Investment Club Meeting on April 16, 2024 (Webinar)
Ellen's Investment Club (Toronto Central Investment Share Club)
Guest Speaker: David Trahair, CPA, CA
Tuesday, April 16, 2024, 7:00 – 9:00 P.M.
By videoconference
1. Member introduction
2. Approve Agenda
3. Our guest speaker is David Trahair, CPA, CA,
David is a personal finance writer, trainer and e-Learning content developer. He is also an author of six books on personal financial issues, including three national bestsellers. He was a columnist for CPA Magazine from 2014 to 2018 and spoke to a meeting of our club about a decade ago.
I was checking out David’s site recently and saw a course that I thought would be helpful for investing novices and more experienced investors as well. It normally takes 3.5 hours and costs $275 for public attendees, but David will give us a shorter version in 45 minutes and answer our questions.
His online course is called The Complete Guide to All Your Investing Options. Here’s how he describes it:
“This course will show you all the different options you have when it comes to investing your money. It will cover 10 different types of accounts with a whole range of different investment strategies.We'll look at a full-service broker (Manulife Financial), a robo-advisor (Wealthsimple), five discount brokerages (Questrade, Qtrade, CIBC Investor's Edge, RBC Direct Investing and TD Direct Investing), a deposit broker (Fiscal Agents), a bank branch mutual fund account (TD bank) and even a cryptocurrency account (Wealthsimple Bitcoin).”
This isn’t just a theoretical exercise for David. He has opened all 10 of these accounts in his own name and continues to monitor how they are doing.
Just FYI, David is no longer practicing as an accountant. He’s passionate about financial literacy and he’s busy developing on-demand online courses, mostly aimed at accountants.
His views are totally independent because he does not sell any financial products, he says. He currently operates his own financial training firm and offers seminars to organizations.
Check out the video (2:14 minutes) on his course page, which will give you more insight on his presentation.
4. At last month’s meeting, our member Tom Loftus described how the Ottawa Share Club set up Fantasy Pre-retirement and Retirement investing Portfolios for its members to manage since 2016.
The members choose the initial stocks. Then the portfolio is monitored on an ongoing basis and improvements are made when members suggest trades to improve the portfolio’s performance. The improvement recommendations are voted on by the entire membership and the approved changes are implemented.
These portfolios were designed to demonstrate the real issues members are confronted with when managing their own investments and savings.
“Our current stock contest tends to be a selection of the most popular stock picks at the initiation of the contest and operates on an annual basis,” says Tom.
“The Fantasy Portfolios offer members the opportunity to solve real portfolio issues like seeing a good investment idea and deciding what securities you will sell to implement the new investment proposal. The Fantasy Retirement portfolio has a realistic 4% withdrawal requirement for each year of operation.”
Our club members have told us they like this idea and would like to adopt a similar approach. So, now we plan to move ahead with establishing rules, such as:
What kind of securities should we hold in these portfolios?
How can we achieve consensus on initial holdings and changes made at a later date?
After asking members for suggested holdings, we have two Fantasy Portfolios nominees to date:
- Lumine (LMN.V) - a spinoff from Constellation Software (CSU). For more information: Lumine investor relations
- Cintas Corp. (CTAS: Nasdaq) - provides corporate identity uniforms and related business services primarily in the United States, Canada and Latin America. For more information: Cintas investor Relations.
We are looking for 15 to 20 stocks to create a long term Ellen's Club portfolio to monitor performance and make improvements as recommended by members. We need some additional stock nominees for members to consider for entry into the portfolio and be confirmed by a majority vote.
Question: Should we consider including the better stocks from the previous Club Competition?
- | NVIDIA Corp |
- | Athabasca Oil Corp |
- | Topicus.com Inc |
- | Alphabet Inc, Class C |
- | Canadian National Railway Co |
- | SPDR Gold Trust |
- | Apple Inc |
5. General discussions
- What are members buying, selling, or watching?
- What's the best or worst move you made recently?
- Would you do anything differently? If so, why not?
6. Next meeting: Tuesday, May 21, 2024, 7 to 9 p.m.
7. Adjourn
David's presentation was super colossal and rich with content. It was Christmas, Happy Birthday all together. Ellen continues to amaze with her extensive knowledge of who's who in the finance world. We are not worthy, thank you Ellen.
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