Hey Guruvians, so you’ve probably noticed the last few days I haven’t been updating the site as much as usual – there’s a reason, and it’s a great one.
As of next week, Equity.Guru will be supplying a weekly ‘Investing in Vancouver’ column to local media startup and multi-time Best Blog in Vancouver winner, Vancouver is Awesome.
To say I’m happy with this arrangement is an understatement. Not only is their readership expansive (120,000 on Facebook, 100,000 on Twitter, and many many more online), and their content great, but their community is right in the demographic that I built this company to appeal to.
When Nintendo stock jumped by some $10 billion last week on the back of Pokemon Go’s success, that wasn’t grandpa and your local dentist driving the jump. That was young investors, some completely new to the game, jumping into the market with both feet and a bunch of dollars and making a company triple in value overnight.
I’ve long been convinced the North American investor space, and specifically the Canadian markets, rely too much on the ‘investor class’ – older people who might be retiring, might have a little spare cash lying about, and who (if we’re honest) might be an easier mark for a bad deal.
But younger adults – Millennials and Generation Xers, if you’re into labels – are the ones who actually have money now, and with housing being increasingly out of reach, they have few places to spend it beside cars, clothes, online poker, restaurants, and daily fantasy sports.
My arrangement with Vancouver is Awesome will try to show that crowd the value of not just investing money to make a profit, but also investing it to make a difference, to encourage businesses that are local, different, innovative, and on trend on a global scale rather than whatever commodity is momentarily high.
As part of that, I’ll be showcasing three companies a week that I think are worthy of some attention. I’ll discuss why I think they’re great, what makes them cooler than the competition (if anything), and what isn’t so great and should be considered before any buying decision is made.
To be clear, companies will pay for their space in the column, though they don’t receive an automatic passing grade in doing so. I have literally thousands of companies to consider for each piece I write, and while a commercial deal helps companies jump that queue and get in front of me right now, they still have to earn any kind words I might write based on their actions and merit. The reader must be protected from dogshit at all costs, and I’ll go all David Baines on anyone who promises one thing to those readers and delivers something less.
The first three companies I’ll be mentioning are all companies I have no arrangement with; Integra Gold (ICG.V), Ydreams Interactive (YD.V) and soon-to-be-listed Peekaboo Beans (NOR.V).
I think they’re great examples of local deals at a high, medium and small level that do things the right way, and I look forward to bringing you more.
This day marks the true launch of Equity.Guru. We’re doing what we said we would.
Gotta go. Have a photo shoot to prep for.
— Chris Parry