The following are a collection of posts that, in my humblest of opinions, were worthy of note. The list will be amended from time to time:
January 21, 2010: Peer to Peer Lending – Prosper / Landing Club – Explaining the risk – An examination of peer-to-peer lending companies and default rates. Without the benefit of hindsight, it turned out that these sorts of loans were terrible. They eventually tried to securitize these loans and create tranches, but even these offered sub-par returns and plenty of headaches for the issuers and investors alike.
March 9, 2011: Petrobakken – Value trap – I took some heat for calling this company a value trap but this once-loved company which had a gigantic yield eventually filed for CCAA as an over-leveraged mess. There is some degree of irony (fate?) that the US shale industry a decade later was a textbook case of what happened to PBN. I predicted well in advance their dividend was going to be suspended and their inevitable decline.
July 17, 2012: Genworth Mortgage Insurance Canada – My original thesis on why Genworth MI (TSX: MIC) was a buy at the time. Genworth (renamed Sagen MI) agreed to be taken over by Brookfield Business Partners in 2020 for CAD$43.50/share. I provided extensive coverage of Genworth MI and at one time it was my largest portfolio holding.
November 26, 2013: Pinetree Capital – Possibly the worst closed-end fund, ever – Unfortunately a data migration caused the images of financial information to no longer appear on this article, but this trade on the debentures of Pinetree was quite profitable. The company has since had its management kicked out and is now run by the son of the CEO of Constellation Software (TSX: CSU).
October 4, 2014: Bitcoin Valuation Review – Boy, never have I been so early nor so wrong with an asset than cryptocurrency in general. I originally wrote about Bitcoins in June of 2011 when they spiked from $10 to $20…
December 7, 2015 and January 7, 2016: An analysis of the Dundee Corporation Series 4 Preferred Shares exchange proposal. This particular series of preferred share had rare features which made the dissection of this offer to be rather fun to examine (and it is always instructive to see how “shark tank” management finds creative ways to rip off their stakeholders).
October 28, 2016: KCG Holdings – very inexpensive risk-reward ratio – This was a classic case of a company wrecking themselves four years prior coming back and becoming a much better entity to invest in. They eventually were bought out. My thought process on this investment was solid and it did come to fruition with a buyout offer.
November 3, 2016: US Presidential Election: Current Guess – Nailed the prediction of Trump’s election. Doesn’t mean I support him or his policies. My 2020 prediction also had Trump ahead, but this was despite polling in all the relevant swing stages (including Florida) showing that Biden had a huge lead. The actual result (whether or not you believe the election was fraudulent, which is beyond my pay grade!) was a lot closer than pollsters and pundits predicted.
May 8, 2017: 2017 British Columbia Election Prediction – Another successful election prediction, where modelling beat polling.
April 23, 2018: Physical Fitness, Mental Fitness and Financial Performance – Making a linkage between physical and mental fitness and how this relates to financial performance.
July 30, 2018: Atlantic Power – Terrible industry, cheap stock – My original write-up on Atlantic Power. They received a buyout bid in January 2021 for US$3.03/share.
November 26, 2019: Yellow Pages – A comeback from the dead? – I had been tracking Yellow Pages before their recapitalization and after. They recapitalized in 2012 and it is amazing when you stalk a company for such a long period of time, opportunities present themselves when you have the right management team in place – operationally things in a company change and you don’t see the results until years ahead – in terms of the stock market, this is usually a great time to be investing before the results of changing the operations kicks in. My previous ramblings on the former Yellow Pages are worth a historical read for context.
Everything I wrote in March 2020, especially the “CoronaPanic” edition posts (read it in chronological order from March 1st to 30th if you can). This was one of the most intense months of my investing life and you can see my documented attempts to trying to sort out everything in the “heat of the moment”. If I had to point to a single month of writings to be a good reflection of my thought processes, this one is it.
December 21, 2020: Mutant SARS-CoV-2 Viruses, Perceived Risk, Actual Risk – Talking about the perceived risks of Covid-19 variants.
May 21, 2021: When narrative and reality collide – ESG, politics and markets – Commenting on the impact that politics has on markets.