Investment Club Meeting on April 22, 2025 (Webinar)
Ellen's Investment Club (Toronto Central Investment Share Club)
Regular Session
April 22, 2025, 7:00 – 9:00 P.M
By videoconference
1) We originally scheduled a timely guest speaker to kick off the meeting. Ben Kaplan, a Toronto journalist, is a founder and editor of KIND magazine, which is distributed in Canada’s legal weed shops. He’s also the author of a new book called Catch A Fire: The Blaze and Bust of the Canadian Cannabis Industry (published by Dundurn Press in January 2025).
Here are a couple of links with some reviews:
Please note: You can now buy a KIndle ebook version at $9.99 from Amazon.ca. That’s a great price for a 300-page book with a very detailed history of the past six and a half years since former PM Justin Trudeau’s legalization of marijuana in October 2018.
Acting as a cannabis historian, “Ben Kaplan speaks with the dealers, stealers and renegade freaks who made and then lost money with the combined chutzpah of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried,” says the publisher’s blurb on the back cover of the paperback book.
Unfortunately, the author can’t attend our meeting on Tuesday, April 22, at 7 pm because it’s an important time of year for marijuana lovers, known as 420.
420 Day Celebration
Description
420, 4:20 or 4/20 is cannabis culture slang for marijuana and hashish consumption, especially smoking around the time 4:20 p.m. It also refers to cannabis-oriented celebrations that take place annually on April 20. Wikipedia
Date: Sunday, April 20, 2025
Significance: Time/date to celebrate cannabis
Ben has a conflicting engagement on Tuesday night, but he has agreed to do an interview with me in the next day or two before the meeting. I will record it and show it at the meeting.
Here’s a link to Ben’s Globe and Mail ROB article that was published on Jan. 31, 2025:
A tokin’ gesture: Legalizing weed destroyed what made it cool
Ben Kaplan
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published January 31, 2025
While Ben is an economist and historian, he is not an investor or a financial analyst. So, I asked club member Walter Fernandes, an astute investor, to give us a sense of how the major Canadian cannabis stocks have fared since legalization.
In his book, Ben focuses much of the boom and bust story on Canopy Growth (WEED on TSX), one of the major players, and Canopy’s CEO Bruce Linton, who was let go in in 2019 after a merger with Constellation Brands, a U.S. company that brought in an infusion of $5 billion.
Here’s a link to a Yahoo Finance chart, which shows the HMMJ ETF has lost 99.23% of its value in a five-year period:
I hope Walter can also bring some insight into the ETFs sold in Canada that follow the cannabis industry. If you are a longtime club member, you may remember the guest speaker we had at a live meeting just before the legalization of the cannabis market. Steve Hawkins was CEO of Horizons ETFs (now called Global X), and told us about introducing the first index ETF (HMMJ on TSX) – and having to buy an accurate index from another company.
Here's a link, which shows the risk rating as High:
We welcome a discussion among club members afterwards about the future of cannabis and marijuana stocks. Are you still holding on to your stocks purchased shortly before or after legalization? Which companies attract you and which ones do you think are too risky? Do you think this growth sector still has a lot of life in it?
2) In the second hour, we can talk about strategies we may be thinking of using in the upcoming months, when Canada has a new PM and the US President will continue to put economic pressure on us to take over our resources and sovereignty and make us the 51st state. Many economists believe that our economies are close to recession if not already in a recession.
Buy more stocks? Sell off some stocks and invest in bonds and other fixed-income products? Hold more cash?
3) Another topic we can discuss is the current income tax season. What's new and what's changed since last year? How can we fix any problems that come up? It’s hard to deal with the CRA by phone (waiting on hold for many minutes). I recently had a question and tried using their Chatbot, which was useless. No matter what I asked, even after rephrasing what I had said, I kept getting exactly the same answer -- basically, "there are too many words here and I don't understand what you're saying."
Then I started insulting the bot for not being able to help, but the answer stayed the same. It was amazingly frustrating.
If you use a chartered professional accountant (CPA) for help with preparing your income tax return, please let us know if you have learned anything about the 2024 tax return rules that could benefit other club members.
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