beerbaron
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Posts posted by beerbaron
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For those canadian fellows, anybody looked at Rona? It's starting to look deecent for a canadian equity.
BeerBaron
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beerbaron, I am also looking for top quality stocks in Canada (like a MSFT, KO etc). Strong franchise, big moat, low debt, good to great management etc. VERY difficult!
I do think Canadian banks are a good option; right now I hold BMO and likely will add RY as it seems to be the most unloved of the bunch. I looked into POW; my concern is their life insurance business should long rates stay low and equities weaken further.
I have followed TS.B since FFH (and Chow) purchased a few years ago. The stock traded over $15 a couple of months ago and today traded as low as $7.60. It has a $0.50 dividend (+6% yield) that looks reasonably secure. They sold their 20% stake in CTV earlier this year and paid down debt (now just over $100 million); compared to 2008 they have significantly delevered their balance sheet. My concern is the underlying business.
I would love to buy CN but it is not cheap enough yet.
I am undecided what to do with the cyclicals. I like WFT and CFP but they are not cheap enough for me yet. Big oil is also something I will spend some time on.
Viking, I've been finding for the last few years that all Canadian equities are overpriced:
-No good operating companies trade below 10x earnings. Most US ones do even for companies in the same fields and international sales.
-Stock market to GDP is much higher in Canada then USA.
-Financials in Canada have not been hit by any crisis... can you just imagine the impact if RB failed for some reason? When Lehman failed in the US and it killed the markets imagine an equivalent failure in a market 10 times smaller.
I like your CN idea, but way too defensive compared with other defensive US stocks like WINN.
I also been a very big fan of RCH, as it's one of the only operating company that I've seen in Canada with a consistent unlevered ROE in the 15%.
It sucks to be Canadian these days.
BeerBaron
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Canadian dollar went down too much for me to invest in US right now. What's is everybody looking at in the canadian equities?
It was a good day indeed, lots of my trigger prices happened. I feel like a kid in a candy store again. 20% Cash still.
BeerBaron
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As an investor, I find IDG (Kobo's parent) dirt cheap.
Dam is their main business getting killed, it's been on my watchlist since Vito Maida disclosed he owns it.
I bough books from Indigo and Amazon and Amazon is usually cheaper. Altough if the canadian dollar continues to drop it might change the trends...
BeerBaron
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Lol... if it were that easy!
BeerBaron
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How about investing on S&P puts yourself if you can't sit on too much cash?
BeerBaron
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I've been buying BRK since it hit 73$ a few months ago. When Charlie Mungers tells us that he never expected BRK to sell that cheap (around 76$) and you can get a 20-30% discount from munger's "deep cheap" you know you have a winner.
It's about 20% of my portfolio and I'm very happy about it.
BeerBaron
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It's true that the disclosure is horrible on FX spreads with canadian brokers. Nowhere in the sites you can find it. I'll have to call tomorrow and start arbitraging currencies trough dual listing stocks.
There is quite some differences in stock arbitrages. I took all the canadian listed companies on the NYSE and made a dynamic list. And one could see that Hudbay Minerals would actually bring an arbitrage profit. Which I find too good to be true... What should I be looking out for?
Minimum 1.18% HudBay Minerals Inc.
Maximum 3.99% North American Energy Partners Inc.
Average 2.96%
Current 1USD-1CAD= 3.04%
BeerBaron
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0.15% / transaction but EUR <> USD only.
1% and more is outrageous. :o
Who's you broker?
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On my last conversion I calculate that Questrade made a spread between 1 and 1.5%.
Consider using Norbert's Gambit. Pick a crosslisted stock. Say, Royal Bank. Buy X shares in Toronto in CAD, quickly sell the same X shares in New York in USD. CAD->USD for the cost of the commissions/spread/timing. (Reverse for USD->CAD)
Generally a good deal for larger amounts. Welcome to the wide world of arbitrage. :)
Depending on the broker, you may have to call them to make sure they journal over the shares from the CAD to USD account properly.
How can I sell on a different exchange then I bough at?
BeerBaron
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I am a Canadian investor and I convert quite a bit of CAD to USD. I'm with Questrade for their low comissions and low monthlee fees but as my portfolio gets bigger it is starting to look attractive to consider currency conversion fees.
On my last conversion I calculate that Questrade made a spread between 1 and 1.5%.
What are other board member's brokerate spreads?
BeerBaron
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Maybe inflation expectations went down.
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Looks like a run on the bank. How come we allow banks to do it but not poker site is just a matter of perception...
BeerBaron
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Maybe you could ask him if decreasing the Jackpot payout has no influence on patrons attendance and how come a casino rarely runs at the regulatory limit payout ratio.
Make sure you CC Harry with the answers, if I remember correctly he had some stakes in a casino.
BeerBaron
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Beerbaron,
Who do you have your US$ RSP with? I am with Waterhouse, they do a partial solution with wash trades. They even setup your cdn account to automatically wash trade but for all the effort they put in to this program, they could have setup the US$ RSP. I don't think they want to do it. But even with wash trades, your US dividends are forced back to loonies. BMO appears to be coming with a new account. We should insist on this as investors.
http://www.canadiancapitalist.com/bmo-investorline-to-allow-u-s-dollar-registered-accounts/
I'm with Questrade. Their interface was crappy and it's slowly getting better. Their prices are really low for someone that does not do much trades.
There is more details in another thread.
BeerBaron
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Methanex has returned lots of money in buybacks.
Pre-Paid Legal Services did an incredible job at buybacks before they were taken private.
BeerBaron
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i have cash to buy bkb, and agree it has never been cheaper. One hesitation for me is the cost of foreign exchange and the currency risk. It is not appealing to convert cdn dollars and pay foreign exchange on a buy and a sell, (2% each way?) and then possibly eat some currency also if the US$ drops. It makes the return hurdle more difficult. I guess the US$ to Cdn could work in my favour, but it seems more likely it is going the other way.
I agree, but I don't see it like that. If I buy USD I will not convert back to CAD until I'm forced to convert of the CAD dollar trades at 0.60USD again. For me having a broker capable of holding USD and CAD in all my accounts was important. At least you don't pay spread everytime you do a conversion.
BeerBaron
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Look at ishares. They have some value index and growth index ETF.
BeerBaron
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I'm curious to see that new corporate tax package presented on monday. It seems we don't get the repatriation tax levy for now...
BeerBaron
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Done listening. I like that guy. He made me want to dig deeper into Mastercard :D
So Comb did not make you look but this guys does... I think you have Canadian investor bias ;)
BeerBaron
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I refinanced last week. 3.89% for 5Y, Canada is so expensive compared with US rates >:(
I almost tough of getting a US loan and hedging the currency, I think it would come cheaper then using a Canadian bank.
BeerBaron
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Over here in Quebec you can wait 12 hours in the emergency rooms. Some claim that it's because it's free and people with cold go to the doctor. Which is completely true, some proponents have been claiming to put a small fee on every doctor's visit to deter people from abusing it. I kinda agree with it but if you think about it waiting 12 hours will also deter me from abusing the free healthcare :)
BeerBaron
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I don't think that I am the man to comment on your government programmes because I'm not very familiar with how they are structured. Morally, I'm instinctively opposed to just about everything and generally they always seem to end up wasteful. Given that they exist they can of course be everything from pretty benign to god awful, but I just dont't have the competence to comment on your domestic issues. I wouldn't call them non-econ, though. Government programmes are always a tradeoff with the functionality of market forces.
Actually, some would argue that a private healthcare system is malfunctionning because of the market forces. In a private market, the buyer of insurance has an informational advantage to the seller. Which means that the buyers that thinks he is sick will get insurance while the others will not, therefore only the most expensive customers would get insured. Raising the cost of insurance for the non sick people and deferring them of buying a policy and so on... Empirical data seems to prove quite well this theory as the USA is the only country with a private system and it's the most expensive.
Sometimes the market is not adequate. We need to avoid the man with the hammer syndrome.
BeerBaron
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I wasn't talking about libertarian states, but if Sweden can serve as an example of a good leftist/semi-socialist country, I think it is fair to say that the US can be said to be a good example of a right-wing/conservative country. Even if there is lots of room to go further to the right and left respectively for both countries (though, as a Swede suffering almost 60% tax burden I have my issues with that, lol). In some ways Sweden is and have been more pro-market than most countries, though. Certainly more pro free-trade than the US, for example. And during the 19th century, when Sweden went from one of the poorest countries in the world with over 1m emigrants to the US (about a third of the population if my memory serves me right) to the upper-tier of industrial countries we were arguably one of the freest countries in the world.
As for the rest, I agree with you in your analysis, although we probably differ much in where those facts take us stance-wise. Of course, the same goes for all Western European countries, of which most have poorer demographics than the US, coupled with more extensive social benefits and poorer productivity.
Yes but your boose is so expensive in Sweeden.. how can BeerBaron ever visit such a place..
BeerBaron
What a Lovely Frickin' Day!
in General Discussion
Posted
Ahh... Glacier Media is there a value investor in Canada that did not look at it? Good company in a misunderstood market.
Thanks for you insight for the other 3 ideas uncommonprofit, especially IDG. Their sales is shrinking so fast it's quite scary.
BeerBaron