Feb 11 : Dr. Jack M. Mintz
I went to a talk about the future of policy in economic reform, he went over the neo-libreastic view point that Canadians had in the 2000s and how that has rapidly changed to a more nationalistic view
I don't fully understand what he said, but what I understood was that neoliberalism is basically deregulation and lets the market do whatever, so less government intervention. Nationalism says we as canadians need to adopt a self-reliant economic policy. I don't believe these two perspectives are mutually exclusive, except in light of trade. Neoliberalism wants more trade between countries, and nationalism wants less trade, because they want to be self-reliant. I'm no economist as you can see.
He then pointed out that Canada does a really good job of redistributing wealth, we are among the top countries in the G7, but in terms of economic growth we are really far behind. I don't really understand the pipeline argument, but it seems that we stunted our economic growth, which is tied oil and gas being our main resource. We can't sell oil and gas without pipelines, and we didn't build pipelines because we didn't want to harm the environment? I'm not sure why we couldn't think of a better solution. I don't really keep up with the news
Besides that it was super fun meeting people at the talk. There were lots of people that were city councillors or people that are interested in the growth of edmonton. I found that really cool, it makes sense because the topic at hand would be really interesting to the people that can actually make a difference. I was talking to this guy, and on his name tag it said CEO, and I was a little shy to talk to him. I don't think I had a problem starting a conversation with him, but I really didn't know what questions to ask. He was a great guy though, people kept coming upto him and saying hi, and I was just in their conversation. I thought it was pretty funny, there were like 3-4 people in our space that I STARTED, but everyone there had done something incredible one was a past councilmen and another guy was a CEO. I felt like the odd duck out, at one point I was like "should I just leave?". They seemed to be catching up and talking about economic reform. I thought it would be funny to just stay and absorb all the information so I did.
After that I talked to a finance group, and they had good advice for me. They were closer to me in age group, and we talked the different types of Finance, Sell-side and Buy-side, reading Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham is a good idea.
I had some specific questions about trading markets, in my youth I had a been a big believer in Technical Analysis. The Reminiscence of a stock operator - Jesse Livermore was a great book, it didn't go into much depth about trading but Jesse livermore is one of the greatest traders to live, he made 100$ million in 1929 with his own money, and this was back in the day when you had to call in your trade, like an actual landline. Back to the main point, He said Technical analysis was bullcrap basically and I should read Security Analysis which is Fundamental Analysis.
If you are confused about the terminology. In the stock market there's two ways in general to know if a stock is going up or down, either by looking at the charts, or by researching the company. Technical analysis is looking at the chart, seeing how much money is being traded (Volume), looking at the volatility and the general trend of the stock, I admit this might be a gross simplification. Fundamental Analysis is looking at what the company is doing, for example lets say an oil company just filed a patent for a high efficiency drill, you would buy the stock because now they will be able to make more money with that drill. Conversely now you can sell or short the other stocks in that sector because they will lose market share.
I met cool people, but I had two midterms at the end of this week, and a final next week. I feel like I should have studied today, but it is what it is.