Monthly Commentaries

MacNicol’s Monthly Commentary - March 2020 Late February’s stock market action has the dubious distinction of having set a number of dastardly investment records. We will avoid rehashing the painful plethora of horror stories here as many investors continue to lick wounds. At the same time some market stats made even our eyes water and [...]

MacNicol’s Monthly Commentary - February 2020 I earned a Science Degree from the University of Toronto in the late 1990’s. Among the more challenging courses I took in those days was human immunology. Human immunology gave me the opportunity to learn how the body fought off bacteria and viruses, and whole host of other interesting [...]

MacNicol’s Monthly Commentary - December 2019 My friend wanted to learn more about real estate to provide his clients with better information when it came to their investment options. Institutional sales can be a tough, competitive business where you only “eat-what-you-kill” so it is important to have a competitive edge. With real estate being one [...]

MacNicol’s Monthly Commentary - November 2019 One of the things that working with the MacNicol team can do is help you avoid investment myopia, the natural tendency to focus on the short-term. Apart from helping investors avoid “bubbles” partnering with us can allow your overall cost of investments to fall. In James Montier’s little book [...]

MacNicol’s Monthly Commentary - September 2019 Speaking of efficacy, the on-going trade talks between the US and China have dragged on and domestic economic indicators are beginning to join global ones in their decline. We referenced the slowdown in the US manufacturing sector on the front page of The Monthly noting that Institute of Supply [...]

MacNicol’s Monthly Commentary- August 2019 French novelist and journalist Jean-Baptise Alphonse Karr was famous for coining the phrase “the more things change, the more they remain the same”. We reproduce Karr’s famous quote in his native French to begin this edition of The Monthly and we think it is pretty fitting given the state of [...]

MacNicol’s Monthly Commentary- June 2019 I love pancakes, most people do. Pancakes are delicious, satisfying and a magnificent breakfast to enjoy before a day of sight seeing. They are also flat. Really flat. So flat is my guilty breakfast pleasure that they take me back nearly 20 years to an evening I spent at the [...]

MacNicol's Monthly Commentary-May 2019 Trade only when the market is clearly bullish or bearish…so which is it? Jesse Livermore famously said, “Trade only when the market is clearly bullish or bearish”. I really wish it were that simple. Although markets have for the most part performed well in 2019 the arrival of May has dumped [...]

MacNicol's Monthly Commentary-March 2019 The Great Pivot At one point this week meeting minutes from four of the worlds major central banks were on my desk. Though much digital ink was spent disentangling what went wrong with preordained interest rate hikes and balance sheet reductions nothing quite satisfies a craving like the real thing. Besides [...]

MacNicol's Monthly Commentary-February 2019 The Death of Indexing? Thankfully the word "giant" is not used liberally in the investment world and that’s a very good thing. These days it seems that everyone in our industry is either a Vice President or a Director, so it can be difficult for investors to know who to listen [...]