A roundup of what The Globe and Mail's market strategist Scott Barlow is reading this morning on the Web
Morningstar has published its list of U.S. fund managers' "high conviction buys,"
"We focus on high-conviction purchases and new-money buys. We think of high-conviction purchases as instances where managers have made meaningful additions to their portfolios, as defined by the size of the purchase in relation to the size of the portfolio. We define a new-money buy strictly as an instance where a manager purchases a stock that did not exist in the portfolio in the prior period."
The stocks listed are Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. along with Gilead Sciences Inc., Abbott Laboratories and Comcast Corp.
"Ultimate Stock-Pickers: Top 10 High-Conviction and New-Money Purchases" – Morningstar
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Bank of Montreal is the first major domestic lender to report profits and it continues the trend of defying the still-high number of foreign short sellers (although we don't know what's on the other side of these short trades where it's half of a long/short position),
"The bank boosted its payout by 2 cents to 90 cents as second-quarter profit rose to $1.25-billion, or $1.84 a share, from $973-million or $1.45 a year earlier. Adjusted earnings per share rose to $1.92. "We remain confident in our ability to grow and create value in an evolving environment," chief executive officer Bill Downe said in unveiling the numbers."
"BMO boosts dividend" – Babad, Report on Business
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Prominent portfolio manager Meb Faber lists his picks for best investing books. It's led by Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor, A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Gordon Malkiel and Howard Marks's The Most Important Thing.
"The #1 Investing Book" – Meb Faber
See Also: "23 Books That Changed My Life" – Collaborative Fund
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The fact that very few stocks determine returns for major benchmarks has been a major topic over the past week. It's also another strong argument for passive index investing,
"From 1994 to 2014 the S&P 500 returned 9.3 percent a year. The top 10 stocks were good for 4.1 percent, or just shy of 45 percent of the total gains. So it's perfectly normal that a handful of the 500 stocks in the index account for a large portion of the gains each year."
"A Few Big Stocks Don't Tell the Whole Market Story" – BloombergView
" Hot Stocks Can Make You Rich. But They Probably Won't" – New York Times
These three links are related in non-obvious ways,
"On the economic weaponisation of troll armies" – Kaminska, FT Alphaville
"There are bots. Look around." – Ribbonfarm
"@SBarlow_ROB "the 'cloud of finance' is ~US$400 trillion to US$800 trillion (depend on treatment of derivatives) vs US$60 trillion in '90" - Macquarie" – (research excerpt) Twitter
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Tweet of the day: "@Ed_Crooks Spencer Dale, BP: For every barrel of oil the world consumes, it finds two more. We are in an age of abundance. #FTEnergyTrans #oil" – Twitter
Diversion: I'm worried readers are going to take this personally but I'm only presenting it as a thought exercise, and something I'm doing myself,
"The Work Required To Have An Opinion" – Farnam Street
Scott Barlow