Rod

Yes, thanks, I stumbled onto that myself last night. I've downloaded the trading program and am trying it out. Do you know if an alert needs to be associated with an active order? I see you can set a "trigger method" as "bid/ask", but it's functionality seems to depend on whether you have a buy or a sell order outstanding. Ideally, I wouldn't have any order outstanding, I just want an alert when the ask falls below a set level. -------------------------- Bid/Ask For a buy (sell) order to be triggered: • A single bid (ask) price must be greater than (less than) or equal to the trigger price. -------------------------- Judging from the above description, to trigger on an ask price falling below a certain level is associated with a sell order, which is the opposite of want I would want. I want to buy when the ask falls. I see you can also set "Alarms", which can be triggered off bid and ask levels independently, but I can't see a way to have an alarm send an email/text. It appears to only notify you while you are in the software. Do you know if alarms can be set to send an email/text?

Does anyone know if there is a way to get alerts by text/email when a particular stock on the Toronto Stock Exchange has it's bid or ask cross a particular level? I know you can get alerts related to price changes, but I am trying to buy a very illiquid stock with a wide bid/ask spread and it would be helpful to know when someone is offering to sell near my price. For example the bid/ask could be $12.00/$14.00 and someone could place a sell order at $12.50 to change the bid/ask to $12.00/$12.50. If I was to get the alert I could log in and grab the shares at $12.50.

Through it's holding in Union Group, Dundee indirectly owns 16M shares of ICC Labs (ICC-X), a Cannabis producer in Uruguay. I think it's worth watching because ICC has recently moved up from $1 to $1.70 as it seems to be catching the cannabis wave. At the current price it's worth about 50 cents per Dundee share, or roughly 20% of the market cap. I guess a best case scenario would be that ICC shoots up to $5 or so on a take over or continuation of the bubble, and Union Group sells. Dundee's share of that value would be about $1.40 per share, more than half the current market cap, a not inconsiderable amount.

I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that it was never possible before. In all the history of mankind up until Satashi published his white paper, any currency created by man would have been easily inflated and would require you to trust the issuer. So no, there is no precedent. Wait, wasn't money created out of "thin air"? Yes, technically true. But I was referring to currencies or commodities created by private entities. Governments clearly have the power to make a currency legal tender through spending, taxing, and regulation.

Creating a currency or a commodity out of thin air, which is what bitcoin is, has to my knowledge never been achieved. Does anyone have any historical examples?

I’m content to continue to hold the stock, both the common and the preferred (B shares). We should get a valuation on Parq Vancouver sometime in 2018. I’m optimistic that the value wil be $2+ per share. If that comes to pass it will be a game changer. With some more rationalization of the remaining holdings, I think we will have a solid NAV of $7 to $10 with the $2 from Parq. Much of that will be cash and near-cash. If the stock remains where it is now the oportunity to add value through share buy-backs will be immense. If the market is reluctant to reprice the stock, the buy-backs could go on indefinitely.

What specifically was the negative surprise you saw in the Q3 report?

I always wonder why should a house in Toronto cost roughly triple the price of a house in Ottawa? Average income in Ottawa is much higher too. Either Toronto is grossly overpriced, or Ottawa is a fantastic bargain.

Elon's real agenda may to be to use the media to promote himself as a visionary. He may know that most of the far out ideas he is proposing, like the hyperloop, are unworkable, but it keeps his name in the news and builds his larger-than-life persona. Why does he want to do that? Maybe because it creates demand for Tesla stock and allows it to trade at an enormous price, something that allows him to issue stock and finance the heavy losses that Tesla itself may need to sustain to gain enough scale to compete with large auto companies. Many people have pointed out that Tesla is in a tough competitive position. As the only auto company with a high priced stock that could neutralize the disadvantages he faces operationally. It gives him almost unlimited cheap financing.

I think if you look deeper into this paper you will find that 30% of stocks have lifetime returns that beat the market. Yes, that is skewed from a naive expectation of 50%. But the claim that 4% of stocks account for all returns is deceptive because it lumps all the losers with the stocks ranked below the top 4%. The top 5% through 30% beat the market when you don't lump the losers into that group. So things are not so bad.

Found this online: “April 2011, Vancouver city council agreed to relocation without expansion of the existing Paragon-owned Edgewater Casino licence. The 70-year, $6 million-a-year lease with B.C. Pavilion Corp. was renegotiated in 2013 to $3 million-a-year. Construction began in summer 2014. Under an accommodation side deal, Paragon will pay Musqueam Indian Band, instead of PavCo, $8.5 million of the first $9 million in lease payments. The project is a joint venture between Paragon, Dundee Corp. and PBC Real Estate Advisors.” Is $3M per year a good deal?

Ok but, why 6%? Why not 5% or 7%? In Buffett's time, 6% was the 30 year coupon.The idea (as I understood it) was that managers are paid in excess of the risk-free rate. Clients moving outside of t-bills are assuming risk. They can either pay themselves for that risk, or pay someone else, presumably a professional. The real question is, why are value fund managers stuck on 6%, versus payment for the intelligent assumption of risk above the risk-free rate? Note: I think his actual fee structure for the multiple partnerships varied: 33% above 6% 25% above 4% 16.6% above 3% But (1) he provided liquidity back to his clients from the fund at 6% (again, the risk-free rate), and (2) I think when he combined all the various partnerships, he adopted 6% as the rate. I think a better hurdle would be the index itself. The manager could keep, say 50% of the performance beyond that level.

I haven't been buying any D's because I already have a ton. I think this one is a no-brainer. When you calculate the future yield based on the ability to convert into the B's in 2 years and likely interest rates increases, the number starts getting silly high.

Thanks for this info sculpin. I like that GMP is using ~$200M for the Parq value. I had been optimistic it would be worth $120M.

Thanks for this. I'm curious why the sale of Dream Unlimited shares is treated as some sort of wonderful catalyst creating liquidity. Haven't the Dream Unlimited shares been liquid all along given this is a publicly traded company?

I haven't looked at them until now. But I think, at $23, the YTM is actually about 14.7% because holders have the option to redeem 17% on Jan 31, 2018 for $25. The potential catch is that there is an embedded put option that allows the company to convert to common at the higher of $2 and 95% of trading price. So if the common was below $2 at some point over the next two years, a conversion would be negative for the holder of the E's. I think the chance of a conversion at $2 is very low, however, unless things get very desperate at Dundee.

Thanks for the heads up. I picked up 200 D's. Unfortunately I'm already fully loaded so can't do more. I suspect someone has been doing a computerized arb trade between the B's and D's for some time, so the original selling pressure may have come from one class only.

I agree with the comment about retail investors. But there appears to be more institutional interest in the B's than the D's. I notice that EdgePoint (the old Trimark guys) own the B but not D. I thought perhaps liquidity had something to do with it. I've been surprised that the floaters have not reacted very quickly to the rising interest rate environment. I thought D's would move up fast. They haven't. The gap with the B's has shrunk somewhat, but that is all. I guess these are ignored securities and it is left to the retail investor who only looks at current yield like you say.

The B's have consistently traded at a much higher premium to the D's than some simple math would suggest is rational. Perhaps the explanation for this is simply that the B's have greater liquidity.

I still own the D shares. I think they are quite compelling at this price, both in absolute terms and relative to the B shares. Another advantage to the D's is that they are redeemable by the company at any time, while the B's can only be redeemed on the conversion date in fall 2019. I think Dundee will be focussed on redeeming the E shares first since they mature in 2019. And second to that probably buying back common shares and/or preferred shares in the market, and third redeeming the D's. So it may not make any effective difference.

Anyone interested in following the construction of the Parq Vancouver development should go to this link: http://skyscraperpage.com/forum/showthread.php?t=213941&page=25 Lots of up to date pictures. Opening is scheduled for September 2017.

The DRM shares are valued at market. Agree with you about the preferreds. I own the Ds. They are the better value since they can be converted into the Bs in 2.5 years. Not sure the market realizes that!

Transaction announced today for Dundee Acquisition. Looks like a good deal to me. Dundee corp. will back in for 20% as the sponsor of the SPAC. This is worth about $20 million to Dundee or 33 cents per share.

I'm curious where your numbers for Android come from. If you are right that is a good catch! From the 2015 AR, I see EBIT of US$24.7M, or about US$5M at Dundee's 20% share. Dundee is reporting their share of net earnings as $3.6M, but that includes a one-time dilution gain due to currency movement of $1.5M. So, on-going net earnings is $2.1M. Dundee carries Android at $28M, which seems reasonable given the earnings (pe ~ 14). Am I missing something here? Speaking of equity accounting misvaluation, I think you can double the value of Paragon Holdings to $120M because the third partner bought in at a price that represents that value. This was highlighted in an interview David Goodman gave BNN summer 2015.