Category Archives: Marijuana stocks

March Madness: Final Four Investing Bracket 2019

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Dear Mr. Market:

Has your alma mater or favorite team already been bounced from the NCAA basketball tournament? My Portfolio Guide can’t change that fact but we can offer you a fresh chance with our annual spin on March Madness. For the ninth year in a row we are rolling out our unique way to share investment themes and overall thoughts on the stock market.

We’re proud to say that My Portfolio Guide was the first financial advisory firm to publish a March Madness investing tournament where we share our picks and match them up against each other! We break down and assign each of the four “regions” with an asset class and then pick teams (companies) that we think have the best chance at doing well relative to others.

Click here to see Final Four Investing Bracket Picks 2019

 

Large Cap

The most boilerplate of portfolios has won out by riding the safe bet over the past few years. This is akin to the March Madness office pool where your coworker, who knows nothing about sports and couldn’t differentiate between a basketball and a football, wins the whole pool of money by simply picking the highest seed in each bracket. What we mean by this with regards to investment asset classes is that since 2013 the Large Cap asset class has been the easy money pick. If you had a decently diversified portfolio (which by design should include exposure to International and Emerging Markets), you lost to the boilerplate and simpleton portfolio that is mainly weighted towards Large Cap. Continue reading →

March Madness: Final Four Investing Bracket 2018

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Dear Mr. Market:Unknown-2

What’s more exciting to watch: Duke versus North Carolina or Apple versus Amazon? If you’re reading this you know by now that it’s not a trick question but rather our annual opportunity to have some fun spinning the NCAA college basketball tournament into a platform to share our favorite investment themes.

My Portfolio Guide was the first investment firm to publish a March Madness investing tournament where we share our picks and match them up against each other. We break down and assign each of the four “regions” with an asset class and then pick teams (companies) that we think have the best chance at doing well relative to others.

This is the eighth year we’ve done this and it’s become one of the most popular articles on the entire internet!

Click the following link to see the entire bracket for 2018:

Final Four Investing Bracket Picks 2018 

 

Large Cap

Many people now have the rearview mirror or armchair quarterback mentality right now. If you’re to be honest with yourself there are very few folks we met at this point last year that said without question that the stock market would soar to record highs. As a matter of fact, it was quite the opposite. Think back to the start of 2017 as most of us were still digesting the fact that Trump won the election. Most pundits felt that the “Trump bump” would be short lived and that the one thing the stock market doesn’t like is uncertainty …and we had plenty of it!

All that being said, we couldn’t have been more clear that if you kept your politics out of it you could have had a nice year! The easy trade was betting on America and the Large Cap asset class turned in a fine year. Guess what? We still think there is room to run here and the recent correction we experienced is exactly what the doctor ordered.

Key Match-up:

#2 US Steel (X) vs. #3 Reliance Steel (RS)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve heard that President Trump wants to reset the playing field on trade imbalances. Continue reading →

Marijuana Stocks: Growing like a weed?!

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Dear Mr. Market:th

Many of our “letters” to you are with a cautionary approach so that readers of this blog fully understand the risks and rewards of engaging with you. With your erratic personality perhaps the last thing you need is a drug to add to your volatile ways. That said, we also attempt to sprinkle in some humor and puns to get our point across…even if you’re at an all-time high (first pun in case you’re not paying attention!).

Whether you are a proponent of legalizing marijuana or not there is no denying that the cannabis industry is real and here to stay. Would it surprise you to learn that cannabis is the United States’ second largest cash crop? Believe it or not it is the second most valuable industry next to corn and is worth over $40 billion! Several reports earlier this year also estimate that legal cannabis sales could grow by at least 30% in 2018.

The marijuana industry is predicted to grow like a weed (second pun). All kidding aside, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects over 250,000 new jobs in this industry by 2020 which is far more than those expected from manufacturing! By 2024 the BLS actually forecasts manufacturing jobs to decline by 814,000. Ignoring the potential growth in this industry or that it has fast become a major economic driver and job-creation force in the U.S. economy is a mistake.

Public opinion is still divided (not a surprise nowadays…) but it’s rapidly changing. A poll conducted by CBS News in July of 1979 revealed that only 27% of those surveyed thought marijuana should be legal; that number by mid 2017 is now at 61%. Even with this momentum there still remains some obvious hurdles: (1) Marijuana is still illegal at the Federal level and (2) Congress has plenty to focus on right now with healthcare and tax reform so legalization is a lower priority for now.

So…how do you play this opportunity, or should you???th-11

If you’re a true investor as opposed to a speculator we’ll begin by letting you know there are major risks in this budding sector. (please tell us you caught that pun?!) Continue reading →