just as important in the decision making process. People who work in the investme...

The cornerstone of my investment coaching practice is to teach and mentor people to make better investment decisions as it pertains to the buying and selling of individual stocks and 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. In this episode I reviews my updated Last 100 list and s...

One of the things that intimidates people about investing is the endless formulas and ratios..the mathi'ness of it all. The image of someone sitting there pouring over spreadsheets can give people hives. I came across a pretty good article recently that outlined 7 steps to quickly analyzing a stock. I noticed that all 7 steps involved some element of math, which again to most people would be a tur...

I'll be honest, I really had no intention about offering any takes on the cryptocurrency mania but I get asked ALL THE TIME about whether it's worth investing in Bitcoin or any of the other cryptocurrencies that are exploding on the scene. To me investing Bitcoin is no different than investing in any other traditional paper currency....which is highly risky. At the same time, I really haven't had...

In the last few months we've seen some business activities and transactions that I think will have major reverberations on how we do business and ultimately the types of investment opportunities that will emerge from them. In this episode Aman offers some hot takes on the Amazon/Whole Foods merger, the Alphabet (Google) partnership with Walmart, and finally the decision by Disney to part ways with...

With the Canadian dollar increasing in value by just over 10 percent recently, I decided to do a little cross boarder shopping in July and increase some of my US stock holdings. At the same time, I used the stronger Loonie to add some new stocks to my portfolios.

With Mad King from North Korea and the Mad King from the USA trash talking using their nuclear weapons on each other, Aman tries to map out what that could look like and how it could potentially impact stock prices around the world. Suffice to say, it won't be good in the short term. What's more concerning is the impact it will have on how commerce is done around the world. As much as the rhetoric...

As stock markets around the world set record high's on an almost daily basis and despite all political chaos and maybe surrounding it, I keep wondering, and asking myself how sustainable this is? This just can't continue on like this.  Something deep down is telling me this epic run will somehow end...but how? What is it that will take this whole house of cards down? In this episode Aman tries to...

The active investing versus passive investing debate continues and it will likely continue forever. An interesting wrinkle though in the debate has popped up and it involves literally the patriarch of index investing changing teams. In this episode Aman dives into this stunning change of heart. At first Aman was ready to go into full "gotcha" on this, however this case highlights an important qual...

At the core of my personal investing ideology is the concept of having entry and exit points for when a stock or ETF reaches a certain return level. In this episode I share some of my recent investment decisions many of which came to down to whether to hold or sell a few positions in my portfolios as they had crossed my personal return threshold.

In episode 69, I reported some interesting changes that occurred on my Robo Advisor portfolio that I setup a few years ago. At the time, I thought that the changes could have been temporary as part of stepping stone. In this episode, I check in on my Robo portfolio at the mid-year mark to see if those changes have remained.

RANT ALERT! In episode 66, I went on a bit of a rant after a blogger said I was asking the wrong investing question in that performance shouldn't play a factor in investing. A common feeling people who start investing experience is intimidation, especially from the financial services industry. They feel like they are being talked down and become hesitant to learn more and ask questions. This plays...

A right of passage for anyone studying investing and finance in university is to face the beat down of learning one of core investing theories which is the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). It is a particularly dry topic which I recall on several occasions made me almost fall asleep in class. In school they basically ram the EMH into your brain and I really wasn't in any place to know if it was a...