Investment Club Meeting on March 18, 2025 (Webinar)
Ellen's Investment Club (Toronto Central Investment Share Club)
Guest Speaker: Ales Eisner
March 18, 2025, 7:00 – 9:00 P.M
By videoconference
We have a guest speaker, a self-taught investor, to kick off the meeting at 7 pm. Ales Eisner is an early retiree, having left his IT job at age 48. He keeps busy with leisure pursuits and writing about investing at his website, https://canadianmoneytalk.ca, as well as acting as a mentor for people who need money advice. He’s not a certified financial planner, so he charges a reasonable fee of $50 an hour to work with them.
My background is in IT. I achieved financial independence in my early 40’s, and stopped working in IT at 46. I have a net worth of over six million Canadian dollars, and live off the proceeds of my portfolio more than comfortably. I would like to help you achieve the same time freedom and financial independence that I have.
You can find him doing videos on social media at https://canadianmoneytalk.ca/contact, (YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and Facebook).
Here's a link to a March 15 video, where he talks about selling his active mutual funds and buying passive index ETFs.
Feel free to ask questions about how he managed to make his assets grow so quickly in retirement – and how he received $159,000 in dividends last year.
Many of our club members are also retired and will be interested in his video, titled, “What’s the best withdrawal retirement strategy?”
How often do we have a chance to learn from a self-taught investor, especially one born in the Czech Republic whose first language is not English?
I tried to book Larry MacDonald, an Ottawa-based economist, financial journalist and author, as a guest speaker as well. But he’s looking after a family member who needs care and doesn’t want to travel right now.
He wrote a bestselling book about Shopify, published last year, and did a terrific interview on the Toronto Legends podcast with host Andrew Applebaum:
(I was a guest on that podcast too in March 2023.)
Larry sent me links to his two recent articles in the Globe and Mail Report on Business section about short selling on the TSX. With so much uncertainty about the Trump tariffs, it’s probably helpful for buy and hold investors to see what pessimistic investors are doing.
“The first two links should give you free access to my last 2 Short selling on the TSX,” he told me.
Talking about Trump tariffs, here’s a March 9 article that Larry wrote on his Substack newsletter about Shopify’s sharp decline:
Shopify’s stock has tumbled more than -20% since mid-February, largely due to fears over the impact of Trump’s tariffs on Canada.
He followed that with a March 10 article, Shopify and Tariffs, Part 2:
A separate point to make is that central banks outside the U.S. can neutralize the impact of tariffs on their countries by lowering domestic interest rates to guide their currencies downward against the U.S. dollar. A lower domestic currency will reduce the price of the country’s exports to U.S. customers and thus offset the bite of U.S. tariffs.
To clarify a paragraph in the previous post: The tariff war should not go on for a long time, says Phillip Cross, an economist with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. That’s because it hurts a lot of people in all the belligerent countries, including those in the U.S. The Republicans in the U.S. could become less popular and lose a lot of votes in the 2026 mid-term Congressional elections; to avoid giving up control of both houses, the party could pressure Trump to roll back his tariffs.
Finally, I’d like to start a discussion about our club’s fantasy portfolios now that Tom Loftus is moving on. He’s left all the files on the club’s hard drive. Do we have any volunteers to keep this initiative going?
The Globe and Mail has several excellent columnists who write about their stock portfolios and their progress in keeping up with the indexes and inflation.
Gordon Pape’s Growth Portfolio: As of March 4, 2025.
John Heinzl: Model dividend growth portfolio: As of Feb. 28, 2025.
Norman Rothery: As of March 9, 2025.
(If this article ends up behind a Globe and Mail paywall, remember that you can read Norman’s writing at his Stingy Investor website.)
That’s enough for now. But let’s spend time talking about the club’s future direction and the guest speakers you might like to invite to our meetings.
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