This week's interesting finds

December 21, 2019

Season's greetings from the EdgePoint team! 

Wishing you all the joys of the season and happiness throughout the coming year.

Same ETF’s, different name
The below table illustrates the impact of index ETFs on valuations of three slow-growth/no-growth companies. The three companies comprise a significant portion of many ETFs marketed under a range of ETF categories.  The companies in charge of structuring the ETFs simultaneously defined the three companies as value, growth, high-dividend, and low-volatility stocks. It is inconceivable that anyone of these stocks can be included in all four categories, suggesting that there is a fundamental flaw underlying these ETF methodologies.

Stats from the bond desk
BB bonds yielded just 3.51% on Monday, the lowest on record and just 164 basis points more than U.S. Treasuries. To put those figures further in perspective the safe AA index yielded 3.58% just over 13 months ago. Source: Bloomberg LP. 

From Almost Daily Grant - Wednesday, December 18, 2019
Newly issued leveraged loans have come to market with an average debt load of 5.5 times EBITDA this year, compared to just under 5 times in 2007. But after accounting for issuer-friendly adjustments such as add-backs (i.e. applying for credit today from hypothetical future cost savings), debt from new issues rises to near 7 times EBITDA, up from just over 5 times in 2007.

What does a junk bond even mean anymore?
The difference between BBB-rated and BB-rated U.S. corporate bond spreads has collapsed as investors chase yield in the highest-rated junk bonds. The differential between the best junk and worst investment-grade debt hit 38 basis points on Monday, the lowest since Bloomberg records began in 1994.

The global search for yield continues to draw investors to the U.S. corporate bond market, particularly the safest slice of high-yield, which has outperformed lower-rated bonds this year.

The millennial urban lifestyle is about to get more expensive
If you wake up on a Casper mattress, work out with a Peloton before breakfast, Uber to your desk at a WeWork, order DoorDash for lunch, take a Lyft home, and get dinner through Postmates, you’ve interacted with seven companies that will collectively lose nearly $14 billion this year. If you use Lime scooters to bop around the city, download Wag to walk your dog, and sign up for Blue Apron to make a meal, that’s three more brands that have never recorded a dime in earnings and have seen their valuations fall by more than 50%.

The idea that companies like these don’t make a profit might come as a shock to the many people who spend a fair amount of their take-home pay each month on ride-hailing, shared office space, or meal delivery. 

There is a simple explanation for why they’re not making money. The answer, for finance people, has to do with something called “unit economics.” Normal people should think of it like this: Am I getting ripped off by these companies, or am I ripping them off? In many cases, the answer is the latter.

This week's interesting finds

December 14, 2019

Conflicting ESG methodologies
Competition in the ESG ratings market is heating up. At least a dozen major third-party companies do such ratings. These different providers vary in their methodology and this is creating confusion for investors and making it harder to compare ESG data and ratings. 

ESG analysis, by its very definition, is subjective different providers will inevitably have different ways of classifying whether they think social concerns are more important or whether they are driven by carbon footprint. ESG data and ratings providers aren’t regulated, unlike counterparts focused purely on financial information. Nevertheless, efforts are being made to bring more transparency and standardization to the industry.

Tough for household formation
At age 35, baby boomers had seven times the wealth that millennials will have at the same age.

Alberta men facing a 20% unemployment rate
Alberta's unemployment rate among young men has nearly doubled over the past seven months, in an unprecedented spike that has pushed their joblessness rate to a level not since the early 1980s. In April, roughly one in 10 young men in Alberta was unemployed. By November, it had surged to one in five.

Only 10% of the volume is in fundamental single stock trading.

EdgePoint Swag orders

Five books Bill Gates recommends this winter

This week's interesting finds

The inconvenient truth about responsible investing
An analysis of  122 active responsible investing funds listed found that 45% still had exposure to at least one stock that is primarily engaged in the production, processing or direct transport of fossil fuels. That number is likely conservative because more than 50 of the funds on the list, which includes ETFs, mutual funds, pooled funds, GICs, segregated funds and private funds, only disclosed their top holdings, which made up as little as 7% of a portfolio. An additional 18 do not disclose any information about their funds at all.

More Than Half Of Canada’s GDP Gain Was From Real Estate Transactions

Real estate transaction revenues is growing much faster than in other industries. RERL represented $252.28 billion in Q3 2019, up $2.30 billion or 0.92% from the quarter before. This works out to $6.62 billion or 2.70% higher than the same quarter last year. Quarterly growth is 4x higher than all industries, and annual growth is over 80% higher. As you can probably guess here, it’s a really big percent of total growth. Like, an unreal amount of the growth.

Government, Corporate and Household Debt now at 3x Global Economic Output
A decade of easy money has left the world with a record $250 trillion of government, corporate and household debt. That’s almost three times global economic output and equates to about $32,500 for every man, woman and child on earth. 

How Amazon Wove Itself Into the Life of an American City
A look at Baltimore shows how Amazon may now reach into Americans’ daily existence in more ways than any corporation in history.

To the city’s southeast stand two mammoth Amazon warehouses, built with heavy government subsidies, operating on the sites of shuttered General Motors and Bethlehem Steel plants.

This week's interesting finds

November 30, 2019

Our holiday gift guide — the list that keeps on giving
It’s the most wonderful time of the year and we’ve got you covered with EdgePoint’s sixth annual holiday gift list! Avoid getting a lump of coal with some gift suggestions from EdgePointers. 

Replacing coal with gas will open a new ‘window of opportunity’ for Canada’s LNG sector
It’s been a struggle to get the LNG sector off the ground in this country.

Despite this, Canada has several factors in its favour including our massive natural gas reserves in British Columbia and Alberta, and our closer proximity to growing Asian markets than U.S. Gulf Coast plants.

A study last year by the Canadian Energy Research Institute found that western Canadian LNG has an overall cost advantage to the land product in Asia, compared to building new export facilities in the U.S.

According to the IEA’s new World Energy Outlook report, coal-to-gas switching can offer “quick wins” for reducing global emissions. Natural gas generates half of the carbon dioxide emissions, on average, than burning coal for electricity, the study said.
“There is a window of opportunity. And the window of opportunity is also, for instance, (in) the coal-to-gas switching,” van der Hoeven, who headed the Paris-based IEA earlier this decade, told reporters.

“If you really want to phase out all of the coal that’s still in the world in power production, well that’s a huge window of opportunity where gas can play an increasing role, next to the renewables.”

Graham & Doddsville: Fall 2019 investment newsletter
“Many people refer to competitive advantage as a moat, based on Warren Buffett's letters. I think something else is just as important, yet hasn't gotten as much air time: functional advantage, which is the very nature of the business. The person who started me on this is Thomas Caldwell.

At some point, he was investing in stock exchanges. He made the point that these are really good businesses by the very function of what they do. A stock exchange naturally tends to have a network effect, not require a lot of capital, and grow with the market. For all these reasons, a stock exchange is a pretty good business.”

How investment analysts became data miners
Nowadays, analysts sift through non-traditional information such as satellite imagery and credit card data or use artificial intelligence techniques such as machine learning and natural language processing to glean fresh insights from traditional sources such as economic data and earnings-call transcripts. 

Teen birth rates just hit an all-time low
The teen birth rate, for girls between the ages of 15 and 19, fell 7 percent, from 18.8 births per 1,000 women in 2017 to 17.4 births per 1,000 in 2018.

Inside Edge Humor

This week's interesting finds

November 23, 2019

Billionaires circle distressed assets: oil and gas patch
Thanks to the shale revolution, the U.S. has become the world’s biggest oil producer. The investors behind that growth, however, have little to show for it. After years of churning through cash with paltry shareholder returns, independent oil and gas drillers are down more than 40% since 2014. Lenders are becoming more discerning after easy money enabled much of the original boom.

But certain billionaire investors see value in assets belonging to an industry that’s in distressed-sale mode could signal that the bottom is here -- or, at least, close.

Known and unknown of shares prices
In the investing community, known knowns are priced in. Unknown unknowns aren’t. They can’t be.  Unknown knowns are when people ignore information in front of their faces.  This is confirmation bias.  That leaves known unknowns; and man, do investors not like known unknowns.  Investors don’t like ambiguity.

We all know that losses feel a lot worse than gains feel good and that fuels and affects our decision making.  We think this is not just relevant for losses that we have already sustained, but for future losses that we think are likely.

When we know that there will be bad news coming, we brace for the impact.  But when we don’t know precisely how bad things will be, we do more than brace.  We panic.  We scatter.  We run for the hills.

It may actually be that the expectation of bad news weighs more heavily on our psyche than the actual bad news when it arrives; even if the extent of the bad news confirms our worst fears.

China imposes gaming curfew for minors
Gamers under 18 will be banned from playing online between 22:00 and 08:00. They will also be restricted to 90 minutes of gaming on weekdays and three hours on weekends and holidays.

China is the second-largest gaming market in the world, with US global revenue surpassing China for the first time this year due to China's increased regulations on the industry.

The state of the smartphone
A dozen years since launch, the smartphone is now at an inflection point. Adoption rates are nearing their natural peak, with close to nine in ten adults owning one. While ownership rates may be approaching a ceiling, the smartphone economy is just getting started. The smartphone industry remains brimming with potential.

 Almost every person asked uses their smartphone daily.

Here are Bill Gates' favorite TED talks:

The best stats you’ve ever seen, by Hans Rosling

The danger of science denial, by Michael Specter

The history of our world in 18 minutes, by David Christian

Let’s put birth control back on the agenda, by Melinda Gates

How we’ll stop polio for good, by Bruce Aylward

How do we heal medicine, by Atul Gawande

The surprising decline in violence, by Steven Pinker

Could this laser zap malaria? by Nathan Myhrvold

Let’s use video to reinvent education, by Salman Khan

How PhotoSynth can connect the world’s images, by Blaise Aguera y Arcas

How I held my breath for 17 minutes, by David Blaine

The power of introverts, by Susan Cain

Robots that fly…and cooperate, by Vijay Kumar

EdgePoint Children's Chrismas Party!

This week's interesting finds

November 16, 2019

Sunday marks the 11th anniversary of the launch of our funds.
Here is a throwback to an early video we shot. We may not look as young anymore – but our commitment to putting our investors’ interests first will never get old.

The price to be paid for listening to Armageddonists
Many famed commentators have made dire predictions of imminent stock-market doom. This has been a recurring theme since the 2008 financial crisis. What if you listened to these talking heads and shifted your money from stocks to the safety of bonds? How would this have protected your wealth? Not very well.

Below is a hypothetical example of what would have happened if you shifted your savings from the S&P 500 Index to the Barclays Aggregate Bond Index during the week these famed commentators made one of those predictions. In the most extreme example, we see losses reach as high as 60%.

Here are some quotes rounded up from these prediction pontificators.

"It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?  A first-pass answer is never. So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight." (Paul Krugman, New York Times, November 2016)

“Trump victory would likely cause the stock market to crash and plunge the world into recession” (Simon Johnson, Former Chief IMF Economist, November 2016)

“I think it’s pretty obvious that the top is in. It’s just waiting for the knee-jerk bulls, robo traders and dip buyers to finally capitulate.” (David Stockman, August 2015)

Kids, money, and process over short term outcomes
The abundance of information today has made us dependant on getting it fast which has translated to the rise of on-line portals enabling parents to check their children’s grades in real-time. There is nothing wrong with making sure your child stays on track, but good intentions can be overwhelmed by unintended consequences, infecting the learning process. Many parents become obsessed with the random bells and whistles alerting them to incoming grades. Children become conditioned to learn something short term, get a good grade, and then forget everything.

There are no shortcuts to learning and investing. Good processes, not temporary outcomes are the keys to positive long-term results.

The same applies to obsessive portfolio checking. Like those compulsive and over-protective parents. What are you expecting to see? The more frequently you monitor your portfolio, the more likely you are to observe a loss. This is likely to cause short-sighted decisions and could hurt your investment performance.

With investing, time is usually on your side. Your kids and money benefit more from a long-term process-oriented approach. Incessantly logging into your computer frequently checking things that don’t need checking never made anyone rich.

Betting on humble CEOs
A new study accepted for publication in the Strategic Management Journal found that analysts tend to significantly underestimate the earnings potential of companies run by humble chief executive officers. That leads to artificially low earnings forecasts from the analysts, which the firms can then more easily meet or beat.

To measure humility, they recruited senior undergraduate students, as well as experts in psychology, to rate videos in which the CEOs appeared, using a scale that includes such characteristics as modesty, fairness and sincerity.

While humble CEOs aren’t any more or less capable leaders than their more brash peers, they tend to benefit from an “expectation discount,” which can lead to increased market returns for their companies following earnings announcement.

The only ones to really gain any valued insight from this study is the analyst. they might be unaware that their own psychological biases can affect how they appraise companies and the CEOs that lead them.

Investing fads
Investment products like any other products are created only because their manufacturers feel they can be sold. In the investment industry what sells is constantly evolving and can depend on anything from demographics to changing consumer sentiment.

Think back to the late 1990s and the dot com boom. Suddenly, anything vaguely connected to the internet and the “new economy” became a license to print money. Investors queued up to sink their savings into IPOs of misty-eyed ventures built on the flimsiest of pretexts.

In the post-dot-com early 2000s, disenchanted with the “new” economy, Wall Street renewed its embrace with the “old” economy through the concept of BRICs, a term coined by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill.

More recently, the investment du jour has been “smart beta”, a rules-based investment methodology pitched as combining the advantages of low-cost traditional ‘passive’ indexing and high-conviction ‘active’ stock-picking.

Having an adviser who understands your needs, circumstances and risk appetite can help in understanding these swings in investment fashion. 

This week's interesting finds

November 9, 2019

A focus on Canadian energy

Canadian Energy - Solutions for the industry
A great new talk from Chris Slubicki, CEO of Modern Resources. Nationwide discussions regarding energy and the environment in Canada have become increasingly heated and divisive. 

In this talk, Chris explores some of the serious unintended consequences of our current regulatory environment. He then outlines some solutions and a new path forward to economic prosperity, environmental sustainability, and a more cohesive Canada.

We Have Met the Carbon Enemy and He is Us
Your smartphone has enabled enormous hydrocarbon-based energy demand growth – and will continue to. The virtual world has shown a funny way of triggering real-world activity, nearly all of which requires energy – and in turn, causes CO2 emissions.

Decreasing oil and gas investment amid growing global energy demand driven by population growth, coincidental with increasing disposable income enabled by technology and industrialization in developing countries, has a real shot at spiking medium-term oil and natural gas prices to previously unseen levels. Sadly for Canada, our collective response to this astounding global opportunity appears to be self-flagellation, continuous delay and an ever-increasing regulatory burden, rather than building great, well-thought-out projects, of which Canada could have many. 

How best to help save the world from carbon while being honest with yourself? Begin by putting down your phone. Travel locally and walk or bike when you can. Deny yourself the instant gratification of online ordering. Grow more unfertilized food yourself. Sounds a bit rough, doesn’t it?

For your remaining energy use, recognize that Canada is a global leader in environmental stewardship and support the energy companies of this country. They are competing internationally under significantly more stringent domestic rules and practices while ranking 2nd (behind Norway) on environmental and social performance against other energy-rich nations.  The world is moving ahead on energy demand of all types, with or without Canada. We shouldn’t impoverish ourselves to no purpose.

How about some unity?
The world is making the transition to cleaner energy, so why not be a leader? Why not develop Canadian expertise, deploy these technologies and share them with the rest of the world? We believe cleantech will be a $2.5-trillion global market by 2022.

Many Canadian energy companies have already made great progress in prioritizing the environment. Some of us in the industry are committed to bold steps – to being not just cleaner, but to be clean. Net-zero emitters. If the Canadian industry is going to brand itself as an ethical alternative, that’s a must.

Hypocrisy
South Africa, India, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan and China, all signatories to the Paris climate accord, are building a combined 1,800 new coal-fired power plants. Coal plants emit twice as much CO2 as natural gas plants. Meanwhile, international environmental groups campaign against sending Canadian LNG to those countries.

Exporting our cleaner natural gas to global markets would benefit global emissions