Urbana Corp.
… Urbana’s management correctly predicted the coming wave in initial public offerings of stock exchanges and the higher valuations that public listings would unleash.
Scorecard #8 – Unconventional Wisdom
… Cisco Systems is the world leader in the design, manufacture and sale of high-performance networking equipment for the Internet. Their products are ubiquitous and most often the industry standard. In an era of increasing usage of smartphones, tablets, and connected devices (the “Internet of Everything”) data transfer and consumption should continue to increase exponentially.
Foreign Exchange (FX) Hedging
… Currency hedging imposes costs and acts as a drag on long‐term performance. We will consider hedging our currency exposures only when we believe that a currency is dramatically mispriced.
Apple
… As a consumer, I love Apple Inc. What’s not to like? They make fantastic products that are user-friendly and often leading-edge. At first glance, the stock also appears attractive.
Scorecard #7 – Anchors Aweigh
… Many (most?) investors are fascinated by the daily fluctuations of the stock market. CNBC, BNN and other business news programs fill countless hours of their programming days featuring “experts” that try and give meaning to recent market moves and predict the way forward. Investors are thus conditioned to search for meaning in Mr. Market’s every twitch. It is a Pavlovian-like process.
Poison Pills
… In Canada, boards faced with a hostile bid can use a shareholder rights plan – often called a poison pill – and other defensive tactics to buy time and force a bidder to remove some of the coercive elements of its bid. But a company can’t play defence forever:
Coach
… Handbags. Handbags. Everywhere I go these days, I find myself staring at women’s handbags. My recently acquired and admittedly bizarre obsession is due to my purchase of shares in Coach Inc. last month.
GMP Capital
… I know GMP well from my days on Bay Street. Back then, GMP and the Canadian bank-owned dealers were my main competitors.
Scorecard #6 – Apples and Oranges
… The hardest part about value investing is having the discipline to be extremely patient. Attractive opportunities to buy shares of excellent companies on the cheap don’t come along very often. Market panics are a good source but far too infrequent. More often they come in the form of companies that are encountering a temporary problem and the market overreacts.
Owner Earnings
… Calculating owner earnings requires hard work and numerous value judgments. It is not an exact science but will produce results that matter.