Modern Investing Techniques — Episode 17

Modern Investing Techniques – Episode seventeen Air Date: Friday, April tenth, twenty twenty-six Target length: approximately two thousand three hundred fifty words (≈fifteen to sixteen minutes) Happy Friday, everyone, and welcome back to Modern Investing Techniques, Episode seventeen. I’m Patrick, broadcasting from a very damp Vancouver this morning. It’s the last trading day of the week, which means it’s time to look back at what the market actually delivered, separate the signal from the noise, and set ourselves up with a clear game plan heading into next Monday. Before we dive in, the usual but important disclaimer: everything we discuss on this show is strictly for educational and entertainment purposes. The Practice Investment of the Day is a simulated trade using zero real dollars. I am not a licensed financial advisor, and none of this constitutes financial advice, investment recommendations, or solicitations to buy or sell any security. Markets involve risk of loss. Always do your own due diligence and consult a qualified professional before putting any of your hard-earned capital to work. Past performance, including our simulated results, does not predict future outcomes. Let’s start with the macro picture that dominated the tape this week. Statistics Canada is scheduled to release its March employment report later this morning, and the stakes are higher than usual. Canada’s labour market stumbled noticeably in the first quarter of 2026, with job growth slowing, participation rates softening in certain provinces, and wage pressures that have been uneven across sectors. Investors are watching today’s numbers — especially average hourly wage growth, unemployment rate, and labour-force participation — because they feed directly into the Bank of Canada’s inflation models. A hotter-than-expected print could push back expectations for near-term rate cuts, while continued weakness would reinforce the easing bias and act as a tailwind for rate-sensitive parts of the T S X. At the same time, North American equity markets showed mixed conviction in early trade. The S&P 500 finished the session up 0.6 percent, closing at six thousand eight hundred twenty-five. The NASDAQ Composite outperformed slightly, gaining 0.8 percent to close at twenty-two thousand eight hundred twenty-two, helped by continued strength in technology and A I related names. Meanwhile, the T S X Composite lagged, closing at thirty-three thousand four hundred seventy-eight, down 0.4 percent on the day. Energy and materials felt the crosscurrents of geopolitics, while financials and consumer staples were relatively quiet ahead of the jobs print. Sentiment across the continent is being shaped by three overlapping forces: the fragile ceasefire talks between the United States and Iran, persistent supply constraints through the Strait of Hormuz, and the anticipation surrounding today’s Canadian employment data. Oil prices have climbed on any sign of diplomatic progress, yet they remain extremely vulnerable to any breakdown in negotiations. For Canadian investors, this matters on multiple levels. Higher and more volatile energy prices flow through to diesel surcharges, transportation costs, and ultimately consumer prices — which in turn influence both the Canadian dollar and the Bank of Canada’s reaction function. My take is straightforward: we are in one of those periods where macro cross-currents are loud enough that ignoring them is dangerous, but trying to trade every headline is equally foolish. The smarter move is to use these supply shocks as a lens for margin protection — which leads us neatly into today’s Strategy Spotlight. The framework we’re examining this morning is commodity input-cost pass-through as a margin-protection strategy. At its core, this approach looks for companies that have demonstrated the ability to quickly and credibly pass higher raw-material, logistics, or energy costs onto their customers through contractual escalators, automatic fuel surcharges, or transparent price increases. When executed well, it protects gross margins — and in some cases even expands them — during periods of inflationary supply shocks. We’re seeing this play out in real time. News this week that Maple Leaf Foods and several other major Canadian food processors are implementing fuel-cost surcharges of up to two dollars,200 per twenty thousand-kilogram tractor-trailer load is a textbook example. Elevated diesel prices stemming from the Hormuz constraints and broader energy volatility have pushed transportation costs materially higher. Rather than simply absorbing the hit to margins, these companies are explicitly passing it downstream. That’s exactly the behaviour we want to identify and systematically screen for. Here’s how Canadian investors can put this into practice on the T S X. Start by building a focused watch list within consumer staples, industrials, and certain specialty chemicals names. Use SEDAR+ to pull the most recent Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) sections and earnings-call transcripts. Search for explicit language around “fuel adjustment mechanisms,” “cost escalators,” “surcharge clauses,” or “pass-through pricing.” Once you’ve narrowed the list, compare gross-margin stability over the past two volatile diesel quarters against industry peers who lack those contractual protections. The names that have held gross margins within fifty to eighty basis points of their three-year average while peers compressed by 200 basis points or more are the ones worth deeper fundamental work. Historically, this strategy has performed best in the three-to-nine-month window following major energy-price spikes — precisely the window where input costs stay elevated but end-demand remains relatively inelastic. Of course, there are risks. Customers can push back hard enough that companies are forced to absorb some of the cost, or regulators can step in and cap allowable surcharges. That’s why we don’t treat this as a “set-it-and-forget-it” idea. It requires ongoing monitoring of both commodity benchmarks and company-specific pricing power. Practically, you can do a lot of this work with free or low-cost tools. SEDAR+ for filings, Wealthsimple or Questrade screeners with custom filters on gross-margin delta versus the Bloomberg diesel or WTI benchmarks, and even simple Excel tracking of quarterly margin trends. The beauty is that once you’ve built the screen, it becomes a repeatable process you can run every time energy markets spike — exactly the kind of repeatable edge that separates serious investors from those who simply react to headlines. Protecting margins during cost shocks is critical, but it’s only one part of the equation. You also have to protect yourself from getting picked off in the execution phase — especially in thin, headline-driven tapes. That brings us to a topic many of you have asked me about in the DMs and comment sections: adverse selection and order-book toxicity. Let me paint a picture that will feel painfully familiar to some of you. Imagine you see the U.S.–Iran ceasefire headlines hit the wires, oil jumps, and you decide to jump into an energy-services name with a market order for 500 shares. Your order fills at eighteen dollars and forty-two cents. Ninety seconds later the stock is trading at eighteen dollars and nineteen cents and you’re already down 1.25 percent with nothing fundamentally negative having happened. What actually occurred is adverse selection. High-frequency traders and institutional algorithms spotted your marketable order hitting a relatively thin post-news tape and leaned against it. The result: the effective spread you paid ballooned from the displayed four cents to a realized twenty-three cents. In the current environment of geopolitically driven oil volatility, we’ve seen average bid-ask spreads on mid-cap energy and mining names expand by roughly 180 percent during the first thirty minutes after major headlines compared with quiet sessions. The professional technique most retail investors still miss is to pause and read the order-book imbalance and relative-volume ratio on a proper Level-2 platform before you click buy. When relative volume is running below 0.6 times the 20-day average, the pros almost always switch from market orders to carefully placed limit orders or even a small VWAP algorithm. The biggest misconception is believing that the quoted price on your screen is the price you will actually receive. Instead, the disciplined question to ask yourself is: “Is my order likely to be toxic to the current order flow?” If the answer is yes, you either reduce size, improve your limit, wait for the first flush of headline volume to clear, or simply stand aside. Mastering this single habit can save you dozens of basis points per trade — which compounds dramatically over a year. Speaking of energy and gold volatility, let’s turn to this week’s Practice Investment of the Day. As always, this is a simulated trade for educational purposes only. No real money is at risk, and this is not a recommendation. Our weekly hold this week is SSR Mining (T S X/NASDAQ: SSRM). The thesis is a balance-sheet-recapitalization play driven by a reported one point five billion dollars cash infusion combined with documented recent insider buying. That combination materially strengthens the company’s liquidity position at a time when gold prices remain volatile and many mid-tier miners are struggling with balance-sheet pressure. Technically, the stock is trading near its 50-day moving average on the daily chart, and we saw volume come in at 1.4 times the 20-day average on the announcement day — a healthy sign of conviction. Nearest support on the daily timeframe sits at the 200-day moving average, while resistance is defined by the recent swing high. For risk management, we’re using an 8 percent stop-loss below our simulated entry to keep the maximum acceptable loss clearly defined. Our target for this weekly hold is a 4 to 9 percent gain by Friday’s close. Confidence level on this idea sits at medium. We have two reinforcing factors — the sizable cash infusion and clear insider buying — but we also have one material uncertainty: the fragile U.S.–Iran ceasefire and the potential for renewed geopolitical escalation that could pressure gold and mining equities broadly. This trade is a deliberate shift away from pure price-momentum or earnings-surprise frameworks toward balance-sheet event analysis. It teaches us to quantify liquidity improvements, cross-reference them with insider conviction signals, and size positions around verifiable capital-structure changes rather than noisy headline sentiment. It also serves as a practical reminder for Canadian investors: inside a T F S A, capital gains remain tax-free, but you must still respect superficial-loss rules on any re-entries within the 30-day window. These tax nuances matter when you’re actively managing volatility around mining names. Let’s quickly review how our previous weekly hold performed so we can extract the lessons. Yesterday we closed the book on SSNLF, an earnings-surprise momentum play focused on artificial-intelligence memory-chip demand. We simulated entry at sixty-five dollars and twenty-one cents on Monday’s open. The position closed the week at exactly the same price — sixty-five dollars and twenty-one cents — producing a flat 0.0 percent return, or zero dollars on a one dollars,000 simulated position. Our running total across six simulated trades now stands at up thirty-three dollars and eighty-five cents. Win rate sits at 33 percent (two wins, two losses, two break-evens). Average return per trade is up zero point five seven percent. The best single trade delivered up seven point eight eight percent; the worst was –7.49 percent. The current streak is even. A flat result on an earnings-momentum name is instructive. Even when the fundamental surprise materialized, the market had already priced in much of the good news, leaving little incremental edge. The clear takeaway is that we should tighten our entry filter going forward: we now require not only an earnings beat but also expanding forward guidance or visible upward revisions from analysts. Flat performance still adds to the cumulative total, but it reinforces that conviction must be matched by clear, post-event catalysts that the market has not yet fully digested. While we track our own simulated results, professional research continues to surface fresh ideas worth monitoring. Two tools in particular are worth highlighting. First, the BTIG equity research platform. Their recent initiations of coverage on companies tied to power demand and quantum computing platforms illustrate how professional research can spotlight emerging secular tailwinds before they become consensus. Individual investors can gain an edge by cross-referencing these initiations with their own screens for unusual options flow or meaningful changes in short interest within the first 48 hours after the note drops. You can access much of this through major discount brokers such as Interactive Brokers’ research hub or via Seeking Alpha’s analyst-coverage aggregator. The free tier is often sufficient for headline ratings and target prices. Canadian users should remember that while foreign research can absolutely inform T F S A holdings, you must still weigh currency risk and any potential withholding-tax implications on dividends or capital gains. The second tool many of you have asked about is Seeking Alpha’s pre-recorded shareholder-call transcripts and accompanying slide decks. These let retail investors dissect the exact commentary and visual materials that institutional participants receive live. The recent ITM Power call, for example, offered granular detail on electrolyzer deployment timelines and margin trajectories that can be mapped directly against hydrogen E T F holdings or individual names. My practical suggestion: upload the slides into a personal Notion or Obsidian workspace, tag the key metrics (deployment targets, gross-margin guidance, cash-burn rates), and set quarterly reminders to track actual delivery against those targets. The free tier of Seeking Alpha typically delivers full transcripts within 24 hours of the call — an incredibly powerful resource once you build the habit of systematic note-taking. A few other developments worth watching as we head into the weekend. Statistics Canada’s March employment figures will be released shortly. Stronger-than-expected wage or participation data could temper near-term rate-cut expectations and support the Canadian dollar, while continued softness would reinforce the Bank of Canada’s easing bias and act as a tailwind for rate-sensitive sectors on the T S X. JPMorgan’s warning that oil could test wartime highs if full Strait of Hormuz shipping recovery is delayed until July keeps upward pressure on diesel prices and widens the crack spread versus gasoline. That creates interesting relative-value opportunities between Canadian energy producers and refiners that are positioned to benefit from sustained crack spreads. On the healthcare side, Alvotech’s biosimilar pipeline continues to show strengthening revenue visibility and margin trends — potentially signalling a technical bottom. Canadian investors may want to keep this on their R R S P watch list to minimize withholding-tax leakage on any future dividends or capital-gains events. Finally, Treasury investors are actively positioning to protect against further losses as the next consumer-price report approaches, even as the fragile U.S.–Iran truce removes one inflation tail risk. This environment reinforces the case for laddered Canadian government bond E T F's held inside TFSAs — a way to manage duration risk without accidentally triggering superficial-loss rules on the fixed-income side. Before we wrap up, keep a close eye on how today’s StatCan labour numbers influence rate-sensitive sectors heading into next week. Will the Bank of Canada be forced to hit the brakes on easing? Or will softness in jobs data open the door for more accommodation? Those answers will set the tone for next Monday’s open. That wraps up Episode seventeen of Modern Investing Techniques. Remember — every trade, whether it wins, loses, or goes nowhere, is a learning opportunity if you’re willing to extract the lesson. If you found value today, please subscribe, leave a review, and share the episode with a friend who wants to invest smarter using modern tools and disciplined frameworks. I’ll be back with you on Monday morning. Until then, trade carefully, think probabilistically, and I’ll see you next week. This podcast is curated by Patrick but generated using AI voice synthesis of my voice using ElevenLabs. The primary reason to do this is I unfortunately don't have the time to be consistent with generating all the content and wanted to focus on creating consistent and regular episodes for all the themes that I enjoy and I hope others do as well.