(This is an excerpt from an article written on Substack by Mark Bunting. You can read Mark's full bio below).
When I was 10 years old, my father bought me 10 shares of Cooper, the sporting goods company, and that sparked my first interest in investing.
I’m sure my dad, who was the president of his father’s stock brokerage firm, Alfred Bunting & Company, figured Cooper was a natural choice to get me interested in investing because I played hockey, loved Dave Keon and the Toronto Maple Leafs, and enjoyed following the statistics of the National Hockey League.
My First Stock
My father taught me how to read the stock tables in The Globe & Mail newspaper. I would check Cooper’s price every day. I would love to tell you at this point that Cooper shares provided a big profit and sent me on my way to future investing success. Or that the stock went to zero, and I learned an important lesson about money and risk.
I lost track of my Cooper investment. My memory is hazy why. I may have had the physical share certificate, but I don’t recall. Cursory research shows that Canstar Sports bought Cooper, the parent company of Bauer Hockey, and Nike acquired Canstar Sports in 1995. As a result, they phased out the Cooper name, and my investment died of neglect. That would not be the first time I wasted my dad’s money.
Next Stock, Same Result
When I was a teenager, I must have saved up money because I asked my father what a good investment might be. He sent me to a colleague of his who suggested New Gateway Oil & Gas. I bought $400 of that stock, as I remember. That investment met the same fate as my Cooper shares.
I’m sure you’re sensing a pattern. So am I, as I remember these careless misadventures. But as comedian Brian Posehn said, when telling a story in a standup special about a woman he was undressing for who was aghast at what she was seeing, “Oh, it gets worse.”
“What’s There to Think About?”
Maybe not worse but definitely not much better. My former self continued to follow the investment world from a distance, lacking the resources I considered necessary to get involved.
It wasn’t until my early thirties that I called the CEO of a well-known Canadian mutual fund company that I had interviewed to request he refer me to one of his employees to recommend some funds.
I met with this person in his office who, in a soothing voice, explained and then recommended four of their funds. I said, “I’ll think about it.” His pleasant demeanor disappeared, and he blurted out, “What’s there to think about?”
I felt pressured because he showed annoyance at having to meet with me, and now my hesitation put him at risk of not closing the sale. As a general avoider of conflict, I agreed to invest in the four funds he recommended. Happily, those funds performed well for several years until, in need of cash for a move to a different city, I sold all of them.
Imperfect Timing
My next foray into investing was in 2000, during the technology boom.
My father had gifted me and my two older sisters money to limit inheritance tax. I asked him in a phone call whether he thought I should invest in stocks.
By now, my dad was president of the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE). One would assume he would have a bias towards purchasing shares in various corporations, or mutual funds or ETFs, the latter of which he and his team had pioneered at the TSE.
But my dad said something to the effect of,
“If you believe certain companies can do well in the long term and that the market will keep going up, then you should invest in the stock market.”
He left my decision up to me or didn’t want to be responsible for or want to know about what I did with the money, which was fair and generous.
After paying down some debt, I put half of the money into four mutual funds and the rest into select technology stocks, such as Nortel Networks and Research in Motion.
The day I bought those stocks in March 2000 was the same day the Nasdaq Composite had a wild, intra-day swing plunging several hundred points only to climb back and finish flat on the trading session. I was at a friend’s place. We were glued to CNBC throughout the afternoon. It was the first major prick in the technology bubble, which burst in the fall of that year.
My tech stock investments cratered, and I redeemed my mutual funds to help finance my girlfriend and me in raising our two-year-old daughter. I was not the only one who saw the tech crash vaporize their investments and teach them a massive lesson about manias and bubbles. Unperturbed, I moved forward.
From Sports to Business
Career-wise, before the dot-com crash, I left The Sports Network after 12 years when they did not renew my contract and started looking for a new gig, which I soon realized was on business television as I watched (got caught up in) CNBC’s coverage of the raging bull market (bubble) in tech stocks.
My skills were transferable and my goal became to get an on-air job at Report on Business Television (now BNN Bloomberg), a cable channel that started broadcasting in 1999.
After stints reporting on sports and then business at CFRB Radio in Toronto, and at a weekly, national business television show, I achieved that goal, which propelled me to a 15-year run at BNN as a reporter and anchor.
I then became much more immersed in reading and doing research on investing and business, learned a lot, and interacted with and interviewed people I perceived to be smart, educated, and successful portfolio managers.
During that time, I took part in the defined contribution retirement plan of BCE, BNN’s owner, whereby I regularly contributed a chunk of my salary to the plan and they matched it. When I left BNN, I transferred that account to my wife, a professional money manager, for her to manage.
My Hedgeye Revelation
Despite this education in investing, I still had no proper plan for my personal account beyond taking risks and trying to hit home runs with my attention bouncing between the latest shiny things such as gold, silver, certain small caps and cannabis stocks.
It wasn’t until I discovered Hedgeye Risk Management and Keith McCullough’s global macro, full investing cycle, data-driven process that I realized there was a viable and far superior alternative to my indiscriminate way of investing, and to traditional buy-and-hold, long-term investment strategies.
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ABOUT MARK BUNTING This is a Hedgeye guest contributor piece written by Mark Bunting and reposted from his Substack publication. Mark is a seasoned financial journalist with 25 years of experience in the industry. His career includes 15 years as an anchor and reporter for Business News Network (BNN Bloomberg), where he also served as London Bureau Chief for three years. He currently is the host of RCTV for Red Cloud Financial Services, focusing on interviews with CEOs and leaders in the metals and mining sector. Mark also plays a significant role at Red Cloud’s conferences, where he conducts keynote interviews and moderates panels. Additionally, he is an on-air host of sponsored content for BNN Bloomberg Brand Studio and has previously been the publisher and host of Uncommon Sense Investor and Capital Ideas Media. Mark started his career with The Sports Network (TSN). He has been a Hedgeye subscriber for three years.. View all posts by Bunting on his Substack. X (Twitter) handle: @MarkBunting_ LinkedIn: Mark Bunting |
