Cutting Through the Noise
August 24, 2009
In this podcast, Tom expands on his latest Globe and Mail column, which focuses on the traits that he looks for in a money manager. More specifically, he highlights two things that he watches for and studies very intently: 1) the temperament of the...
Read MoreAugust 24, 2009
Being an analyst or portfolio manager means you are destined to make lots of mistakes. They say the great ones are right 60 per cent of the time, which means they're wrong 40 per cent of the time. There aren't too many professions where you're allowed...
Read MoreAugust 19, 2009
The Steadyhand Small-Cap Equity Fund has been one of the top funds in its category since it started in early 2007. But in getting there, the fund has traced quite a different path compared to that of the market and other small-cap funds. That's because the...
Read MoreAugust 12, 2009
I walked into the office this morning to the news that AIC, the troubled fund company owned by Michael Lee-Chin, has been sold to Manulife. I smiled. I always smile when I hear that more consolidation has occurred in the wealth management industry. That’s...
Read MoreAugust 9, 2009
It may not be politically correct to admit it, but I have mixed feelings on the billions of dollars worth of bonuses being paid out on Wall Street. I'm always wary of hysterical, highly politicized issues that have only one side to them. But in this case, I've...
Read MoreAugust 5, 2009
This current market rally has been characterized as ‘a dash for trash’. In other words, lower quality companies have seen their stocks bounce back dramatically, while the higher quality ones have experienced more modest gains. When the companies that...
Read MoreJuly 29, 2009
In my last posting, I talked about the questions that money managers should be asking. I focused on three – inflation, the next market leaders and valuation. There is an additional question that individual investors (and their advisors) should be asking...
Read MoreJuly 27, 2009
The Globe and Mail, Report on Business. Published July 25, 2009. Knowing the right questions to ask is an important and difficult part of any decision-making process. For the last two weeks I've been parked on the edge of Crystal Lake, Ont., where the right...
Read MoreJuly 21, 2009
If you look up the term ‘credit crisis’ on Google, you’ll get close to 50 million results. Over the past year or so, you would be hard pressed to find two more commonly used words in the business world (other than the usual expletives that abound in falling...
Read MoreJuly 13, 2009
A lot of thought has been going into the lessons learned from the recession. That's prompted me to think about what has come out of the turmoil in the capital markets. It didn't take long to come up with a list. Here are my top five lessons learned, or should...
Read MoreJuly 10, 2009
In this podcast, Tom and Scott review the second quarter of 2009. The equity markets rebounded sharply in the quarter, with many stocks posting strong gains. The corporate bond market also enjoyed a long-awaited recovery, as yields declined...
Read MoreJuly 2, 2009
“Things will never be quite the same again. Western businesses in particular will be well served by moderating future expectations. That goes for investors too.” - Tim Price, PFP Wealth Management, June 22nd, 2009. I read Tim Price regularly and always...
Read MoreJune 27, 2009
The Globe and Mail, Report on Business. Published June 27, 2009. Over the past nine months, I've talked often in this space about risk being cheap. Investors can't let past losses blind them to the opportunities that have emerged from the banking crisis and...
Read MoreJune 24, 2009
We need your help Aretha! It seems that the little Canadian technology company that could, Research in Motion, has trouble getting respect. This is hardly a statistically robust analysis, but it has been evident to me for years that RIM and its hugely...
Read MoreJune 18, 2009
Christine Montgomery from Edinburgh Partners, the manager of our Global Equity Fund, has been traveling in North America this week meeting with companies (research) and clients (hand-holding). We dragged her out of the San Francisco fog and welcomed her to...
Read MoreJune 16, 2009
Panic is a compilation of articles that shed light on the most severe upheavals in recent financial history – the crash of ’87, the Russian default and subsequent collapse of Long Term Capital Management, the Asian currency...
Read MoreJune 14, 2009
I'm not a hedge fund manager, but I find their place in the industry to be forever fascinating. Indeed, this week I went so far as to publicly debate the proposition “Hedge funds are dead” with Toreigh Stuart of Man Investments, a hedge fund conglomerate...
Read MoreJune 10, 2009
Be it resolved that hedge funds are dead - or at least the model as we know it needs to change. This is the position that Tom Bradley argued in a debate yesterday at a luncheon held by the Alternative Investment Management Association (Canada’s...
Read MoreJune 8, 2009
Last week Chris and I met with Scott Robertson, a financial planner from Ottawa. Scott is a veteran and has a straight-forward, no-nonsense approach to his craft. That was clear when we asked him when and how often his clients re-balance their portfolios...
Read MoreJune 4, 2009
People are having trouble with this rally. Indeed, I admitted to being uneasy about the speed and magnitude of the market’s move in a recent post. What’s spooking people is that it’s happening at a time when the economy is in the dumper and it's not clear...
Read MoreMay 30, 2009
As our firm passes the two-year mark, we aren't able to generalize about where our clients are coming from or why they chose us, but we can make some observations about what their previous portfolios looked like, and more broadly, the state of the...
Read MoreMay 28, 2009
“Fess up, fellows: The masters of the universe have turned out to be masters of disaster. No matter which aspect of the financial crisis you consider, there is a man behind it.” This was the opening paragraph of an article recently posted in the Wall Street Journal that reinforces our view that women are great investors, and even better...
Read MoreMay 26, 2009
The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (Teachers) came within a hair of buying BCE at $42.75. Clearly the powers that be at Teachers thought enough of the BCE franchise that they were willing to pay up for it and use substantial amounts of leverage...
Read MoreMay 23, 2009
In 26 years of doing this, one of the phrases I find least useful is, the market “is range bound” or “will stay in a narrow trading range over the next X months”. I don’t have conclusive data on it, but I believe that these types of predictions are almost...
Read MoreMay 21, 2009
Blogger Canadian Capitalist published a complimentary posting on Steadyhand the other day. He highlighted four aspects of our firm that we emphasize on our website and in our conversations with investors: Low cost, Concentration, Co-investment...
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