During the first quarter 2021, we initiated a new position in GFL Environmental – a waste disposal company based in Canada. The Industry The waste industry has historically been characterized by high barriers to entry (land use regulations on landfills as well as scale economics due to route density), stable non-cyclical demand, exceptional pricing power, and...
Dear Clients, We are pleased to report another positive quarter in both absolute and relative terms. Our GCI Select Equity strategy ended the first quarter of 2021 up 8.01% gross of fees. For comparison, the S&P 500 ended the quarter up 6.17%. Over a trailing three-year period, our strategy has now compounded client capital at a...
Our last article, Indexing, Benchmarking, and the Problems Therein, generated a lot of positive feedback so we have taken the time to deepen the discussion further. As a quick refresher – Benchmarks and the Indices they are derived from are typically used by firms such as ours to provide some element of performance comparison and...
We are often asked about our performance relative to an appropriate “benchmark”. For this reason, we often cite our over/under-performance relative to the S&P 500 (the most widely used benchmark, despite significant drawbacks). But please note, we are indifferent to any benchmark, and by no means manage our portfolio with the S&P 500 in...
Dear Clients, We are pleased to report that 2020 was another positive year for performance in both absolute and relative terms. As you know, Globescan Capital was founded on the principle that investing in high-quality companies at attractive prices is the most consistent way to achieve long-run, risk-adjusted returns. As such we do not overly concern...
Aside from the pandemic and election related news this year, you are probably also aware of a significant wave of private companies going public in the market to great fanfare and even greater one day share price appreciation. Some notable examples this year have been: Snowflake, Unity Software, DoorDash, Airbnb… just to name a few....
Over the past decade, a new sub-industry has developed within the investment community. It operates under a number of names, the broadest of which is Responsible Investing, which incorporates concepts such as ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), and SRI (Socially Responsible Investing). At its core, Responsible Investing requires that investors acknowledge a number of issues...
Buried in the news coverage of the election last week was a story that China suspended the $34 billion IPO of Ant Group, the largest online payments platform in China which grew up inside Alibaba, just two days before its planned listing. If there wasn’t a huge amount of election noise going on right now,...
You might be familiar with the expression “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. We prefer the expression popularized by Warren Buffett: “Put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket very closely.” We firmly believe that despite what you may have been told, simply holding many different equities is not...
Step 1. Identifying a Long-term Inexorable Trend Wherever possible, we prefer investments that benefit from an inexorable trend – the sort of long-term trend that cannot be disrupted by geopolitics, elections, pandemics, wars, etc., the sort of trend that we can be confident will continue for decades into the future, and the sort of trend...
