The Canadian Investor - A basket of stocks for the creator economy

Episode Date: March 22, 2021

In this week’s episode, we start by talking about some recent news and pump and dump scams on the TSX Venture exchange. Simon then makes the case for putting money into a TFSA over an RRSP. We finish the episode with a basket of stocks to bet on for the growing creator/solopreneurs economy. Tickers of stocks discussed: RCI-B.TO,SJR-B.TO, FVRR, UPWK, ETSY, TWTR Want to send us a question? Check out our Anchor.fm link in the description below and leave us a voice message! Getstockmarket.com Candian Investor Pod Twitter: @cdn_investing Simon’s twitter: @Fiat_Iceberg Braden’s twitter: @BradoCapital --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-canadian-investor/messageSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome back into the show. This is the Canadian Investor Podcast, made possible by our friends and show sponsor, EQ Bank, which helps Canadians make bank with high interest and no fees on everyday banking. We also love their savings and investment products like GICs, which offer some of the best rates on the market. I personally, and I know Simone as well, is using the GICs, which offer some of the best rates on the market. I personally, and I know Simone as well, is using the GICs on a regular basis to set money aside for personal income taxes in April of every year. Their GICs are perfect because the interest rate is guaranteed, and I know I won't be able to touch that money until I need it for tax time. Whether you're looking to set some money aside for a rainy day or a big purchase is

coming through the pipeline or simply want to lower the risk of your overall investment portfolio, EQ Bank's GICs are a great option. The best thing about EQ Bank is that it is so easy to use. You can open an account and buy a GIC online in minutes. Take advantage of some of the best rates on the market today at eqbank.ca forward slash GIC. Again, eqbank.ca forward slash GIC. Live from the great white north, this is the Canadian Investor, where you take control of your own portfolio and gain the confidence you need to succeed in the markets. Hosted by Brayden Dennis and Simon Belanger. The Canadian Investor Pod. Today is March 18th. Yesterday was St. Patrick's Day, so happy St. Patrick's Day.

Hope you had a nice green beer. Simon, did you have a green beer? Tell me you had at least one. beer um simone did you have a green beer tell me you have at least one i did not doctor's order because i'm on prescriptions for uh for anti-inflammatory for my niece i can't drink with it fair enough fair enough i forgot about that i'm assuming you did uh okay well i had i had a couple so i i uh i had enough for you as well so there you go uh let's talk about absolute canadian blockbuster of a deal shawn rogers uh tell me about this one yeah so um i mean obviously i'm sure most people saw it but rogers made an offer to buy sha communications um i don't have the full details in front of me i do

know that uh sha is still trading at a discount compared to the offer so what that means typically is that there is some uncertainty whether the deal will be going through or not so i keep an eye on that it's most likely uh investor knowing that there is going to be a lot of regulatory scrutiny on this acquisition um I have no idea if it'll go through or not. I know it's been these kind of acquisitions by telecos have been shut down before. So I think it's probably 50-50 personally that it goes through or not. But what do you think about that one, Brayden? I mean, I think it should have very prudent questions being asked about this acquisition, right? I mean, this has been a hot topic.

It was a hot topic when we elected, you know, during the last federal election of the telcos kind of gouging customers. And, you know, this has been a problem in Canada for a long time. We have the highest phone bills on the freaking planet. And these consolidation-type acquisitions, I don't know if they're good, to be honest. I'm not sure about that. So with the oligopoly that exists already, when one of them is swallowing up another one,

I think that the feds should be looking at it quite critically and but that's just my opinion i have no interest in owning either of these names separately and probably not together either so um that's my take yeah yeah and well it'll be interesting just to keep an eye on i have a feeling that it if it does go through uh does go through um there there will be a lot of strings attached by the CRTC and obviously the federal government. So it'll be interesting, but definitely it was big news this week when it came out. Yeah, it sure was. It's such a big deal. All right, let's switch gears because now that this, I see you laughing.

now that this i see you laughing uh now that this pod has become i don't stay humble it's it's this podcast has become quite big you know we're charting number one on apple podcasts for uh canadian investing or in the business category and we have been getting approached by all kinds of pump and dump stock promotions that are very common and thrive on the TSX venture. I have heard, we have not been offered this much, but I have heard people getting offered up to $40,000 like big YouTubers for a stock promotion video. We would would first of all we would never do that to you guys ever everything that we talk about is our opinions or borrowed ideas for the most part and we just wanted to let you guys know that right now more than ever the TSX venture particular, the Canadian Venture Exchange, has so many pump and dump insider stock promotions going on right now.

And this is just us letting you know, be careful. When someone whispers to you telling you to buy some new hot mining stock that just IPO'd on the venture, these companies will actually pay, like on Facebook ads, to get them in front of investors. So if you're a mining business, why would you be pumping to retail to buy their stock?

It has nothing to do with the fundamentals of the business. And that capital should be used to do their mining exploration and run the actual business. So if something smells funny, it probably is. Like where there's smoke, there's fire with these types of things. And it's happening a lot right now. There's lots of just general scams going on right now. Like since people have been working from home and looking for investing ideas. So this is just our cautionary. This is happening and just be careful out there.

Yeah, exactly. Well, first of all, I wanted to say, well, thank you for everyone to listening to us. I think it's grown way beyond our wildest dreams in terms of listenership, engagement, and we love getting questions from people and the feedback that we get. And obviously, we can't answer all the questions and we'll do a mailbag episode soon, but I wanted to just a shout out to all our listeners. But to go on what Braden said, yeah, it's really, there's been already a few that reached out to us and tried to get us to like, you know, as partners to promote their stocks, and I'm doing air quotes here. And that's something like Brayden said, we would never be interested in this kind of, yeah, trying to get people's money and basically ruin people. That's the way I see it. I have no interest in it's not

the goal of this podcast. Like he said, we're really here to talk about some of the things we learned, help everyone out, becoming, you know, financially independent and taking care of their own financial wellness. So things like pump and dump like that, making a quick buck, but on the back of investors, I have really no patience for that. And, you know, if you're listening to this podcast and you're one of those companies, then, you know, just go listen to another podcast. We don't want you on here. So that's really kind of I get kind of boiled up and I have no patience for that kind of stuff. People trying to take advantage of investors. That's not what we're here for. investors that's that's not what we're here for on a different note we will be looking in the next few months for for advertisers for the the podcast it will be very clear that they are ads we will be very selective in the type of advertisement we do get and there won't be that many I don't know if we're gonna

have one or two per episode but it's something that we will be exploring but you can rest assure it will be very clear it's an ad and if we don't think it's it should be on our podcast then we won't put it on our podcast yeah there won't be any face drive pump and dumps on the canadian investor i was just curious as we're talking down from our last episode, FaceDrive is down 55%. Oh, yeah. I love that. It was a $5 billion in market cap company doing $700,000 in revenue. Like, that's not a lot. That's like a small one-bedroom apartment of revenue. Like, that shouldn't be a thing.

like that should never it shouldn't be a thing um anyways okay i'm glad we got that off off our chest because it's it's rampant right now oh yeah it's been bugging us you guys can tell like it's something that uh like we get we get almost like pissed like angry when we see that kind of stuff happening because we know especially you know we know our listeners for the most part are like you know they're starting to learn and they're learning more and more and they you guys can probably sniff those scams out but there's a lot of unsuspected people out there and i just feel bad that there's companies like that are people trying to take advantage of them that way yeah that's that's just dirty man all right i'm this is an interesting topic okay so let me lay out the land for this episode we're going to get into what's called the creator economy after we talk about rsp and tfsa for a

second but the creator economy has me fired up and we're going to talk about that uh it's really a hot topic right now nfts have gone absolutely bonanza. If you don't know what that is, we'll give you a very high level of it here. But, Simon, give me the lowdown on RRSPs and TFSAs. Because this is a question, you know, that comes up all the time. It's going to come up again and again because it's important. And what I think is the most important is that RRSPs might not be the best option for some people. For some people, it's the best option. For some people, they default into putting their money there.

And it might not always be the best place. So give us the lowdown. Yeah, exactly. So I've been thinking about that a lot in the past couple of weeks. I've just been reading on and researching a bit more. And yeah, we're kind of programmed. I don't know what it is with financial institutions, but when you grow up, you're younger, it's always like you hear your parents talk about RSPs and it seems to be the only thing that people talk about. But when you start digging more into it, for a lot of people, I think it's just not a really good option. So a lot of the first thing to realize is there are required minimum distribution when you hit 71, because you have to convert that to a RIFS or a retirement income fund. So what that does, it basically takes away some of the control that you have on the

money. So just to give you an idea, at age 71, the minimum distribution, so you have to cash out 5.28% of your RRSP through the RRIF. At age 80, it's 6.82%. Age 90, 11.92%, and 95 and older, you have to cash out 20%. So right there, I think it's a big downfall of the RSP is those required distributions. And keep in mind, say you have a million dollar balance. At age 71, that 5.28% is $53,000. I rounded the numbers, so keep that in mind. If you have $2 million balance, it's $106,000. So it might sound like a lot, but if you start early with an RRSP, these are not balances that are out of the ordinary. So that can actually happen quite a bit. So that money that you're required to take out, because once you hit 71, you no longer have the option to take money out as you wish before that age. So you're forced to take it out. It adds to your taxable income and that's on top of CPP or other pension income or even other incomes that you might have.

So you do not control future tax rate. And that's really important. People make these assumptions about, you know, I'll be taxed less in 20, 30 years down the line. Well, the reality is elected officials tend to be very short term. You know, they want to get reelected. So what seems to be like a good plan right now based on the current tax rate and you're trying to project, it may not be true 20, 30, you know, 10, 20, 30 years from now, because the tax rate may very well change and your old assumption that you may pay less taxes might be out of the window. And keep that in mind with the amount of money that

the government is currently spending. I would say there's probably a good chance that taxes do increase in the upcoming years because something's going to have to give. And one of the big things and that really like, it was a head scratcher, I saw an article that was written by a CFP who had an MBA and he gave these like four or five scenarios about RSPs. And you know, there was some good information on there. But what really struck me is there was no mention once of old age security at all and people don't realize that if you make too much money when you're retired after when you hit 65 there's actually clawbacks for old age security so the minimum to get a clawback is close to 80,000 79 845 in 2021 and then maximum is 129. So that means once you hit that

79,000 number, it starts clawing back. And then once you're past 129, you actually get no more OAS. So it's a full claw back, you're no longer eligible. So it's definitely something to keep in mind. And there are tax consequences if you pass away. And I don't want to get too much into taxes because it can get pretty complicated. But one of the things that can happen is if you have a big balance left, it's basically when you pass away, it's actually considered a cash out. So you cash out all of your RRSPs and it's added to your income. cash out so you cash out all of your rsps and it's added to your income so and i know we had like a tax lawyer not too long ago that did mention that uh there are there a bit of uh they're quite

a pain if you'd like uh when someone passes away with a big balance for rsps um do you remember that that one brayden yeah and one and 50 percent uh in an rsp goes to the feds, right? Yeah, exactly. If you pass away. Yeah. That sucks, right? Yeah, well, I mean, if you pass away, yeah, I think it's just basically added to your taxable income. So obviously, if you have a huge balance, it's going to be taxed at a high rate.

And there's different circumstances. You can transfer it to a spouse and things like that, but then that creates another problem for your spouse because then they'll have a huge balance and it goes back to the minimum distributions and there is eligible dependence and anyways I'm not going to go too much into that but all you need to know is there are some tax consequences if you pass away with a large balance and the last thing for RSPs is even if you're young you're in your your 20s, 30s, 40s, let's say you're in your 30s and you have a child and you go on maternity or parental leave and your

income is actually significantly lower for that year and you have a decent balance in your RSP, it might be a good opportunity for you to look at withdrawing some money. You don't have to wait till you're retired to withdraw from your RSP. It will be added to your taxable income but if you're about the penalties though there's no there's no penalties to rsps so the basically just adds to your income there's a withholding tax from the financial institution so they'll basically take an amount off as a withholding tax but that's usually not enough to cover all the taxes. So the real penalty is it adds to your taxable income but there's no age requirement for a regular RRSP to withdraw it. In the States they have penalties for that but in Canada it's

really adding to your taxable income so it really could be of benefit to you if you have a year where your income is significantly lower and I'm taking maternity leaves for women or parental leaves. That might be a good opportunity to kind of cash out those RSPs and put them in a TFSA, for example, if you have room. As do-it-yourself investors, we want to keep our fees low. That's why Simone and I have been using Questrade as our online broker for so many years now. Questrade is Canada's number one rated online broker by MoneySense, and with them, you can buy all North American ETFs, not just a few select ones, all commission-free, so that you can choose the ETFs that you want.

And they charge no annual RRSP or TFSA account fees. They have an award-winning customer service team with real people that are ready to help if you have questions along the way. As a customer myself, I've been impressed with Questrade's customer service. Whenever I call or email, every support rep is very knowledgeable and they get exactly what I need done quickly. Switch for free today and keep more of your money. Visit questrade.com for details. That is questrade.com. Okay, so talk to me about the TFSA now because this account obviously has contribution limits, but it's pretty awesome in many ways. Yeah, exactly. Because I think

personally, I think you should max out your TFSC contributions before contributing your RSP. I think personally, that should be almost a rule of thumb for almost everyone. There might be some exceptions and obviously everyone's financial situation is different. So as we say, do your due diligence. But you know, there's there's value in certainty. Yes, you may be at a decently high tax bracket, but you know what your taxes are, you're paying them now, and then you're done with them going forward. So that has an extreme amount of value. And it's a very flexible account. There's less tax consequences when you pass away, depending on what type of beneficiaries or successor holders are. And those are two terms that you might see if you do a bit more research

on that. One thing that you may ask me is, okay, well, what if legislation changes and politicians don't allow TFSAs anymore? I mean, that's really unlikely because you have to remember politicians tend to be very, you know, short term focus. So for them, it's actually a good thing that you're putting money in your TFSA because you're getting taxed right now. And that's going towards the money that the government receives, whereas an RSP is actually a tax deferral. So they're actually giving you back money because you're getting the tax credit. So it doesn't really make much sense for politicians to do away with the TFSA because they're usually very short term focus. And even if they did, my my opinion would be that, you know, have a feeling they probably would grandfather people in the TFSA and then do the changes going forward. But that's...

You'd hope. Yeah, you'd hope. You would hope. Yeah, you'd hope. You never know. But I mean, at the same time, when you make investment decisions and everything, that's the name of the game, right?

There's always going to be some variables that you can make some assumptions, but you never know for sure. You don't know what age you're going to pass away at. You don't know what the future tax rates are. You don't know what your future returns will be. You can make assumptions, but you never know. That's well said. Yeah, that's kind of the lowdown. It's really personal. It's really personal, right? It's case by case. Sometimes it makes

sense for you to do one thing and sometimes the other, depending on your situation. Yeah, exactly. And one last thing I was going to mention, you know, I invite everyone just to kind of crunch the numbers as well, right? So take an amount and compare it if you invested to an RRSP with a certain percentage annual growth rate let's say seven or eight percent and compare another amount that's already been taxed at your current tax rate so let's say 30 or 40 percent tax and what that would give you after 30 years for example and then what taxes you would have to pay at

that point and then you kind of figure out whether it makes sense or you are not but don't forget about that OAS component. If you're not a super wealthy person at retirement, OAS may be pretty important when you retire. Yeah. The only thing I'd add is the RSP matching program is usually a no-brainer. Usually. program is usually usually a no-brainer usually with the employer yeah yeah oh yeah that's obviously I'm not I'm not thinking about any like matchings or anything like that I'm just saying yeah saying like straight up obviously if there's a matching then that's a no-brainer so but if you're matching

sire pretty solid but if you're considering of your own money without any match you know should you put $100 in an RRSP or $100 in a TFSA, or let's say 60 in a TFSA and 100 in RRSP because you're getting taxed, obviously. Do the calculation. You might be surprised that at the end of the line, you know, when you factor in OAS and all the things I talked about and the tax complications if you pass away and how more flexible the TFSA is it you know in my opinion for the most part TFSA makes a lot of sense yeah and if your TFSA let's let's leave it here if the TFSA is maxed you have like a like a two million bucks in your RRSP just go invest in a non-registered yeah that's That's what, you know, pay the cap gains tax.

And if you're long-term investors and you don't sell very often, that's very tax efficient in a non-registered. So something to consider and more reason to be a buy and hold long-term investor right there. Just tax reasons on those non-registered loans. All right, Simon, let's switch gears. i'm pumped yeah i'm pumped for this part uh i'm pumped for it for many reasons like with my own business and then just what's happening right now and all these trends kind of mashing together to call what some people are calling the creator economy. I love the name of that too, the creator economy. So what that is, is it's one of the most interesting trends right now because

of like the rise of the solopreneur. When I say solopreneur, I just mean like the one person company, maybe two people, small companies. And you can build a following by providing useful content on the internet. You can do things like monetize it on a Shopify store with merch. You can have Stripe manage your entire finance department with one line of code. You can make a membership site with Squarespace

and monetize that. You can use MailChimp or ConvertKit to manage all of your email automation and email marketing. You can manage your cloud email spreadsheets with G Suite. You can have Zapier automate your entire workflow. You can outsource editors and content creation to freelancers all over the world, like on Fiverr or Upwork. to freelancers all over the world, like on Fiverr or Upwork. You can market yourself on Twitter. You can market yourself on Instagram.

You can plug the link to all of your platforms using Linktree. You can make short videos on TikTok. You can document them on YouTube. You can go live streams with your fans on Twitch. You can have your following support you on Patreon, or dare I even say OnlyFans. You can listen to your podcast on Spotify. People can join you for a chill evening talking on Clubhouse. And you can subscribe to a paywall writing long form on Substack. And then you can advertise the whole flywheel on Facebook ads. These are the common tools that are enabling the creator economy. If you are a craft DIY maker,

you can sell your stuff on Etsy. These are the types of businesses that we're talking about that are powering the creator economy. So the capability for content creators of both physical and digital products right now to grow their following with these powerful tools, which here's an important part, they don't require a high level of technical expertise. Like you do not have to be fluent in JavaScript to build out these powerful tools and link them together with their APIs. So that's important. It also aligns well with the work from anywhere trend that was already happening, believe it or not, pre COVID, because it's been a full year around the sun now with COVID. But that's been accelerated now. But that was already kind of happening. You know, the digital accelerated now, but that was already kind of happening. You know, the digital solopreneur person, you know, that was already happening. So we're going to dive into four specific

scenarios. I'm going to end it with a bunch of private companies that I think not only could be interesting IPOs, but they're not public. And we talk a lot about public companies, obviously, because it's accessible for everyone listening. But there are a lot of really interesting technology companies that are currently private that power the creator economy and are doing serious business for very small lean companies. So I'm going to highlight some of them. And there's tons that could qualify for this basket. And this basket of businesses that power the creator economy, fire me up because they're just so there's so many secular trends that go with them. And they're reporting absolutely bonkers numbers like the public ones that Simon is going to touch on. that Simon is going to touch on.

But before we do that, a lot of this craze in the creator economy is getting hyped up right now. It's because of NFTs, non-fungible tokens, which I actually don't even talk to you offline about NFTs, really. I'm curious to know what you know, because I flip-flop. I'll read about NFTs, and I think this is so cool. It's a great way for digital artists to monetize their work. And some of it's so cool. Some of it is so, so cool.

And then another time, I'm like, hi, I just screenshotted it. Now I own the art. I can't really grasp the value proposition on some of it. But I'm interested to hear your take. I'm assuming you saw that that guy sold his art for $69 million. Yeah, yeah, I saw that. On an NFT. I mean, of course, like what makes the headlines are the ones that sell like crazy.

I'm still learning on NFTs. So this will just be kind of an overview. So like you said, they're non-fungible tokens. So just to give of an overview so like you said uh they're not fungible tokens so just to give people an idea like what the hell does that mean um so let's compare it to bitcoin for example so if brayden has one bitcoin i have one bitcoin we swap it to each other that's fungible because it doesn't matter it has the same value one bitcoin is the same as another non-fungible token is different is you when you have that token or that proprietary piece of art or whatever it is then i cannot go to braden and

try to swap it with them they're basically unique and that's where a lot of the power of nfts and a lot of the technology and i think a lot of the potential from nfts comes into place because you can just start dreaming a little bit on what they could potentially become in the future right it could be that you have a personal nft when you're born that tracks your medical history and throughout your years and it's specific to you and you cannot swap it. I know some people have talked about NFTs for physical assets. I think that might have some limitation, but it's a really interesting technology. I know we'll be in the next few months, we'll be looking at getting maybe a guest or two to go a bit in more depth about that. But it's definitely a really,

really interesting technology. But there's a lot of hype around it. There's a lot of like, let's just say poo poo around it as well right now. So be careful to not get caught up too much into that hype right now. Yeah, and that's typical, right? When a new hype technology or sector comes out, there might be a lot of merit to it,

but it'll get so inflated right off the get-go. Like all those companies that had ridiculously silly valuations during the tech bubble, you know, investors were onto something with that these companies are going to be massive like these internet companies they have margins that are just so much better they have scalability that are just so much better than traditional you know brick and mortar type businesses but they the valuations just went absolutely bonkers i mean like 2000 there and then they came back to life now many of those names are the companies that went to the moon uh are over a trillion dollars in market cap today and could be relatively undervalued, some of these names. So with all of these interesting hypes that come out, there could be merit to it, but it's just really hard to dissect what's valuable and what's not when it's happening.

So that's my very uneducated take on NFT so far. So that's my very uneducated take on NFTs so far. I'm trying to learn more, but I got to stick with what I know sometimes, and I just don't know if I'm there yet. Yeah, exactly. And I apologize if my dog's barking a little bit in the background. You were muted. You were good. Yeah, I know. I was muted. I was good. But why don't you start with your first company, and I'll go after.

I hear him growling. Okay, I'll go after. I hear him growling. Okay, I'll go first. So I'm going to kick it off with Twitter. And Twitter is an interesting business right now. It's not a new business. Everyone knows what Twitter is. But something's happened in the last six months to a year with twitter um i saw i saw funny tweet on twitter i know that's ironic that was basically saying like twitter decided to

take all their draft products and drop them all like in q1 this year uh and it kind of feels like that you know they have like twitter spaces which is kind of like a clubhouse copy um but right on twitter which is important because that's where people are already following them that's where their audience lives so that's interesting um they bought review which is a subscription a newsletter platform that challenges Substack because Substack's gotten so much Substack's gotten huge lately like writers freelance writers who want to charge for their work Substack is where they do it and get it right into your email inbox and review is a platform to to take that on and where do writers like this advertise themselves? On Twitter. And in terms of

news and in society, Twitter is so important. And at 50 billion in market cap right now, there's a lot of upside because Twitter, the consensus narrative for so long, is like, what are they doing? Why is it so under monetized? Like, why aren't they making any money? This platform is huge. Like what's going on? And Jack Dorsey, the CEO, also the CEO of Square. It's like, this guy doesn't care about Twitter. You know, it's, it's an important platform, but you know, making money seems to not be really the target because it's so under-monetized. The ad platform sucks. But it's like they're getting their swag back, you know? And it's interesting to see that, and the stock price kind of reflects that lately.

So in Q4, they reported monthly active users up 27% year over year and revenue up 28%. So I mean, that correlation is very strong. That kind of makes sense. Stocks up 67% in the last six months as they kind of get their swag back. And it's an extremely important business at only 50 billion in market cap. And there's so much upside. And the reason that it's important to the creator economy is it is one of those platforms. It's a social media platform that hosts who you are. And I think more than Instagram. definition of who they are online and what they represent and what their thoughts are and what the product or business that they monetize. And it's a central anchor point for a lot of these creators to advertise and put their content out to the world. So it's very important for the creator economy. And it's just so under monetized

now. So now, Twitter's realizing we are a central part of the creator economy. How can we start monetizing that they're introducing subscriptions, they're introducing the the paid newsletter with the acquisition of review, they have Twitter spaces, which is the clubhouse competitor. And all of these now are allowing creators to start monetizing their Twitter following. And it's going to become an important anchor in the creator economy. It already is. I just want to caution, they have a lot to prove on their ads platform. As a Twitter user, the ads platform is dog shit.

There's just no way around it. It's not good. I get very little targeted ads, and maybe that's kind of like why I like it as well, because they don't know what I ate for breakfast, like the other ad platforms seem to know. So I'm so-so on that, but it's definitely under-mon under monetized and why would you advertise

there right now i don't know so if they can figure that out 50 billion in market cap they have a lot to prove but there's a lot of upside here and i think twitter has their swag back and um i like i like the business here i really do. I would own it here. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's definitely a lot of proving to be done for Twitter, but it'll be interesting what happens. It feels sometimes like Jack Dorsey is more focused on Square, which I'm fine with because I'm a Square shareholder, and he's done quite well for that.

Oh, for sure. Square has become so much bigger than Twitter. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Of course. Yeah. So I'll go with my first one. Sorry again for the little stretch with my dog barking, but, you know, I'm back in business. He's calmed down a little bit.

There you go. He was just protecting me. It's all good. Yeah. Seems dangerous over there in Ottawa. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, my first one for the creator economy, I've talked about this one before. I own it as well so it's etsy um so etsy had had a phenomenal year it's not only for masks it's uh just over all the craft goods that uh their merchants sell uh people on their platform um it's not their

merchants but people that do sell on their platform um i think it's a great platform because of that because it lets you buy craft goods from you can even select if you want to buy them from people more around you help the local economy more or you can go a bit outside of that as well whether you want to go in north america or i've never actually bought global but i'm assuming it works global as well. And they really have had a phenomenal year. And I personally don't think, you know, it's going to be scaling back or anything. The growth might not be that big going forward, obviously. But I wouldn't be surprised that you see some really good growth for Etsy going forward. So just to give you a bit of an idea of what it looks like from a

financial perspective. First of all, they have a net cash balance. Their revenue more than doubled year over year last year in big part because of the pandemic. They had over $670 million in free cash flow. So amazing, amazing free cash flow. 73% free cash flow 73% gross margin so that's always something that we look at as you guys know the one word of caution I would say it is very expensive I know Brayden and I have talked about that before it's expensive for good reason because it's a great business but to give you a bit of an idea, so it trades at about 15, 16 times sales right now and has a price to free cash flow around 40. But again, if you're buying this like us for the long term, the way we invest, I'm going to caveat, I don't think Braden owns Etsy, but if

you're buying this for- I should. I should say there you go i should own it it's a great business yeah it's a really great business and uh yeah it's i don't think you can go wrong to starting a position and just holding it for a very long time yeah these platform companies are very interesting to me the they're obviously powering the creator economy in a major way not only is etsy you know where people where creative people monetize their creative goods but these platform businesses are awesome and etsy's brand awareness uh has become really really impressive and i i thought it was i thought etsy was for like just buying i don't want to say masks because that was so popular during the pandemic, but like really artsy crafty goods that I would never care about. And a Stratosphere customer who has an Etsy shop, he wanted to, as a gift, buy me a cutting board.

Sorry, make me a cutting board. And he said, pick out which slab you want from my Etsy shop. So he kind of introduced me to Etsy. And he makes badass cutting boards. Oh, I wish I could plug his name right now. I'm going to, when you go into the next one, I'm going to get his name because he gets you to check out his cutting boards.

He engraved Stratosphere on the bottom of it. It's beautiful. And that's cool, man. It's a great gift. It's a perfect gift. And you get to support local people, which is really appealing for a lot of people. Exactly. I like it, man.

It's a great business. And the way that, in case people weren't aware, so the way Etsy makes money, so they make money on, so there's a listing fee. So when a seller posts an item for sale, they'll make a small a little bit of money on that and then they make a small Commission I think it's like two three percent around there when the product sells so that's how it see makes the money and obviously they're very seller focused because they understand that you know the sellers made their platform and the big thing about them too is they actually amazon tried to get in that market and they ended up basically

kind of giving up on that so um i would go to say that they're amazon resistant or amazon proof yeah that's that's important with these platform businesses uh so i just want to plug that jack taylor uh his etsy shop is called taylor chopping boards and i appreciate the gift jack but this is something that you can get on etsy and it's cool i like it and uh this is a this is a great business so it's perfect for the creator economy do you want to go with your next one as well because mine's kind of a big cluster of private businesses and i might uh yeah yeah i might go on yeah let's do it so um so the two well the i'll talk about one specifically but i'll mention another one that's in the same space so the name is fiber um so the uh it's f-i-v-e-r-r in case you were wondering and as always i will add the tickers in the show description.

So what is Fiverr? So Fiverr is a platform for basically freelancers to go and offer their services to businesses. I know we used it for our intro, for example, for the Canadian Investor Podcast. So you can find a lot of different things. You can find people, for example, that do taxes. So it's a great platform for just like Brayden said, just the creator economy, but also the solo entrepreneurs as well. And people basically being their own business. The pandemic was a big boost for them as well. So the revenue almost doubled last year. They had $13 million in free cash flow last year, 82% gross margin. So that's

really exceptional. They're not cheap either. Fiverr trades at 44 times sales right now. It's really big, like I mentioned, for the gig economy. And the way that they get their revenues is they have transaction-based fees as a business model. But it's really, there's a huge total TAM, so total addressable market for these gig economy, or like we just mentioned, like creator economy. And I think they're just scratching the surface when it comes to that. mentioned like creator economy and i think they're just scratching the surface when it comes to that i don't know like i'm not who knows what the actual tam is for uh for fiverr and they're one of their main competitors which is upwork uh upwork's also listed uh as well it's a public

listed company so i think personally fiverr may look a bit better in terms of how they've been building their business but if you want a piece of that gig economy type of business, you probably can't go too wrong if you just hold both of them. Or, you know, hold the basket of all the companies that we're talking about in terms of the creator economy. If you really want to get some skin in the game, but may want to diversify a bit more and you'll like all of the business that we're talking about. As do-it-yourself investors, we want to keep our fees low. That's why Simone and I have been using Questrade as our online broker for so many years now. Questrade is Canada's number one rated online broker by MoneySense. And with them, you can buy all North American ETFs,

not just a few select ones, all commission free so that you can choose the ETFs that you want. And they charge no annual RRSP or TFSA account fees. They have an award-winning customer service team with real people that are ready to help if you have questions along the way. As a customer myself, I've been impressed with Questrade's customer service. Whenever I call or email, every support rep is very knowledgeable and they get exactly what I need done quickly. Switch for free today and keep more of your money. Visit questrade.com for details.

That is questrade.com. This stock has done exceptionally well oh yeah it's like it's 10x right in the past year something like that it's close to 10x

yeah it's pretty crazy yeah I mean well deserved I mean the business executed well they have clever marketing I think

they had a Super Bowl commercial I believe as well it's a good business I've used it many times. And if you want someone, if you don't care where they're from, you can get someone from all over the world to do graphic design, you know, website development, article writing, you name it, commercial making, all for you and deliver it to your inbox in like a 48 hours sometimes on some of these gigs. And the work's usually pretty solid. And yeah, the review

system also works well. So you know what you're getting yourself into because you like you leave a review after every checkout when you purchase something. So that social proof validation is nice as well. What a performing stock that has been. Holy crap. Yeah, it's been, I couldn't even believe it when I started researching it yesterday. I had to like take, I had to double take just the price. And when I was looking at it,

like one year and five years out, I just, I mean, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a lot of stocks that performed that well in the past year. No, yeah, it's crazy. That's one that I kind of miss. It's one that I used before they were public, and I should have paid more attention.

Anywho, I'm going to go off on a different route here because I'm looking at the list here. I don't believe any of these are public companies, so investable right now, hopefully in the future for some of them. And the reason for that is because I know some of them very intimately using them for running Stratosphere and know how important it is for the solopreneur, the work-from-anywhere type person. And okay, let's get into them. So Stripe just raised another round at a $95 billion valuation. If you listen to this podcast, I talk about Stripe like every other episode.

It is an absolute beast. They power all of Shopify's payments, by the way, still to this day. And Stripe, you can basically create a business, accept payments, you know, run, you know, they'll take all your financial and all your billing and all that stuff. And it start accepting payments with basically one line of code. So you don't have to be really a developer because you just copy and paste some code in. It's really simple. The backend of Stripe for the users is beautiful.

But what's really interesting about Stripe is all the ecosystem that it's creating. So all of these platforms are building startups on top of Stripe. So Stripe has become like the rails of payments on the internet. This company is going to be huge. I truly believe Stripe will be a trillion dollar company in the future. All the avenues they're building out, really well done.

The Collison brothers from Ireland areland are geniuses very successful entrepreneurs perennial hustlers since they started uh since they were growing up and there's podcasts out there you can hear john collison and patrick collison talk about stripe these are smart guys they're still really young the kind of people that you want running a business. And the ecosystem that they're creating that a lot of these companies about to talk about are building on top of Stripe. And Stripe allows people to deploy payments in seconds, not, not months or years. So that's really interesting. Okay, let's keep going. So Zapier, Zapier is another company that is allowing a lot of these no code tools to kind of it's the glue between them. So if you have

a new customer sign up, and they get added to Stripe, then Stripe can, you know, send it to your email marketing, and your automation. And if you have it, a new account made in this other low code tool, it'll make them a little welcome package or, or it'll send them a t-shirt, uh, from another low code tool where you can kind of reward your fans and, and gain some of that customer relationship. So Zapier basically is an automation. It's if, if this happens in this app, then do something else in this other app. And this is what I mean by, you know, one person company doing what, you know, 10 people used to be able to do because of all this automation. Zapier does like hundreds of millions in revs. And I think it's only like a 200 or like a 400 person company,

very lean, very smart. And it's cool. Email automation like ConvertKit, MailChimp. Really important for creators, not only to get some of that email real estate for people's inbox to market and build. Really cool. Clubhouse is just coming out, raising a bunch of money. I don't know if it's fad or not.

It's really cool what they've done i think they need to chill with the email notifications now that i'm on it but uh or sorry in a like a phone app notifications it's they are on uh they are on the pink sheets though since oh are they yeah since the beginning of the year yeah oh yeah okay interesting yeah i mean obviously it's uh something in itself the pink sheets but they they are listed on the pink sheets yeah it goes back to twitter spaces you know clubhouse it's this kind of audio hangout area where people can connect with their their following um that's important. Patreon and Gumroad. Those are two examples of, you know, kind of like support me and you get these things for creators. You know, there's different tiers

to Patreon subscriptions. Gumroad is another creator economy business similar to that where you can have subscriptions to gated content. Gated content, meaning that you need to be a paying subscriber to see them. Substack does like email newsletters as well. So either like on the web via Substack or like directly into your inbox. And those have paywalls as well. If you want, if you want to run a paid membership Substack, membership sites run on like Squarespace, MemberSpace, MemberStack are some, some of them that are out there that I've seen and used. Web builders like Squarespace, Webflow. You do not have to be a web developer to build really beautiful websites. Like Webflow is sweet, really cool. I know people are building really complex apps in Webflow and then a bunch of other APIs

on top of them may be glued together by Zapier. Canva and Figma are like really easy freemium type photo editors. I don't know if that's the right word. They're not like a Photoshop where you're editing photos, but you're creating graphics. It's like graphic design. That's the word I'm looking for. So you can build all kinds of really cool graphics on these free web-based platforms and share them for research reports or share them on your social media. The amount of people that build Canva graphic designs and then post it on their Instagram followings. Like myself, I do it. These are the types of really, really highly valued private unicorns that exist out there. And they're be to small business usually. That's typically what the model is right now. It's

business to business, but it's business to small business and business to small creators, business to business, but it's business to small business and business to small creators, the solopreneur company. And the amount that what I'm getting with this is, if you are a solo entrepreneur, you can build companies that are doing the same kind of output and automation of like 20% companies if you do it right. Not only is that super profitable to do that for yourself, but it's really awesome that these tools are available. And I think this is just the start. This is just the beginning of the creator economy. It's going to change a lot over the next 10 years. And it's exciting. It's very exciting to me to be not only because i'm involved in it personally but it's it's really awesome and it's empowering people to do work that they actually like and want

to do get paid for it work from wherever they want in the world and uh that's awesome man you gotta you gotta love that yeah definitely i mean i are, I mean, I wasn't familiar with all of them, but quite a few of them, and I'll be interested if a few of them at least go public in the next year or so. Zapier and Stripe, I would buy at any price, like straight up. Not surprised about Stripe. The Stripe IPO is going to be bananas yeah it's got so much hype over the last couple years well deserved i don't want to say hype

because it's it's truly a great company uh it's like when are they going to go public now for so long that i feel like the day one ipo would beiness, like crazier than we've ever seen on, you know, like even the hyped up ones like Airbnb. I think the appetite for Stripe is getting to be absolutely huge now. So anywho, that's the creator economy. It fires me up and I'm really excited about it, as you can tell.

Yeah, I can tell. I think that's probably going to be it for this episode. It was a pretty long one. Yeah, let's wrap it up. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you for the support so far. Just know that there are lots of TSX Venture stock pumps happening right now, so be careful.

Beyond that, getstockmarket.com.com, bring you to Stratosphere. You can sign up, get a free trial there if you haven't already. I use that. Simon uses that for all of our research. It's a great tool, tenure, financial statements, analyst recommendations, competitor analysis, all there for every single North American listing of public companies. And I think you guys will really like it.

And we're also building out entirely new infrastructure for it. It's going to be going this summer. And the current customers, I think you guys are going to really like it. Again, that's GetStockMarket.com. We will see you guys next week. Peace out. The Canadian investor is not to be taken as investment advice. getstockmarket.com. We will see you guys next week. Peace out.