Okay...I'm outta here

In May I suggested that the time had arrived for me exit...stage left. With my plan to spend at least three months in Arizona this winter I'll be officially "semi-retired". Time to cash 'em in methinks. As is so often the case, as soon as I decide to sell, the bottom falls out, and that's exactly what happened. In June I posted a chart showing what happened to my bank stocks as soon as I placed my sell orders.

Well, the story has a happy ending after all. The TSX in general and the banks in particular rallied this month and I was able to sell all three banks, BMO, RBC & TD at fifty-two week highs. You gotta know that after I sold they continued to go up. What's new? Doesn't matter. I did really well on these three and will not look back. I also sold my Suncor, leaving only a few penny stocks in my trading account. With all the money parked, for now at least, in the Bond Fund I am after all these years truly a Passive Investor. To be honest, it feels good...been sleeping better than ever!

I do plan to hang in here at TPCI and chip in from time-to-time. After all, as a semi-retired boomer, I should have more time to write.

IMPORTANT REMINDER:
Nothing on this site should ever be considered to be advice, research or a suggestion or invitation to buy or sell any securities. Every investor should do their own research and consult their own finance guy. See full DISCLAIMER.

As always, Good Luck & Happy Investing!

Spoke Too Soon!

In my May 22 post I mentioned my plan to cash out of individual stocks and move on. At the time, all three of my Canadian banks stocks, BMO, RBC and TD, were very near their fifty-two week highs. My strategy, if you can call it that, is very simple. Figuring that they reached a the high sometime in the past year they'll get there again soon and I'll take that as my exit point. I placed three sell orders, one for each bank stock. Figuring that I'd like to net the fifty-two week high, each sell order was for the previous high plus a few cents to cover brokerage fees. Too easy!

My guess was that I'd be out of these long held stocks within days. Not!  Could I have been more wrong or timed things any worse. No sooner did I decide to sell, my bank stocks and the whole TSX hit the skids. RBC is off 5.47%. BMO and TD not quite so much. I now figure it could take many weeks or even months before they get back into the range of my sell orders. That my friends is why I've decided to get out. Yes, over the long term they do tend to go up, but the crazy volatility is enough to drive one to drink.  Guess I'll be holding for a while yet.  In the meantime,

Good Luck & Happy Investing! 

May be time to cash 'em in...

Looking back, my first investment in an individual stock was in January of 1997 when the Manitoba Telephone System (MBT) went public. The excitement surrounding the IPO enticed many passive investors into opening trading accounts. I cashed a GIC from my perfect GIC ladder for that one. My MTS shares are long gone but my success with that purchase had me hooked. Watching the markets, buying and selling stocks, what a great hobby!

Sometime later I cashed another GIC and added the proceeds to my trading account. This was for a sure thing and I promised my better half that as soon as the stock doubled I'd sell half the shares and put the money back into a GIC where it belonged. Sadly, the double never happened. The successful Phase 2 drug study was followed by a Phase 3 flop. I've never written the story of my Medicure investment, it's just too painful.

Be that as it may, my overall trading account hit a double a few years ago. The total value has been well over the double from time-to-time and I had many a chances to take the double and run. Alas, greed kicked in as I convinced myself to hold for the triple that never arrived. Up & down, down & up but never reaching the triple.

The return on the TSX for the past five years has been a negative 14.33%. Five years ago I bought a GIC that paid 5% annually. Compounded, it's now up 27.62%.  Are you getting the point? Yup, I think the time may have arrived for an orderly sell off of the basket of stocks in my trading account. I don't intend to bail overnight, rather, I'll pick an exit point for each stock with an aim to be divested by year end. I believe that my message in Who Should(n't) Be In Funds?, goes double for individual stocks.

It's an e-World or should I say iWorld...you can't leave home without ???

I think we're a normal couple...at least we hope so. On a recent trip to Arizona we took along one laptop computer, one Netbook computer, one Blackberry Playbook, one Kobo e-reader, two Blackberries and three iPods. That's normal...isn't it? The scary thing about travelling with all this stuff is that if they x-ray our luggage someone might think we're packing bomb components. Imagine what the maze of devices, chargers and cables must look like when x-rayed.

It's a wired world! Or, rearrange the letters and it's a weird world! I think it's both!

With all that stuff you'd figure we'd be maxed out. Not! While away, I got jealous of her Kobo e-reader and had to have one. It weighs about a third as much as the Playbook and the paper white screen is easy on the eyes and can be read comfortably in full sun light. To top it off, Kobo perfected edge lighting with the Kobo Glo and you can also read in the dark. Since our return we've picked up a second Kobo Glo and I'm lovin' it.

We're not done yet. On the wish list are iPhones to replace the Blackberries when our contracts expire and we're pretty convinced that we need at least one iPad. I think we're only couple we know who don't have an iPad. The Apple thing is pretty additive. Sorry Blackberry. You pretty much caught up with Blackberry 10 but as I posted recently we're likely to see iPhone 6, 7 & 8 before we ever see Blackberry 11.

Speaking of Apple (AAPL), their shares are off over 40% since the peak of $705.00 last fall. Seems the market expects a home run every quarter from the greatest innovator ever. Rumours are all about iWatch, an Apple smart watch. I figure Apple just planted that rumour to get everyone else blowing their brains out on smart watch development. Samsung & Google will introduce smart watches and then wake up to the fact that we all quit wearing watches a long time ago.

Have a great weekend & Happy Investing!

Two Of The Best Stocks I Didn't Buy

I've done my share of bragging on these pages. Why not? It's my blog and if I want to share a success story so be it. To keep things in balance I've also shared stories of several mistakes. This is another one of those. Happily, it's not about losing a pile of money, rather, it's the story of two missed opportunities.

Back in March of 2006 Canada's iconic coffee giant Tim Hortons (THI) announced an IPO. The shares, priced at $27.00, went on sale Friday, March 24, 2006. Me, I figured I'd wait and see. I actually thought Tim's had reached a saturation point. It seemed they were running their own competition on many streets in 'Peg City. It was a while later that I visited Vancouver and saw Starbucks operating as many as three stores at an intersection. Over the next few years Tim's shares went up and down but mostly up. They reached the double, double in March of 2012, six years after the IPO. Today they're at $52.65, and no, I never did buy any!

The second missed opportunity was Dollarama (DOL). Many believe that the dollar store sector offers one of the best investment opportunities in the retail sector. While The GAP and Canadian Tire eke out a 2-3% increase in year-to-year same store sales all a dollar store has to do is raise their price to $1.25 and bingo, a 25% increase!

My Dollarama story begins the day I left the house heading for Canadian Tire in search of some connectors and splitters for the entertainment center. You know, the whole deal with the cable box, TV, VCR, DVD, sound system and enough cable and wire to go once around the earth. As I sat at a traffic light I spotted a Dollarama store just past the intersection. I figured I'd check it out. Well, I found most of what I was looking for all priced at a buck or less as a couple of items were packaged in twos. Yup, two for a buck! After spending $4.00 I continued on to Canadian Tire to finish off my shopping list. You gotta know, I did some price checking. One of the items I'd purchased at Dollarama two for a buck was priced at $4.95 for one. From that day on whenever I needed a small hardware bit or household gadget my first stop was Dollarama.

I know, I know, you get what you pay for. One rule of thumb for dollar store shopping is to avoid things with moving parts. A screwdriver, great! A crescent wrench, not so much.

The Dollarama IPO was in October, 2009. The initial share price was $17.50. Why, if I loved Dollarama so much didn't I jump in? I learned that the Quebec dude who invented Dollarama had sold the company some time ago to Bain Capital of Boston. It was Bain who were offering the shares simply to get their money back, not to expand the company. Once again, I figured I'd watch for a bit before making an investment. Dollarama hit the double in less than two years. Today it's at $61.39.

Lesson learned, the next time a Canadian consumer success story goes public jump on for the ride! Canadians love their home grown companies.

Trash Talkin' At Blackberry??

Blackberry (BB) CEO, Thorsten Heins,says Apple stood still and now the iPhone has fallen behind.  Unbelievable! This coming from a guy who heads a company that didn't manage to produce a touch screen smart phone until sixteen months after Apple (AAPL) introduced the iPhone. By then iPhone 2 was already out. As if to lay permanent claim to being sixteen months behind they managed to crank out the half baked PlayBook, without email or calendar, sixteen months after the first iPad. A month later Apple rolled out iPad 2 and crushed Blackberry once again.

Now, with the long delayed Blackberry 10 operating system he thinks he may be a hair ahead and instead of quietly taking care of buisness, he's out there trashing Apple.  It doesn't take a crystal ball to predict that he'll be eating those words in short order.  Let's see, Blackberry 10, January, 2013, just four months after iPhone 5.  My guess, we'll iPhone 6, 7, & 8 before we see Blackberry 11, if Blackberry lasts that long...more to the point, if Thorsten lasts that long.

As an investor I did real well buying and selling Blackberry shares, when it was called RIM, in the $40.00-$50.00 range. Since I bailed the shares have been as low as $6.10. They're $15.43 today. Hey, I'm Canadian and would love to see Blackberry succeed, but trash talking Apple accomplishes nothing!

16% Annual Return!!!

That got your attention.

That's the track I'm on for 2013. As at February 28 my stuff is up 2.74% YTD. This annualizes to 16.44%. Those of you still in the market in a big way, especially if you're in US equities, will be chuckling at this as you might be trending toward something like a 40% gain. The DOW is up 7.35% at the end of February. 

Here we go again, the perennial struggle between fear and greed. Question. Do I jump into US equities at an all time high? This is the Canadian way. We have a terrible history of buying high when motivated by greed selling low when fear sets in with a market correction or outright collapse. I'm thinking I'll stick to my guns and stay with my Canadian Bond Fund and the basket of Canadian bank stocks in my trading account. After all, I'd be real happy at year end, if I'm up 16.44%.

As always, Good Luck & Happy Investing! 

A bit of a year end review...

Ho-hum, 2012 was pretty much a nothing year. The TSX struggled to a gain of 4% for the year. The DOW fared better at 7.26% and the broader US market did even better with a gain of 13.41% for the S&P. It seems that our commodity heavy TSX just ain't going to break loose until oil goes over $100 and gold gets going again.

Regular readers know that I'm pretty much all Canadian all the time so it stands that I didn't do all that well for the year. I was up 7.89%. As I've said before, because of my high Canadian content I'm always happy just to beat the TSX. Even though the US markets seem so much stronger I expect that I'll stay the course for the foreseeable future. Just can't convince myself that the US is going to recover from the current debt and deficit crisis anytime soon. This despite the fact that they did a bungee jump over the fiscal cliff. Over the cliff on New Year's Eve only to bounce back on January 1 with passage of a half way piece of legislation to stave off huge tax increases for the masses.

I did a bit better with my trading account for the year with a gain of 16.74%. Held the three banks, BMO, RBC & TD, for the whole year. They did well as always. Made only five trades in all of 2012.  Sold a couple in January then bought and sold Apple (AAPL) and then bought the Energy ETF (XEG). Other than the banks, XEG and a few penny stocks, that I don't talk about, the only other thing in my trading account at the moment is Suncor (SU). When I bought Suncor two years ago this month I had great expectations. Sadly, Suncor sagged along with the whole energy sector.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! 

As always, good luck & happy investing!