Plus: How not to pick stocks November 27, 2023 Sign Up | View Online IN THIS ISSUE 8 min read 👪 How to get a home 🪙 How to fix Argentina’s inflation? 🎰 How not to pick stocks The social-climbing Russells of The Gilded Age built a railroad and hired a French chef to set their daughter up for high society. The Canadian equivalent now, as we explain below, is just parents who locked down a bungalow in 1985. | HBO THE WEEK IN MARKETS Do you believe in Santa (rallies)? Last week was quiet thanks to American Thanksgiving, but no news was good news: the S&P 500 and Nasdaq inched up, while the TSX was flat. The rally that began in October is still officially happening. What’s driving it? Mostly falling inflation, along with strong earnings from U.S. companies. Goldman Sachs recently floated another theory: the Santa Claus rally, an almost yearly phenomenon where markets rise sharply in Q4. But, as trader/writer Brent Donnelly pointed out, Santa Claus rallies aren’t sure things — we certainly didn’t get one in 2008, during the Great Recession, for instance. Do we believe in this Santa rally? Well, it’s been a year defined by wrong market guesses, so we know better than to speculate. We will, like children anxious to see what St. Nicholas did (or didn’t) bring them, just have to wait and see whether the rally rolls on. THE WEEK IN ONE CHART Chipmaker Nvidia raked in north of US$18 billion in the third quarter — a 206% increase over the same time last year. And yet investors basically yawned at the news. We explain why below. WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK IMPORTANT Bye, Binance CEO. CZ, the second-richest Canadian and probably the richest former Vancouver McDonald’s worker, agreed to pay a US$50 million fine and step down as CEO of the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, after pleading guilty to violating U.S. anti-money laundering laws. One might have thought the downfall of CZ and SBF, two of crypto’s leading figures, would freak out the market, but Bitcoin rose on the news. (It’s +125% YTD.) It seems like crypto might have waved goodbye to its chaos years and is embracing a more boring, more regulated future. A Canadian nepo baby is just someone whose parents own a home. According to a new StatCan report, the National Bank of Mom or Dad is the best path to homeownership. If you earn less than $80K and your parents own a home, you’re more than twice as likely to own a home yourself. And no wonder, with how unaffordable housing is for anyone who doesn’t have access to a handout or a family loan. One broker told the Toronto Star that a whopping 80% of his GTA clients relied on parental money to buy their first home. INTERESTING Nvidia serves up chips and a dip. If anyone had been questioning whether the AI boom was getting any less boomy, chip designer Nvidia offered a hard “no” when it announced that its revenue grew 34% over the previous quarter, to US$18.1 billion. Nvidia, as we’ve explained, is sort of like Levi Strauss selling jeans to ’49ers hoping to strike it rich. Except, instead of jeans, Nvidia makes fancy chips (not those kind) that the Silicon Valley giants need to build AI language models. And how did investors respond to Nvidia’s monster quarter? They sent its share price down a little. That’s because investors have enormous expectations for the company (and AI generally) — so enormous they’d bid up its stock +250% YTD going into the report, meaning anything other than a huge win was a bit underwhelming. Argentina’s inflation fix? Adopt the U.S. dollar. Argentina doesn’t have the world’s highest inflation rate — that’s Venezuela, where prices are up 360% YoY — but its 140% increase, among other grave economic troubles, drove voters to elect libertarian/dog-clone enthusiast/self-proclaimed tantric-sex guru Javier Milei as president. And, boy, he has some ideas. Namely, Milei wants to abolish the central bank, ditch the peso, and adopt the stabler U.S. dollar as the official currency. Economists are pretty skeptical of the idea, but at least one former IMF official thinks adopting the USD could stabilize prices. Argentina landed in this mess in part by taking on a lot of debt and printing a lot of money as the economy slowed. Not good! BIG NEWS! THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 🐷 Northern U.S. states taking steps to stop influx of invasive Canadian “super pigs.” Ketchup-chip traps just one idea. Source ✈️ Air Canada alleges Brink’s gold shipment was stolen because it wasn’t properly identified. Always write “GOLD BARS” on the box. Source 🔋 Swedish start-up Northvolt develops breakthrough sodium-ion battery that could help reduce our dependence on China to just TikTok. Source 💇 Sam Bankman-Fried pays for haircut in jail with mackerel snacks, the only currency anyone trusts him with. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 🎸 Darryl Hall sues and gets a restraining order against John Oates. They will, however, share custody of the moustache. Source 🚬 Snoop Dogg “going smokeless” was just a marketing stunt for a smokeless fire pit that he’ll probably use to light joints. Source 🍄 Let them eat truffles: Kim Kardashian invests in a company that makes truffle-infused condiments. Source 🇫🇷 Napoleon’s hat auctions for $2.8M to an anonymous buyer who surely doesn’t have the right shoes for it. Source WHO CARES WHAT’S UP THIS WEEK Four of the Big Five Banks report earnings (Tues – Thurs). We’ll hear how Scotia, RBC, CIBC, and TD are faring amid worries about rising loan defaults. DON'T BE A TLDR HOG 🐷 Like TLDR? The first five million people to click this link can share it with a friend for free. (You can share it with enemies too but only if you’re ready for them to love you.) THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY TRADING Four Simple Rules for Being a Lousy Stock Picker Stocks, as we mentioned up top, are once again on the march. The S&P 500 is up almost 20% on the year, and, though the TSX hasn’t soared as high, it’s gone on a lil’ tear of its own and is now up almost 3.5% YTD. We don’t give money-making trading advice here at TLDR, but, since the stock surge has drawn a lot of traders off the sidelines, we thought it would be an appropriate time to break down four rules for losing money in stocks. And, if you don’t want to be an awful stock picker, these rules also work as a list of behaviours to avoid. Rule #1: Get obsessed with one or two stocks If you want to be a bad trader, start by pouring money into a small number of individual stocks. That’s because the U.S. and Canadian stock markets, as a whole, have marched steadily upward over the past 100 years. But only a tiny fraction of stocks — about 4%, according to one study — have earned investors more money than banks pay in interest, meaning most stocks really aren’t worth buying. Betting big on a few stocks increases the likelihood that you won’t pick one of the rare moneymakers and your investments will instead lose value over time. And if that’s your goal, don’t overlook the blue chips; the market’s best-performing companies change all the time, creating ample overinvestment opportunities. Rule #2: Bet on all the same stuff A craftier way to suffer big losses is to build a thematic portfolio, in which your positions are focused on a single industry or region. That way, you’re really exposed to downturns in those areas. For instance, if you go all in on Canadian energy stocks and the Canadian energy sector has a rough year (while the U.S. energy sector does just fine), you’ll be all in on the losses. You can even build a thematic portfolio unwittingly. For instance, if you hold a lot of U.S. tech stocks and diversify by investing in an S&P 500 index fund, you’re not really diversified, since the biggest companies in the S&P are U.S. tech companies. Rule #3: Trade all the time Even stocks that do well over time experience far bigger swings in value than boring diversified indices. And actively trading in reaction to these swings creates opportunities to bungle your timing. Case in point: one study found that households lost more money selling stocks during market drops than if they had stayed invested, since they tended to delay reinvesting, missed the rebound, and began buying shares again after prices had already shot back up. Frequent trading can also rack up fees that cut into your profits. Rule #4: Chase winners, buy high, YOLO If you really want to lose money, look for stocks and funds that shoot up dramatically, especially ones that gain 100% or more in a given year. This’ll up your odds of buying an overpriced asset that fails to generate returns in the years ahead. If you bought $ARKK at its 2021 peak, for instance, you’d still be down 72%. THE UPSHOT In sum, being a busy, know-it-all investor who gets obsessed with a few hot stocks has been a fantastic way to lose money. If you don’t want to lose money, however, history suggests that knowing your limitations and putting your money into passive index funds for the long haul is a decidedly smarter move for most traders. The stock market is sort of funny like that: it’s a rare area of life where making unwise decisions takes much more time and effort than making smart ones. OTHER VERY GOOD READS 💿 Why Sunrise Records Is Still Spinning The chain somehow survived Napster, iTunes, and Spotify | The Walrus 🧑‍💻 Sam Altman’s Polarizing Past Silicon Valley’s culture can put personality cults at odds with guardrails | The Washington Post 💝 How to Pick a Charity That Does the Most Good Not all charities are created equal | Wealthsimple THE WISDOM OF TWITTER It’s time we admit that those impulse bargain buys are not, perhaps, great bargains. THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S ISSUE? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Ben Mathis-Lilley (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Sarah Rieger (news writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Ciara Rickard (copy editor), Nikki Holmes (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Mohini Tailor (senior lifecycle specialist), Matthew Karasz (markets editor) Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), Kat Angus (managing editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). 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