NewsFlash – I have recently decided to join Danielle Fernandes and the team at Cap Circle.
This didn’t come without sacrifice. I had to make tough decisions I didn’t want to make. However, I found this to be the perfect opportunity and easiest path to making good money in a way that I am morally aligned.
I will get into more details later, but first I need to clarify something. One of those tough decisions stemmed from the fact that I supposedly have a tainted record when it comes to my stock analysis. I’ll set the record straight. My record is impeccable. Unlike useless opinions of people who cherry pick certain losing picks or need scapegoats for their own poor investment decisions, I have hard data to back that up.
Tipranks is a third-party data scraping service that tracks and ranks the performance of analysts and bloggers (aka “talking heads”) within the stock market. Its service isn’t perfect as it doesn’t capture and track all calls of a certain talking head, but it does a good enough job that I believe the sample it captures is representative. This is a link and screenshot of my performance and ranking that was generated from my publications on Seeking Alpha going back to 2012:
The screen shot is at one point in time, but my numbers have normalized enough that the ratings don’t fluctuate much anymore. Out of 152 captured ratings, 81 of them were correct for a 53% accuracy rate and an average return of 14.6% with a one-year time frame immediately after the call. This is good enough for me to land just outside the 96th percentile of all financial bloggers and just outside the 95th percentile of all experts. Financial bloggers include people like me who write on Seeking Alpha and similar sites for fun. All experts include the bloggers, plus analysts who are handsomely paid to do this for a living. If I were considered an analyst, I’d still rank within the 90th percentile. And that’s by doing what’s essentially a hobby all by myself while the analysts have the advantages of working for an investment house with access to the best data and news feeds, algo trading, and human capital lower on the totem pole from which to absorb all the credit.
What I hope people immediately take from this set of data is that with my grand total of 53% accuracy, I land solidly within the top 5-10% BEST of the talking heads out there. That should tell you how hard stock picking is and how terrible people are at it, including the so-called professionals.
My bragging does eventually lead to a point. How can I reconcile this data with the fact that some people know me for my penny stock graveyard? First off, about a third of my captured ratings on Tipranks are short/sell calls, and it is a lot easier to call out junk in penny stock land than it is to find diamonds in the rough. The second and more pronounced reason is that most of those calls are on U.S. companies with U.S. listings. My penny stock graveyard is almost exclusively confined to Canada.
It’s not my analysis that is screwed up. It’s Canada’s business environment. Most small businesses have an uphill battle and will fail. That’s the risk of speculative capital and entrepreneurship. However, in Canada, they are basically designed to fail. Anything outside of the real estate feudal system, kowtowing to the handful of oligarchs and oligopolies, layering in useless bureaucracy, and the handout brigade is not of interest to the ruling class in the country. And if real estate prices, powerful oligopolies, bureaucracy, and high taxes don’t kill innovation, entrepreneurship, and speculative capital, a useless management team that grifts investors will.
One character flaw that I will admit that I have that doesn’t serve me well in terms of analyzing Canadian junior listings is that my “yes” means yes, my “no” means no, and any caveats to maybes are clearly explained. If I commit to doing something, I will do it and naturally expect people to behave the same way. In the fraudulent culture of Canadian fake politeness, “yes” often means “no, and then I’ll ghost you about it later when you need me to come through for you”. Add in the incentive of being paid a huge salary and not earning it, and grifters disguising themselves as CEOs of publicly listed companies can turn the Canadian small cap industry into a landmine. It happens in the United States as well, but there are certain keywords and catch phrases in SEC filings that can easily filter such companies out. Canada, in all its brilliance, has several different security regulatory bodies at the provincial level instead of one federal body like the SEC that would make things easier for honest companies and investors alike.
With that being said, I want to live in a successful country. I’m not interested in moving to the United States, even if it would economically benefit me. I want to support small businesses here. REAL small businesses that add wealth and productivity to Canada. Not immigration grifts. Not Tim Horton’s franchisees that survive by exploiting foreign wage slaves. Not “mom and pop” landlords. Anyone who follows my words online knows that I am not a fan of Justin Trudeau. And I certainly didn’t vote for the Liberals this time around because I felt that they needed to be punished for what they have done to the economy, crime, youth unemployment, and for excluding an entire generation of young people from the prosperity Canada can offer. However, that had nothing to do with the leaders of the two viable political parties. I am optimistic with Mark Carney’s pedigree and early words and actions that Canada’s SME environment is going to get a lot better for a variety of industries, particularly resource extraction, industrial/defense, and technology. That includes public listings on the TSXV and CSE.
This is why I joined the Cap Circle Team. Out of all the people I have met on Bay Street, Danielle is the one whom I trust the most to get the job done.
The people teaming up with her are morally aligned with my goal of seeing productive small business success in Canada. There is no way I am giving up that opportunity. This is not your typical promo team looking to extract marketing dollars and pump cheap paper out into the market. Every story will be vetted as viable, and this team will work to accelerate the business, not just the stock price. Keep in mind that being viable doesn’t mean it’s not speculative. Penny stock trading is not a high percentage game. You hope that a handful of big winners more than offset a long list of duds.
For those who are familiar with some of my past stock picks that are still in good standing with me, this is very, very good news. I don’t intend only to be a blog writer and financial analyst. I am a business developer and activist shareholder. I like to think that I can see connections others can’t. Not only from a business standpoint but from how different management teams will be able to get along. I predict that Cap Circle can elevate the perception and economic performance of some of my existing investments.
This is why I joined this venture and why I look forward to seeing its growth and success.
