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.

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.

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...

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:

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.

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.

Value Fail: Aeropostale

A few years ago, I brought up Aeropostale as a potential value investment. There was a time this company could do no wrong. Times have changed.

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.

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:

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.