Blessed by the Potato

This is a monthly update from the Blueberry Portfolio. The events I mention below happened approx 8 months ago.

I started this update by providing a spreadsheet to the investors with the capital gains laid out. [Specifics redacted] It’s important to remember that realized gains in a non-registered account are taxable. Add the information from the spreadsheet to your schedule 3 for taxes (if you don’t ordinarily have gains to put in schedule 3, I can show you how, it’s really easy). In addition, you’ll be receiving some tax slips (T3s) in the mail around the beginning of March for the dividends that you enter into the appropriate boxes in your tax software.

Otherwise there hasn’t been much to say.

After spending some time without (m)any bright ideas, I put more cash into the ideas I did have. That broke an unwritten rule that I’d try to stay diversified with no more than 10-15% in any one stock (Chemtrade is close to 20% of the portfolio, and Canexus over 10% — and both are in disturbingly similar businesses). As soon as I do have a bright idea, these will be the first positions I look to trim to get cash to move around.

One bright idea was Poseidon: a high-risk, high-reward play on “fraccing” in the oil business, which also pays a lucrative dividend. Our timing there couldn’t have been much better: as of this message, we’re already up about 15%. I don’t know yet how much further I’ll let this one run before locking in the profits, but I imagine I’ll wait for at least double that return over the next year before getting out (unless something changes).

Since the last monthly update, the market has been more-or-less flat, while we’ve added a few percentage points. After the first day of trading in the new year, we’re up almost exactly 10%, vs the market at just about 1%.