This week's interesting finds

Frank Mullen – Partner since 2009 (Peak of Blackcomb Mountain – Whistler, British Columbia) 

This week in charts 

Resources, Manufacturing and China   

Real estate 

U.S. mortgages 

This week’s fun finds 

What the Longest Study on Human Happiness Found is the Key to a Good Life 

Since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been investigating what makes people flourish. After starting with 724 participants—boys from disadvantaged and troubled families in Boston, and Harvard undergraduates—the study incorporated the spouses of the original men and, more recently, more than 1,300 descendants of the initial group. Researchers periodically interview participants, ask them to fill out questionnaires, and collect information about their physical health. As the study’s director (Bob) and associate director (Marc), we’ve been able to watch participants fall in and out of relationships, find success and failure at their jobs, become mothers and fathers. It’s the longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life ever done, and it’s brought us to a simple and profound conclusion: Good relationships lead to health and happiness. The trick is that those relationships must be nurtured. 

In this sense, having healthy, fulfilling relationships is its own kind of fitness—social fitness—and like physical fitness, it takes work to maintain. Unlike stepping on the scale, taking a quick look in the mirror, or getting readouts for blood pressure and cholesterol, assessing our social fitness requires a bit more sustained self-reflection. It requires stepping back from the crush of modern life, taking stock of our relationships, and being honest with ourselves about where we’re devoting our time and whether we are tending to the connections that help us thrive. Finding the time for this type of reflection can be hard, and sometimes it’s uncomfortable. But it can yield enormous benefits. 

It never hurts—especially if you’ve been feeling low—to take a minute to reflect on how your relationships are faring and what you wish could be different about them. If you’re the scheduling type, you could make it a regular thing; perhaps every year on New Year’s Day or the morning of your birthday, take a few moments to draw up your current social universe, and consider what you’re receiving, what you’re giving, and where you would like to be in another year. You could keep your chart or relationships assessment in a special place, so you know where to look the next time you want to peek at it to see how things have changed.   

Toronto ranked most 'disappointing' Canadian city: poll 

The Big Smoke has been ranked as Canada’s most ‘overrated’ city, according to a poll by independent market analyst King Casino Bonus in the United Kingdom. 

The poll found 10.9 per cent of visitors it surveyed found Canada’s largest city “disappointing,” with the most regrettable attraction being the Toronto Zoo. 

Montreal was a close second to Toronto, with 10.3 per cent of survey respondents saying the city didn’t live up to expectations. Its most disappointing attraction was the Biodome de Montreal. 

Meanwhile, Vancouver placed third in the ranks — 9.3 per cent of visitors surveyed found the city disappointing, with Gastown being the most underwhelming attraction. 

10 Nutrition Myths Experts Wish Would Die 

We surveyed some of the country’s leading authorities to reveal the truth about fat, dairy, soy and more. 

1) Fresh fruits and vegetables are always healthier than canned, frozen or dried varieties. 

2) All fat is bad. 

3) ‘Calories in, calories out’ is the most important factor for long-term weight gain. 

4) People with Type 2 diabetes shouldn’t eat fruit. 

5) Plant milk is healthier than dairy milk. 

6) White potatoes are bad for you. 

7) You should never feed peanut products to your children within their first few years of life. 

8) The protein in plants is incomplete. 

9) Eating soy-based foods can increase the risk of breast cancer. 

10) Fundamental nutrition advice keeps changing — a lot.

This week's interesting finds

EdgePoint Q4 2022 commentaries are now live on the website. This quarter: 

• New growth? (equity) – Andrew Pastor discusses why we believe investor biases help us buy growing companies without having to pay for that growth.

• A rose by any other name (fixed income) – Derek Skomorowski takes the opportunity to tell us why labels matter less than content.

Alexandria DiBellonia, partner since 2014 (Ottawa, Ontario)   

How Americans spent their money in 2021 by age   

Robots are spreading to other industries… 

…and are integrating more into them   

The middle class is growing in emerging markets 

MBA Mortgage Market Index shows U.S. mortgage volumes are the lowest in over 20 years

The cost of a new vehicle is almost a year’s worth of income 

Lack of trust in the media

Investors Seek to Pull $20 Billion From Core Real Estate Funds

A group of property funds for institutional investors ended last year with $20 billion in withdrawal requests, the biggest waiting line since the Great Recession, according to IDR Investment Management, which tracks an index of the open-end diversified core equity [ODCE] funds. 

“It’s like the nightclub where everybody lines up to get in and then lines up to leave when it closes,” John Murray, head of global private commercial real estate at Pacific Investment Management Co., said in an interview. 

The capital outflows are ratcheting up the pressure on institutional fund managers as higher interest rates batter the commercial real estate market. At the same time, managers such as Blackstone Inc. are seeing retail investors — wealthy individuals in particular — pulling money from real estate bets amid volatile markets. 

Redemptions are “prompting many core funds to attempt to sell their most liquid assets, like industrial and multifamily assets, which implies a headwind for even the most relatively resilient sectors” of commercial real estate, Murray wrote in a December note. 

For institutional investors, the exit queue is at least partly a response to what’s known as the denominator effect. Investment managers often have certain targets for how much they want to have invested in stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets. As markets slumped last year, their stock and bond holdings shrunk in size while real estate held up better, meaning it often constituted a bigger slice of their portfolios than they initially intended.

This week’s fun finds 

Lunar New Year celebration

We celebrated the upcoming Year of the Rabbit in both the Toronto and Montreal offices with our second moai of the year.

The Best Routine, According to Science

The research on routines is clear. They are indeed effective. They help you activate when you’re feeling low, automate decisions so you don’t burn willpower, and prime your mind-body system to more easily groove into the task at hand. If you work out every morning, you don’t have to think about working out, you just do it. And, if you’re like most people, you feel much better afterward, regardless of how you were feeling before. 

But here’s the catch: Although routines can be magical, there is no magic routine. What works for one person might not work for others. This is problematic for those in the cult of routines, especially those looking to make a buck selling their own.

The bottom line is that the only way to an optimal routine is through astute self-awareness—not mimicking what other people do—and experimentation. The more you can match your activities to your energy levels, the better. The more you can figure out which types of environments stimulate your best work, the better. 

There is also a danger in becoming overly attached to your routine. If for whatever reason you can’t stick to it—you’re traveling, your special coffee shop closes, whatever elixir you order from your favorite podcast’s advertising goes out of business—you won’t know what to do. It’s like a Zen koan: The first rule of routines is to develop one and stick with it. The second rule is to cultivate the capacity to easily release from it. 

Boston Dynamics’ latest Atlas video demos a robot that can run, jump and now grab and throw

Boston Dynamics just released the latest demo of its humanoid robot, Atlas. The robot could already run and jump over complex terrain thanks to its feet. Now, the robot has hands, per se. These rudimentary grippers give the robot new life. Suddenly, instead of being an agile pack mule, the Atlas becomes something closer to a human, with the ability to pick up and drop off anything it can grab independently.

The claw-like gripper consists of one fixed finger and one moving finger. Boston Dynamics says the grippers were designed for heavy lifting tasks and were first demonstrated in a Super Bowl commercial where Atlas held a keg over its head. 

NASA's Webb telescope has discovered its first exoplanet

NASA's Webb telescope has discovered an exoplanet, which is any planet that is outside of our solar system, for the first time, the agency announced Wednesday. 

Researchers were scanning the skies using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) when they came across the exoplanet, and used the Webb's spectrograph technology to further investigate. Spectrographs transmit light from an object to a spectrum, which can give information about the object's temperature, mass and chemical composition. 

"These first observational results from an Earth-size, rocky planet open the door to many future possibilities for studying rocky planet atmospheres with Webb," said Mark Clampin, astrophysics division director at NASA headquarters in D.C. "Webb is bringing us closer and closer to a new understanding of Earth-like worlds outside our solar system, and the mission is only just getting started."

This week's interesting finds

 

Craig Advice – Partner since 2008 (Canmore, Alberta)

This week in charts

Who owns U.S. equity? 

Share buybacks by U.S. companies   

Projected top-6 countries by population in 2100 

CLO Managers Face Trading Crunch in Downturn 

By the end of 2023, more than 40% of collateralized loan obligations will be subject to restrictions on their ability to easily manage their portfolio by investing in new loans, according to Bank of America Corp. 

That means CLO managers will have less flexibility to keep their loan collateral safe just when they need it most. The share of CCC rated loans in CLO portfolios hit 5.6% by mid-December, according to the bank, not far from the carefully watched 7.5% level where individual CLOs may need to begin looking to divert cash flows from equity holders. 

“CLO managers are likely working hard to sort out the B- loans that will eventually be downgraded from those that won’t be downgraded,” said Steven Abrahams of Amherst Pierpont Securities, a broker-dealer owned by Santander. 

One way they’ll be able to tell the good from the bad is by looking at prices. The universe of loans rated B- is trading at a wide range, from roughly 70 to 90 cents on the dollar. The main difficulty lies in what to do about loans at the bottom end of that range. It’s too late now to sell those loans without locking in steep losses. 

“The ability to pick through loans to separate the ones that can be salvaged from the ones that can’t is what will distinguish managers this year,” said Abrahams.   

This week’s fun finds 

EdgePointers continue (and adapt) an annual tradition 

We delayed our annual holiday gathering into the new year, but it was worth the wait as (partner-shucked) oysters made their way to the festivities. 

Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea 

With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say “tea” in the world. One is like the English term—té in Spanish and tee in Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of cha, like chay in Hindi. 

Both versions come from China. How they spread around the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before “globalization” was a term anybody used. The words that sound like “cha” spread across land, along the Silk Road. The “tea”-like phrasings spread over water, by Dutch traders bringing the novel leaves back to Europe. 

A few languages have their own way of talking about tea. These languages are generally in places where tea grows naturally, which led locals to develop their own way to refer to it. In Burmese, for example, tea leaves are lakphak.

This week's interesting finds

Sandro Panella and Cesare Rizzuto – Partners since 2008 and 2011 (Little Italy – Toronto, Ontario)

 

This week in charts 

Tesla’s market-cap drop in perspective 

Bloomberg negative-yielding debt index loses its last member 

Canadian housing affordability 

Inflation category weights 

How private markets became an escape from reality 

The rage for private investing began in the early 2000s, after the success of the Yale University endowment fund led by David Swensen, who embraced private investments to diversify away from stock and bond markets and stabilise returns in the long run. Swensen’s definition of “long” was decades — not a mere ten years, much less the next turn from bear to bull market. He looked for private managers who were building companies rather than stripping and flipping for a quick profit. Swensen defined his job as generating multigenerational wealth to support Yale, which he assumed to be “immortal”. But his approach also had the potential to free money managers from daily pressure in the markets, and transcend the short-term thinking that was infecting modern capitalism. 

What started as a sound idea has become an escape from something else entirely: reality. In return for the promise of superior returns, private funds typically “lock in” client money for up to 10 years, then report to clients much less frequently than public funds do — quarterly at most, not daily. In the new tight money era, with losses spreading across asset classes, private channels have become a way for money managers to conceal losses from clients — typically capital allocators at pension funds or other big savings institutions — who are often content in the dark. They don’t want to face the agonies of daily volatility either.   

Alberta sees largest population increase ever: StatsCan data 

"I think it would be fair to say that the Alberta economy has been doing reasonably well for the last couple of years, and that's made it more attractive," said Janet Lane of the Canada West Foundation. 

Lane, the director of the foundation's Human Capital Centre, says the job market is the first driver of population changes. 

"A very close second recently has been the cost of living in Vancouver and Toronto, the cost of housing for young people. It has absolutely been out of reach to be able to buy a home." 

British Columbia and Ontario were the two largest sources of migrants within Canada, with about 11,000 and 12,000 people arriving, respectively, from each. 

While Alberta led the country in proportional population increases, Ontario by far had the largest increase in sheer numbers. 

That province added more than 153,000 net new residents, largely due to international migration, but it lost more people to other provinces than it gained, many of them to Alberta.

This week’s fun finds   

Are Mushrooms the Future of Alternative Leather? 

MycoWorks eventually focused on creating a material that had the look and feel of leather but was free of animal parts. Called Reishi, after the Japanese name for the genus of mushrooms Mr. Ross first used, it can currently be produced in sheets of six square feet. (MycoWorks declined to disclose pricing except to say that it is currently comparable with exotic hides. As the company continues to grow, they added, MycoWorks will be able to offer some at lower prices.) 

The company, whose headquarters are in Emeryville, Calif., has obtained more than 75 patents and now has over 160 employees in the United States, France and Spain. It has also secured collaborations with high-end companies like Hermès and, most recently, the furniture maker Ligne Roset and GM Ventures, the investment arm of General Motors. 

In contrast, MycoWorks “can achieve the same quality and performance as animal leathers without the need for any sort of plastics,” Matthew Scullin, MycoWorks’ chief executive, said at a temporary exhibition showroom in New York in the spring. Now too large to rely solely on local farmers for its supply of mycelium, the company has its own strains which “we basically keep in cold storage,” Mr. Scullin said. 

The process starts by combining the mycelium with waste from sawmills in trays; as the sawdust decomposes, the mixture begins to develop into a thin sheet. The material can then be customized to meet clients’ specifications, including specific textures, and can include the addition of other fibers, like cotton. The Fine Mycelium, the trademarked name for its patented technology, is then finished by outside tanneries. (The tanning process does not use chromium, historically one of the most polluting parts of leather manufacturing.) 

Because the process for creating Reishi has only a few steps, Mr. Scullin said, it has a “low impact” on the environment. In addition, he said, while animal hides vary in size and texture, Reishi is more consistent and predictable for clients. 

The Surprisingly Profound Power of Thank-You Notes 

Near the end of December, I open my email or pick up a pen, and I begin composing thank-you notes. The messages are usually just a few sentences long: I recap my interactions with the recipient that year, put my finger on what I appreciated, and say I’m grateful. But when I consider whom to thank, I realize the list could go on and on. I try to think of everyone who made my year better: the established journalist who referred me to a radio program, the HR staff who processed my paperwork, the friend who dropped off groceries when I was recovering from COVID. Almost always, I get a note back expressing similar gratitude. 

Typically, we’re told to write thank-you notes at specific junctures—after finishing a job interview, receiving a gift, hosting a wedding or another significant function. These notes can be lovely, but they also run the risk of being rote and transactional. We send them because we’re expected to. End-of-year thank-you notes, though, aren’t written out of obligation. Those who get them are reminded unexpectedly that someone is thinking of them—and that their actions haven’t gone unnoticed. 

I’d argue that end-of-year thank-you notes are good for the sender too. Looking back on the year, I don’t stop reflecting after thinking about what I’ve accomplished. When I make a mental list of everyone who supported me, I remember that no achievement is the result of my efforts alone. That realization is humbling; it grounds me in gratitude for all I was able to do rather than resentment for what I didn’t or couldn’t do. 

Making a New Year’s Resolution? Don’t Go to War With Yourself 

“It’s helpful for resolutions to be resilient—ones that you’re going to be able to stick with even when life doesn’t run as perfectly as you planned. I like the idea that Dan Harris, the meditation writer and podcaster, talks about, which is resolving to do things “day-ish”—the notion that you can make your plan for change a lot more sustainable if it’s not so rigid that one missed day spells failure. 

“The other thing is just to remember that the difference between not doing anything at all and doing 10 minutes a few times a week is absolute. It’s the same idea as “the best kind of workout to do is the one you’re actually going to do.” If it happens to not be the ideal physical regimen according to science right now, that couldn’t matter less. 

“I don’t think there’s anything helpful about resolutions that put you at war with yourself. Often, it’s basically just a resolution to, like, shout even louder at yourself this year until you finally do the things that you think you ought to be doing. That kind of internal combat never works in the end, because you start to resent the person who’s yelling at you to do all these things—even if that person is yourself.”