Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Do not daytrade GIB

When I was a teenager living in Pembroke Ontario, life was much simpler. I was the head of the Young Visicalc Club, a non profit organization aimed at teaching the wonders of this new thing called a spreadsheet. Yes dear members, that was before Excel, that was before 1-2-3. Life did exist before the Internet. While some of my friends were launching Estes rockets and some others were learning to play the Stratocaster, I was at aw with the power of the TRS-80 Model III. I was consumed with the desire to use this new spreadsheet tool, and I could foresee a not so distant future where an entire corporation could be numbers-driven to profitable growth.

I did of course some stock market research and investing at a pace that was in tune with the era. Those were the golden Louis Rukeyser days. Men were real men and they wore 3-piece suits even on week-ends.

Nowadays I feel like I’m totally disconnected with the world, or maybe it is the world that is disconnected with the reality. CBNC announces a breaking news every 5 minutes, and it is usually a pointless press release or a 0.05% share price drop from a low-volume stock. I was a teenager back again, I’d feel obligated to post every thought that crosses my mind on Facebook.

This is why my friends CGI does not issue mindless press releases 5 times a day, and this is why - even if you're a shareholder - you should not daytrade our public stock. GIB is like slow cooking, it is a long term value that keeps on growing if you are patient. Truth is, I don’t check the stock price 25 times a day because daytrading GIB is verboten in the C-suite. What I check though every 15 minutes is our revenue stream, where it is coming from, why some business unit is having a bad week, how many traitors left for a competitor.

If you want to daytrade a stock, why don't you pick a company whose products loose value every day, like Dell. Makes sense, doesn't it?

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