Buzz on the Bullboards: Investors Reveal Their Investing Goals

As regular readers of “Buzz” know, Stockhouse has recently been expanding this feature beyond only alerting the Stockhouse Community to Bullboard activity on the site. We’ve also started monitoring the “pulse” of Stockhouse investors with our Investor Pulse Polls.

We’re asking you about your attitudes on many investment themes, in an effort to keep our Community better informed concerning current market sentiment. With no edition of Buzz last week (due to our coverage of the 2018 International Mining Investment Conference), Stockhouse investors have had two weeks to respond to our latest poll.

We asked you: what is your primary investment goal? This is what you told us:

The bottom-line here is that approximately 1/3rd of Stockhouse’s small-cap investors see themselves as home-run hitters – swinging for the fences with their investing strategy. After “getting rich”, investor priorities were fairly balanced, including a substantial minority who are motivated by all of the investment goals listed in the poll.

How do investors profit from such information? With a significant percentage of Stockhouse investors looking for multi-bagger returns on their investing, we can consider the psychology of such investors.

Multi-bagger returns rarely materialize overnight. This means that investors looking for home-runs will generally be buy-and-hold investors rather than day-traders or swing-traders. Equally, investors seeking jumbo returns on their investing will be more likely to gravitate to the “hot” sectors that currently generate the largest average returns.

With respect to the next largest demographic (“preparing for retirement”), this also implies more of a buy-and-hold mentality. Investors planning for their retirement are generally engaging in such planning from a much more long-term perspective.

A significant percentage of Stockhouse investors (roughly 1 in 7) also identify “hedging against inflation” as a primary investment goal. With precious metals having earned the reputation for being the best hedge against inflation, this implies continued support for gold and silver (mining) stocks – even with precious metals prices being stuck in a trough for the past several years.

With that general look at the Stockhouse investor, what sectors and companies have been recently commanding the most attention? To no great surprise, cannabis companies were the biggest draw from the May 17 – 23 week currently surveyed. However, in individual terms, interest in Canopy Growth Corp (TSX: WEED, NYSE: CGC, Forum) has suddenly perked up.

Readers will recall that in the last edition of “Buzz”, we reported that WEED had dropped completely out of the Top-6 cannabis leaderboard – something rarely seen over the past year. With nearly 74,000 page views last week, WEED is back on top. One of the topics fueling interest will undoubtedly be Canopy Growth’s new NYSE listing (ticker symbol “CGC”).

Behind Canopy Growth on the cannabis leaderboard are the “usual suspects” among Canadian cannabis companies: Aurora, Aphria, Namaste, Isodiol, and Cannabis Wheaton.

Also generating some strong numbers over the past week are healthcare stocks. Leading the way are a couple of names with strong Stockhouse followings: ProMetic Life Sciences Inc. (TSX: PLI, OTCQB: PFSCF, Forum) and Theralase Technologies Inc. (TSX: V.TLT, OTCQB: TLTFF, Forum).

Traditionally, Stockhouse investors have been resource investors. Part of this can be ascribed to the fact that Canada’s economy has always had a strong resource focus. However, as our Investor Pulse survey reveals, Stockhouse investors also gravitate toward resource sectors because of the cyclical nature of most resource sectors.

Valuations can plunge when the tide goes out on a particular resource market. However, when that sector shifts back to bull market conditions, multi-bagger opportunities abound. Today, many (most?) resource sectors are soft, with Bullboard participation revealing this weak sentiment.