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(A Top Pick June 23, 2017. Down 35%). All the junior golds were a disaster. It got a takeover bid and he is glad to be out of it.

(A Top Pick June 23, 2017). The central bank cycle was turning against liquidity. He also thought the market was significantly overvalued and thinks the US market (but not the Canadian one) has gotten more overvalued. He thinks the interest-rate increases have done damage and that business will slow down. He doesn’t know how far the market will go down, but looking at Shiller PE ratio, the market looks 40% to 50% overvalued. In addition, in every 10 year period, there has been at least one 30% correction. He sees a potential for that type of correction now, but can’t predict when it will happen. A different bubble triggers the correction each time. This time, he is watching emerging markets. The US market might continue to do well even if there is a big correction in emerging markets, partially because of the tax cut, but at some point that sugar high will wear off.

Everything moved up on Monday, it felt like a compulsory buy. He used to own it but owns only debentures and warrants now. It’s a plain vanilla cannabis company--growers. They don’t plan to retail, they plan to sell to retailers. They seem to know what they’re doing, but in terms of new investments, there are others that he likes better.

The first few quarters since the GTA bundle blew the doors off, but there isn’t much transparency to that agreement. Some analysts have a sell on it because they believe that there is a tipping point in the agreement, so that if revenue goes down a little bit, cash flow drops near zero. He believes that he has a small short position in the company, mainly from a valuation perspective. There is also ongoing risk from an ongoing investigation into money laundering in BC. Nothing incriminating of Great Canadian has come from this so far, but it is a risk that is not publicized enough, creating a basis for a short.

It has had a big run-up but has recently pulled back on a weaker quarter. He owns a little bit and likes the trend.

This is one of his biggest positions. They report growth quarter after quarter. They were a challenged company but they changed management, changed focus to health care sector and cleaned up the balance sheet. They have no net debt. The stock has had a big run-up but the fundamentals have been going up at least as fast. It trades at a discount to US peers even though it has a much better balance sheet. It trades at about 12x EBITDA and peers trade in the mid-teens.

He owns some in his larger-cap strategies. It’s a great business, a great holding company and he expects to see a steady increase in dividends. He likes the underlying subsidiaries. He sees it as a smaller version of Berkshire Hathaway that gets to play in deals that are too small for Berkshire Hathaway.

He doesn’t think the new tariffs will hurt the stock because they sell into Europe and Asia. However, the US has opened a lot of fishing areas, which has significantly depressed clam prices. The Canadian government also took away one of Clearwater’s clam licenses and gave it to an indigenous nation. However, there were ethical issues in that process and the license is coming back up for bids. In the meantime, it is going back to Clearwater for a year. That will help. In general, it is a good company that is facing a lot of headwinds. It also has a lot of debt. He isn’t ready to buy YET. He wants to see a turnaround in the pricing of their products.

He has a small short position. He doesn’t think it is a bad company, but the earnings trend has been down. They have made a few bad investments. The company invests mostly in debt rather than taking an equity position in the companies it invests in. Its portfolio is concentrated, 8-to-10 companies. He doesn’t think the dividend is at risk. Tax loss selling season will start in 6 weeks, so this is likely to keep going down into then. After that is over, he expects to look at it from the long side again.

They have a microwave-based technology for extracting oil compared to a solvent-based one. This is faster. There is no guarantee that it will be the winner, among competing technologies, but in a sector that has a lot of future growth, this might do very well. It is speculative.

He shorts companies that show a downward trend. This company has been going down for quite a while. The business model for independent channels has been difficult and he doesn’t see a reason for that to change soon. They did a big dividend cut. Tax loss season is coming which will put further downward pressure on the stock.

He used to own this as part of an interest in content creation. He thinks that cycle has played out and he is now short this sector.

This is a junior producer in the Montney. They have 140 sections in northeast BC. Current production base is 3500 barrels per day and they just had a discovery in a different area, which can increase their production to 4000. The cost of each well is very low so there is fast payback, typically 18 months to pay for a well. He thinks the new discovery is drawing attention from bigger players, such as Tourmaline, that might buy the new play or the whole company. The CEO owns a big chunk of stock and has been in this type of situation, and sold his company, before. He thinks a takeout will be above $3 and that it should get close to $3 even if there is no takeout. (Analysts’ price target is $2.73)

This is a specialty pharma company. They have been focused on dermatology products, the lead being Absorbica. He’s excited by their development pipeline. They bought the Canadian assets of Cardiome and have successfully integrated them. This came with tax losses along with the pipelines. Together, they help make Cipher incredibly cheap at its current price. There was an issue with inventory of their US partner, but that has now been resolved. He expects the recovery to show good earnings momentum for the back half of this year, then the release of new products. The company has dropped from $18--it was caught up in the run-up of prescription prices (Valeant) and then the run-down. While their prices were high, they tried to get into the US in a big way, and that failed. That cost them about $10 million and hurt their share price, but that failure is long past. He likes it a lot at its current price. (Analysts’ price target is $6.06)

This is a pure play in phosphate. It does mining and processing. He sees it as a special situation, likely to be taken over. Their original investment was a plant in Brazil, backed by Cargills. Then they purchased Conda Phosphate from Agrium as part of Agrium’s merger divestitures. This makes sense for Itafos because it has other projects nearby. If there is an ag cycle, this will be the go-to small cap name. (Analysts’ price target is $4.00)