Hey Fintwit,
My name is Luke, In an effort to connect with more of my followers as my account grows I figured using substack would be a good place to start instead of the 160 character limit on twitter. I am a 2015 graduate of Western University in London, ON, earning an honors specialization in consumer behaviour through their Management and Organizational Studies Program - fancy way of saying marketing, with a background in business.
It was about a year ago today I was sitting down with my Financial Representative at Scotiabank and just couldn’t believe that this was the person that was responsible for directing me and my money in the markets. My questions were getting dodged, I felt like I was getting substandard service from someone who didn’t care a whole lot. Being from the service industry, you place a lot on how you are helped, not just if you get the help. And I’m a smart guy, always done well in math and had a background in business management and general finance as mentioned above.
I had taken a keen interest in what my mutual funds were holding in Dec 2019, and really started watching their performance through 2020, especially with COVID-19 arriving in North America. My rep and his suggestions just weren’t doing it for me, I wanted more control over where my money was going. I hadn’t yet given up on Scotia, but I had heard of Wealth Simple and Questrade and how some friends were enjoying their platforms. I still did not know a whole lot on my own to want and venture out into individual stocks especially with Market chatter going around about a virus and a crash.
It only took a couple more rounds of unanswered emails and not hearing back from my rep for days for me to say “F it”. I initiated a sell of the few thousand I had in Mutual Funds in an RRSP account with Scotia since 2018 and moved it over to WS in late March.
At the same time, I was laid off due to Covid-19/20/21. I was well on my way to being a GM of a successful Restaurant in the city of Toronto. I was owed a bonus north of $4000 that I never saw, and was left out to figure it out with everyone else who was laid off and waiting on the Canadian government to launch a benefit relief program. I am the type who loves to be on the grind—You’re not very successful in the restaurant industry if you cant put in the hours. But now I had a whole whack of time on my hands and had discovered a massive passion to understand stocks and the market.
O and what a time it was to get into the stock market. By the time my money cleared and was available to use in my new RRSP trading account with WS it was maybe two weeks or so “post crash.” Things were “recovering” but no one was sure it was for real yet it seemed. I threw my $2000 or so at a lot of stocks pretty quickly. Up until that time I had done some rookie DD on 5G and figured any company associated with 5G was easy money. I bought a couple shares of AMD ($55), Qualcomm($72), Corning ($19 post oil crash) and Nokia ($3 something). I heard David Fingold on Bloomberg talk about Abbott and Boston Scientific as his buys for healthcare; boom, couple shares of those too while were at it ($80, $33). Cascades had signed a deal with Bauer Hockey to make face shields I think, lets buy some CAS.TO (cant even remember the price)
Markets as we all know would go on to rip until the oil crash in April when the contracts flipped and Oil went Negative. Things quickly evened out in my portfolio. I started questioning what I was doing owning 3 or 4 shares of “x” (I had more holdings then just the ones mentioned I believe I got up to 27 at one point).. How was I gonna make enough money with this motley crew of holdings on such a low book cost to pay for a down payment for that home I wanted to buy.
It was in that month of April that I had my vision and goal come to light. While laid off with lots of time to read and learn, I was going to find companies that no one had heard of, that could be big players in the years to come because of where the economy and business was going or likely to go. I was going to use the little money I had to get as much of these small companies (penny stocks) as I could afford. I remember reading articles about how to make money with little money, the strategy as I took it was to own companies in the big guys ecosystem that would move up with the market as it matured. As an example of this, consider Photon Control (PHO.TO) for exposure to 5G tech, semiconductors. It provides an important temperature sensing/measuring tech for chips to ensure they are made correctly and not ruined during development. It was sub $1 but was part and still is part of the huge industry that is 5G. I bought it at .98 cents in April and it treated me well while I owned it.
I had briefly returned home to escape Toronto and the small condo I was renting at the time. I collected the CERB a couple times before I psychologically needed to be working again and back in the City. I made the hard decision to quit my position I had been laid off from and get into the Cannabis Industry- I figured what was illegal two years ago and was now essential, would provide some solid job security in a management position. I was able to put more money into my RRSP over the coming months. And now have a book cost of just over $8,000. I am going to finish this post with A list of my holdings and their performance as of the close on Feb/23 2021.
The goal here moving forward is to provide DD on each of these holdings. Some of them you may be very familiar with, some you may not be. I am also going to share my learning curves, which may help younger more green investors that are following and reading along learn some lessons before they make the mistake themselves. You can bet there will be some charts involved!
Portfolio (Sorted by performance)/ACB/first buy @:
BRAG.TO - +543.68%, ACB $0.43, $0.22
MMED - +168.10% ACB $1.66, $1.13
NLC.V - +160.81% ACB $1.13, $.44
NUMI.V - +157.69%, ACB $0.61, .65
FLT.V- +124.86%, ACB $0.83, $0.60
QUIS.V - +96.24%, ACB $0.68, $0.40
DOC.V - +32.29%, ACB $2.00, $.63 - largest holding by book cost
Below are newer positions I have entered into over the past three months
NOU.V - +23.75%, ACB 1.69, $1.55 range (recently new position, Shout out to Financial Independence for putting me on it)
CVX.V - +15.19%, ACB 0.60, $0.45
ALTO (formerly PEIX) - +10.55%, ACB $5.78. $5.78
DML.TO - +1.03%, ACB $1.38, $1.20
INO: -3.84%, ACB $12.15, $9.60
ABXX.NE: -8.68% - ACB $3.56, $3.70 range
All the best until the next post,
Cheers,
Le Belle
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