Investing In Stocks Isn’t Impossible Or Crazy If You Don’t Swing For The Fences

Investing in stocks has an allure like no other. Each day there are winners and losers, and one can easily see where they could have made a fortune if only they’d acted yesterday. Sitting down and staring at a screen full of stock prices, you can be sure of one thing: If you pick the right combination and dump all your money in, you will be rich within months. On top of that, the ease of entry and exit is remarkably simple. There are none of the challenges of starting your own business, building sales, hiring heroes and weirdos, dealing with the latter, and skating through the other million challenges only small business owners experience. It’s all a lot of work. But stocks…a few clicks and your fortune is made! Maybe!

No wonder we’re drawn to the game like moths to a flame, and the analogy is more startlingly apt than we realize. After you’ve signed your wings, or even worse piloted straight into the flame, you will nod to yourself, yup, that’s how it goes. Which is a shame.

What makes investing so challenging? Many things, but first it is imperative to understand the pricing of securities. The price will go up or down depending on the perceived fortunes of the company, and many investors sadly believe that by reading a headline or making a guess about some market development like a new demand for graphite, they can go grab a stock and ride it to the moon. And they might, but first it’s critical to understand that the pros, the people that live and breathe markets, are light years ahead of you, and have moved their money accordingly. When you get a hot stock tip from your beard-trimmer, the early/smart money has come and gone, and if not gone, is waiting for you to throw yours in before scampering.

If you don’t believe me, consider this quote from a remarkably well-placed US market commentator that goes by the mysterious name of The Heisenberg (heisenbergreport.com). The guy (I think) lives and breathes markets, and reading his output makes one realize that the market is moving in ways that retail investors can’t keep up with unless they are diligent to the point of obsession and have about 22 hours a day to devote to the topic. Here’s a quote from one of his posts at Seeking Alpha: “if, for whatever reason, the long-end of the US curve were to suddenly sell-off, the attendant bear steepener would mechanically force an unwind in all manner of equities expressions tied to the “duration infatuation,” including, but not limited to, min. vol. vehicles, momentum products, secular growth, defensives and, obviously, traditional bond proxies.”

Obviously? Huh? I’ve been around markets for decades, watching all sorts of developments, and people like this lose me by the third line. There is a whole layer of expertise in financial engineering that most people don’t even know exists. I’m pretty sure that if you don’t study market manipulations with the devotion of a dog to its feeding dish that you won’t be able to keep up with that narrative.

The coronavirus pandemonium has made things even worse. Blue-chip stocks that once seemed invincible have seen share prices collapse, because the future is unknown. If all the pros are fleeing, why would an average investor even consider entering the game?

You will at some point have to, one way or another, if you’re involved at all in being responsible for your retirement funding. You can farm it all out and pay through the nose, or learn a bit about what you’re actually investing in and if you’re getting your hard-earned money’s worth. Maybe you decide individual stocks aren’t for you, in which case ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds, which are pools of money that buy stocks that mirror stock or bond sectors, or certain sub-indices) are the next best thing (per a guy who should know – Warren Buffett). If you do buy stocks, preferably ones that grow dividends steadily, the stress of watching your portfolio pogo up and down is relieved because you can focus on the dividend cash flow instead. Then you can relax and go back to quality internet programming like funny cat videos or Russian traffic fails. Or is that just me…

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Related Topics:coronavirus COVID-19 investing

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Investing In Stocks Isn’t Impossible Or Crazy If You Don’t Swing For The Fences

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Worst kept secret—red tape strangling Canada’s economy

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

In the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S.

According to a new Statistics Canada report, government regulation has grown over the years and it’s hurting Canada’s economy. The report, which uses a regulatory burden measure devised by KPMG and Transport Canada, shows government regulatory requirements increased 2.1 per cent annually from 2006 to 2021, with the effect of reducing the business sector’s GDP, employment, labour productivity and investment.

Specifically, the growth in regulation over these years cut business-sector investment by an estimated nine per cent and “reduced business start-ups and business dynamism,” cut GDP in the business sector by 1.7 percentage points, cut employment growth by 1.3 percentage points, and labour productivity by 0.4 percentage points.

While the report only covered regulatory growth through 2021, in the past four years an avalanche of new regulations has made the already existing problem of overregulation worse.

The Trudeau government in particular has intensified its regulatory assault on the extraction sector with a greenhouse gas emissions cap, new fuel regulations and new methane emissions regulations. In the last few years, federal diktats and expansions of bureaucratic control have swept the auto industry, child care, supermarkets and many other sectors.

Again, the negative results are evident. Over the past nine years, Canada’s cumulative real growth in per-person GDP (an indicator of incomes and living standards) has been a paltry 1.7 per cent and trending downward, compared to 18.6 per cent and trending upward in the United States. Put differently, if the Canadian economy had tracked with the U.S. economy over the past nine years, average incomes in Canada would be much higher today.

Also in the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S., and only about two-thirds as much new capital (on average) as workers in other developed countries.

Consequently, Canada is mired in an economic growth crisis—a fact that even the Trudeau government does not deny. “We have more work to do,” said Anita Anand, then-president of the Treasury Board, last August, “to examine the causes of low productivity levels.” The Statistics Canada report, if nothing else, confirms what economists and the business community already knew—the regulatory burden is much of the problem.

Of course, regulation is not the only factor hurting Canada’s economy. Higher federal carbon taxes, higher payroll taxes and higher top marginal income tax rates are also weakening Canada’s productivity, GDP, business investment and entrepreneurship.

Finally, while the Statistics Canada report shows significant economic costs of regulation, the authors note that their estimate of the effect of regulatory accumulation on GDP is “much smaller” than the effect estimated in an American study published several years ago in the Review of Economic Dynamics. In other words, the negative effects of regulation in Canada may be even higher than StatsCan suggests.

Whether Statistics Canada has underestimated the economic costs of regulation or not, one thing is clear: reducing regulation and reversing the policy course of recent years would help get Canada out of its current economic rut. The country is effectively in a recession even if, as a result of rapid population growth fuelled by record levels of immigration, the GDP statistics do not meet the technical definition of a recession.

With dismal GDP and business investment numbers, a turnaround—both in policy and outcomes—can’t come quickly enough for Canadians.

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute

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‘Out and out fraud’: DOGE questions $2 billion Biden grant to left-wing ‘green energy’ nonprofit`

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The EPA under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a ‘green energy’ group that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a “green energy” nonprofit that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists such as former Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.

Founded in 2023 as a coalition of nonprofits, corporations, unions, municipalities, and other groups, Power Forward Communities (PFC) bills itself as “the first national program to finance home energy efficiency upgrades at scale, saving Americans thousands of dollars on their utility bills every year.” It says it “will help homeowners, developers, and renters swap outdated, inefficient appliances with more efficient and modernized options, saving money for years ahead and ensuring our kids can grow up with cleaner, pollutant-free air.”

The organization’s website boasts more than 300 member organizations across 46 states but does not detail actual activities. It does have job postings for three open positions and a form for people to sign up for more information.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, along with new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, are raising questions about the $2 billion grant PFC received from the Biden EPA’s National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF), ostensibly for the “affordable decarbonization of homes and apartments throughout the country, with a particular focus on low-income and disadvantaged communities.”

PFC’s announcement of the grant is the organization’s only press release to date and is alarming given that the organization had somehow reported only $100 in revenue at the end of 2023.

“I made a commitment to members of Congress and to the American people to be a good steward of tax dollars and I’ve wasted no time in keeping my word,” Zeldin said. “When we learned about the Biden administration’s scheme to quickly park $20 billion outside the agency, we suspected that some organizations were created out of thin air just to take advantage of this.” Zeldin previously announced the Biden EPA had deposited the $20 billion in a Citibank account, apparently to make it harder for the next administration to retrieve and review it.

“As we continue to learn more about where some of this money went, it is even more apparent how far-reaching and widely accepted this waste and abuse has been,” he added. “It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion. That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue.”

Daniel Turner, executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, told the Beacon that in his opinion “for an organization that has no experience in this, that was literally just established, and had $100 in the bank to receive a $2 billion grant — it doesn’t just fly in the face of common sense, it’s out and out fraud.”

Prominent among PFC’s insiders is Abrams, the former Georgia House minority leader best known for persistent false claims about having the state’s gubernatorial election stolen from her in 2018. Abrams founded two of PFC’s partner organizations (Southern Economic Advancement Project and Fair Count) and serves as lead counsel for a third group (Rewiring America) in the coalition. A longtime advocate of left-wing environmental policies, Abrams is also a member of the national advisory board for advocacy group Climate Power.