Friday, December 27, 2013

Ogilvy On Advertising

Time Magazine once called David Ogilvy "the most sought-after wizard in today's advertising industry". Ogilvy shares his wisdom in his book, Ogilvy On Advertising.

Monday, December 23, 2013

Smart Retail

Retail is a tough industry. There are low switching costs for customers (though firms try to mitigate this with things like loyalty programs), low barriers to entry, and fixed costs make up a large percentage of overall costs, which means even slight changes in revenue can have large effects on the bottom line. But for these very same reasons, it is also a very interesting/dynamic sector from the perspective of a retailer that is doing well and looking to grow its share.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Tellza: Undiscovered Growth At A Very Cheap Price

Tellza (TEL) is an under-followed Canadian microcap. The company has seen year-over-year revenue growth of almost 60% through the first 9 months of 2013, with likely more to come thanks to what appears to be a competitive advantage. Despite this, the company trades at a single-digit P/E, with no debt and a rising cash balance.Read more...

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Top 10 Investment Books

I've been asked a few times to list my favourite investment books of all-time, so I figured I'll take a stab at it. I cameup with this list rather arbitrarily, because I don't know how else to do it without using up too much time. Here they are, in alphabetical order:

Monday, December 16, 2013

The Map and the Territory

Alan Greenspan was Chairman of the Federal Reserve for 19 years. In his 2013 book, The Map and the Territory, he takes a look at the lessons he has learned from the financial crisis that he failed to foresee.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

The Help

I don't read a lot of fiction, but that may soon change. Though I do prefer my continuing education to be fact-based, there's no denying that fiction has a unique ability to illustrate and communicate ideas that would otherwise be difficult to fully express. For this reason, despite my overwhelming preference for non-fiction material, some of my favourite books happen to be fiction, including Animal Farm and The Goal. I hold Kathryn Stockett's The Help in similarly high esteem.

Monday, December 9, 2013

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Value Investors by Chan

We hear a lot about the most famous value investors. But there is a group of very successful value managers who fly under the radar, many of whom are profiled in Ronald Chan's Value Investors.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Capital Cities

Tom Murphy started out managing a tv station after graduating from Harvard Business School. Over the ensuing decades, he would come to run/own the media company Capital Cities, which bought ABC and eventually sold itself to Disney, earning shareholders who hung in there from the start 10,000 times (not a typo!) their original investment. Here is a terrific interview transcript where he talks about what allowed him to be successful:

Monday, December 2, 2013

Naked Statistics

If all statistics text books were as entertaining as Charles Wheelan's Naked Statistics, I don't think statistics would be considered a boring subject.