public offering

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives finally voted to formalize an impeachment process for President Trump … and the market went up, which seems to have surprised a lot of people.

Generally, it’s a good sign when a long-feared threat like the Trump impeachment vote occurs, and stock prices rise in response....

Here’s a special report from our research team on the October 21, 2019, Canadian Federal election. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals lost their majority but held on to a minority government with 157 seats (170 are needed for a majority). The Liberals failed to win any seats in Alberta or Saskatchewan.

The Conservatives won a total of 121 seats and the NDP, 24....

You can count on your favourite Canadian newspapers to do a great job of reporting the results of yesterday’s Canadian federal election. However, it will take a little longer to figure out how the new minority Canadian government will hurt or help your investments....

Here’s the text of the most-recent letter I sent to our Portfolio Management clients in August.

“In recent years, I’ve mentioned that the world is going through a gigantic monetary experiment. At first, I was referring to the “quantitative easing” that the U.S....

The ETF, or exchange traded fund, is the biggest advance for individual investors since the introduction of discount brokers. Both help you cut costs. But both these developments expose you to risk as well.

When you deal with a discount broker, you pay a lot less to act on your investment transactions than you would when dealing with a standard broker....

“A rising market climbs a wall of worry.”

—origin unknown, in use with numerous variations, since at least the 1970s

I’ve mentioned many times over the years that the quote above is one of the wisest investment one-liners I’ve come across. However, it can be useful or misleading, depending on how you interpret it.

The best use is to take it as a reminder that in a healthy, rising market that has additional gains ahead, you never run out of things to worry about....

Funds invested in venture capital in the U.S. amounted to $4 billion in 1994; the 2018 figure was a record $100 billion. Note that this is not the total value of U.S. venture capital holdings. These are the amounts of new investment in the field in these two years, respectively.

Back when this burst of growth was just getting started, most venture-capital investment managers acknowledged that perhaps only one in 10 of the deals they financed wound up making any money for investors....

Stock carveouts can be thought of as split-off IPOs or partial spinoffs. They’re a type of reorganization where a firm sets up one of its businesses as a separate company and uses an initial public offering to sell partial or minority interest in the new firm. The parent typically retains an 80% stake.


Listing shares in the new company lets the parent assess the true market value of the independent new business....

BOX INC. $17 (New York symbol BOX; Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 147.8 million; Market cap: $2.5 billion; No dividend paid; Takeover Target Rating: Medium; www.box.com) sells cloud-based storage services to over 95,000 businesses....

One key part of our Successful Investor approach is our “Limelight Rule”: Downplay or avoid stocks in the broker-media limelight.

This is a basic portfolio-construction principle. Heightened attention from brokers and the media is a poor guide to investment profits....