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Pick a thing. It can be anything: your car, an hour of your labour, your house. If you were to sell that thing how would you arrive at its price? Option 1: Cost-plus pricing If you were thinking of selling your house, this is likely the pricing model that jumped into your head first. You […]
It has been a fascinating year for initial public offerings. This week, news came out that the proposed IPO of WeWork (a lessor of shared office spaces) was not going well, with the company’s predicted valuation falling to as low as $15 billion from the $65 billion that its investment bankers originally predicted. WeWork, which […]
Do we have a deal for you! How would you like to loan some of your hard-earned money to the German government for the next 10 years and, in return, receive absolutely no interest for the use of your capital? No, not interested? Well then, we highly doubt you’d be interested in earning a negative […]
It’s been a month, yet it’s still hard to believe. The Toronto Raptors are NBA champions! Before this season started the team had been consistently good, but not great. Sure, they had won their division in four of the previous five seasons, but they had also only won a combined four playoff series in that […]
You’ve likely read that a distrust of modern-day vaccinations has led to an outbreak of measles cases in developed countries. The number of parents choosing not to vaccinate their children has grown so large that the Government of Canada has been airing pro-vaccine advertisements during Raptors playoff games. So you’ve probably been informed, at least […]
If there were an Olympic Games for the equity markets, Team USA would be dominating this year’s medal count. While nearly every major global index has rebounded since the late-2018 selloff, few markets have rallied like those in the U.S. The following chart shows the relative performance of the S&P 500 compared to the rest […]
If you know what the FANG stocks are, then you’re probably aware that over the last few years the markets have been especially kind to technology companies with outsized growth prospects. Just the fact that a subset of these companies have their own acronym demonstrates how popular it has become to invest in high-growth companies. […]
The U.S. housing market had been rising steadily after bottoming in 2010; however, recent data suggest that it has hit a soft patch. This weakness has us wondering whether this is just a temporary pause or whether the economic backdrop is still supportive of continued growth in U.S. housing. As the next chart shows, both […]
Last year wasn’t a great year for investors. In Canada, the S&P/TSX Composite Index was down 11%, with the energy sector responsible for more than one-third of that decline, thanks to lower oil prices. However, it wasn’t all bad news for Canadians when it came to lower oil prices. The energy industry is such a […]
The market selloff in December caused a lot of people to get really bearish really quickly. The following chart, from Google Trends, shows that searches for “recession” hit a five-year high last month. And it’s not just the average Google user who is increasingly worried about an economic downturn: a recent survey of U.S. CFOs found […]
