The Canadian Investor - The 25 Largest Canadian Employers

Episode Date: June 13, 2022

In this release of the Canadian Investor Podcast, we cover the following topics: An overview of the 25 largest Canadian employers Macroeconomics and what impact it could have on the stocks you own Looking at the most visited sites in the world Check out our portfolio by going to Jointci.com Our Website Canadian Investor Podcast Twitter: @cdn_investing Simon’s twitter: @Fiat_Iceberg Braden’s twitter: @BradoCapital Sign up to Stratosphere for free 🚀 our platform for self-directed stock investing research. Register for EQ Bank, the seamless digital banking experience with better rates and no nonsense. Check out the Yes We are Open Podcast from sponsor MonerisSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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My name is Brayden Dennis, as always joined by the great Simon Belanger. Simon, you can see me. I'm recording this almost horizontal on my couch. And I don't know why I don't do this more often. I got the big MacBook screen on my lap here. So I'm ready to rock. This might be a new thing for me. Yeah, I'm not sure your back will be thanking you if you do that too often.

But you're young enough that I don't think it matters, at least for now. That's true. My lower lumbar is not a fan of what's going on right now, but hey, I feel comfy. All right, let's do this. We got a fun show for you today. As always, this is a Monday release, so we're talking investing strategy. Thursday mornings, we talk news and financial markets and just fun things we think we should talk about. financial markets and just fun things we think we should talk about. And my first topic on the slate here today is about Canadian employers. And then we're going to talk macro and what to make of all the things you hear. Because is it just me or everyone you know is officially has to have a hot take on macro? Yeah. I mean, it sounds like everyone's an economist right now, regardless of whatever their profession is or whatever their walk of life, whatever interest they had in the

economy, they started being an economist probably for the last six months. Yeah. November 2021 rolled around and we shifted regimes and now you areeconomist. All right, let's get into it. I have a list here. In order, the 25 largest employers in Canada. I just thought it was an interesting list because, of course, you're finding lots of large caps in here. But you're also finding, you know, important pieces of our economy. Now, this list of employees is global employees. So many of their employees may be, say they're like a global manufacturing company. These employees may, they'll have some

in Canada, but not all of them. It's more so if they're Canadian headquarters company. Now, Simon, my question for you off the top of your head, who do you think is the largest employer in Canada? Wow, that is a good question in terms of a Canadian company. I would say probably a company like I think Enbridge would be one would be up there because they have a massive operations across North America. They are probably one I'm thinking of like large Canadian businesses, but maybe Royal Bank, one of the big banks. The two biggest banks crack the top 10. I'll give you a hint.

Think more like in the States, who's the large employer? It's Walmart, right? So think of all of those types of employees. I don't know how to give you any more hints. Wow, I really don't know. I mean, I'm trying to think retail now that you mentioned Walmart. Yeah, yeah. Think your mind, get there with it. Yeah, I mean, I just can't really, yeah.

It is Loblaws. Yeah, that one actually came first to mind, but I didn't think they, because they're more Canada, I just didn't think the employee base would be that big. So I was thinking a Canadian company that has a global presence. Yeah. And that's a reasonable thing to do. Number three on the list is in that situation. But Loblaws here, according to this source, employs more than 220,000 people. If you think about all the brands that, you know,

think about all the Shoppers, Dragmats, all the Loblaws, all the No Frills, the corporates, the whole thing. Yeah. So before we started recording this, Briden put a link and he told me do not open the link. Do not open it. Yeah, exactly. So I had to guess. The ones that came to mind, actually loblaws came to mind but when you started talking, I kind of took it away because I was thinking global is – I kind of misled you a bit in a way yeah and then the canadian banks were the other ones because they're so massive so they're the other ones that came into mind yeah all right so the list here is law now i don't know the

differentiation here because like the george weston group is number two with an also over 200 now i don't know how those are correlated in terms of employee count. I'm not sure, but those are one and two. Number three is Magna International. This makes a lot of sense to me. They have over 350 manufacturing plants. I used to work at one that employed 2,000 people 24-7, that thing ran, or at least 24-6, depending on how busy they were. Next is up is Brookfield Asset Management. That probably encompasses the entire business, all of the subsidiaries as well. It's an interesting business, as we've always said, because it has that corporate structure, the asset management

business, but they actually operate so many of those assets. They actually have that operational expertise. So those people are running the actual infrastructure businesses empire company what is this what is empire company yeah i think if i remember correctly they own i think they may own grocery stores or something who why do i not know this business oh it's sobeys in that there you go see i. Yeah, you're on it. I wasn't sure. I knew it was in Metro, so I should have thought it was. Yeah, Sobeys. I think they own Farm Boy too. That's right.

I knew this, but it's just been not top of mind. Yeah, EMP is the ticker. Okay, yes, I know this ticker. It's on TSX, 40 bucks. I had a mental gap there. All right, Couchetard makes sense. Metro, another grocer. And then the list here says Scotiabank and TD are almost identical.

And then Royal Bank. They're basically, you know, plus or minus 1,000 employees each. CGI, the consulting company, the tech consulting company. And then TELUS, WSP Global, the engineering firm. Gildan, which is the, you, which is the white label clothes for people. Well, I'm surprised you haven't mentioned any of the large insurers just yet. They're coming up in a major way. Then we got CIBC, BMO.

Then we got Manulife, TFI International, Power Financial. So you're starting to get some of these insurance companies. National, Power Financial. So you're starting to get some of these insurance companies. National Bank of Canada, Intact, Lululemon, Great West Life Co., and then First Service, which is like the roll-up of services businesses. Yeah, it's funny how they include sometimes like some that have ties to each other because you have Power Corp and Great West Life. So Power Corp owns, I think, a majority of them, right? So it's kind of...

I wonder how much double counting there is here. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, there you go. And of course, no source is going to be 100% accurate at all times because these things are not stagnant at all. I mean, employee count for these companies is one of the least static things you could think of and so that's that's just without saying and just for just for fun i looked you said enbridge that's number 43 okay pretty efficient yeah i guess so no i i just thought i'm sure that what about the rails are they on there as well let me find out here we go cn rail cn rail is number 27 and cp rail is number 42 okay now i'm just interested yeah canadian tires they're in the mix in the 30s gfl international anyway so that just for fun you know i just wanted to think of who are the large employers you know we're talking about macro today who are these like mega employers we've heard so much commentary. The market's been

paying so much attention to the commentary on earnings calls from these mega employers, whether it be the Home Depot, Target, Walmart in the US. People are paying extra attention to those conference calls just as a proxy engage for consumer strength heading into an alleged recession. So I just thought it was an interesting thing to bring up. Yeah. And I think that's a great point because it also makes headlines whenever employment numbers come out. That's right. Yeah. That's one of the big numbers that tends to make headlines when they do come out, whether it's Canada or the US. So that's typically one of the other big macro ones aside from, you know, the traditional

one, whether it's CPI, whether it's, you know, a raise in interest rates or whatever it is, the job employment numbers are pretty big on the list too. Now, we'll actually talk a bit about macro because chances are, like we mentioned, if you follow a company you own pretty closely, you've heard the CEO talk about the macro environment in a recent earnings calls. And if you have, I'm just going to go on a limb that it was not, and I quote here my own quote, the economy is firing on all cylinders. I'm just going to go and venture a guess that that's not what they've been saying. Have you heard that recently or not? I get, well, just for the sake of entertainment

here and to have another view on this, the payments rails have actually been saying, hey, things are look really good. And so I think I was talking to you about this, which is like, how do I decipher between, you know, their business is doing well from all this like positive tailwinds from digital payments versus how strong the actual consumer is. And I've been pretty vocal about this, which is you'll never get a full clear picture on macro. And that's why it's impossible to really predict.

No economist has ever nailed it with 100% accuracy. But in this particular case, there's been so much conflicting data. And that's been really confusing for people. And that's why I think we should just chat about it yeah and a lot of calls you'll also see it might not be all doom and gloom in terms of macro but a lot of companies you'll actually see two things you'll see first of all you know the companies that are still doing quite well the ceo might comment and say oh demand is extremely strong from our products but there are these macro events that are affecting our supply chain and therefore affecting our results so that is something you'll hear quite a

bit and recently some high-profile ceos have made headlines about their comments on macro and more specifically where the economy is going there's three here that I zoned in on. One, not as well known, but the two will be well known. The first one is good old Elon Musk, who sent an email to his employee and made headlines when he said that Tesla will have to slash 10% of its workforce. He said that he had, and I quote, this is classic Elon talk, a super bad feeling about the economy. Super bad. Classic Elon talk. A super bad feeling about the economy. Super bad.

For a guy that's so smart, sometimes he just cracks me up with the language he uses. Yeah. Like, I can't not think of, like, McLovin and Jonah Hill when I hear super bad. That's exactly what I thought when I heard that. And then Jamie Dimon also chimed in last week and said to get ready for an economic hurricane. And then another one, like I mentioned, that's not as high profile, but a little more of a Canadian twist here. CEO of Cargojet, Ajay Vermani. I think it's Ajay. Ajay? Okay.

Well, I apologize, Ajay, if I butchered your name. I also said Fink. I don't know. Yeah. You can butcher my name a few times, Holby, even. He said in an interview with the Financial Post that all the challenges that you see out there are pointing towards an almost recessionary economy. And this is one I think is very interesting to listen to because especially how much of a tailwind cargo jet got in terms of the pandemic and the increase in volume that they got it's very interesting to see him comment about that

before i go on did you have anything else out here only that musk also sent out an email saying that of course i mean anything this guy does hits the headlines, but he also said like, if you think you work from home and you work at Tesla, you no longer work here. Like we need our people here. And to be fair, I mean, they're auto manufacturers. So I don't, I mean, I would probably have a similar sentiment if I was him, but that's also something that he said. So just to kind of maybe get a proxy for what's happening with employees going back to work, even the big tech companies that said, oh yeah, we're so nifty from home. We're so great from home and the banks, you know,

everyone's going back. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's some jobs that obviously if you're working in a factory, you have to be there. I think the employers personally that will do the best are probably the ones that will offer some flexibility. So I think that's really where it's going to go going forward. And I was listening to something over the weekend, and it was an expert talking about that specifically. And he said, I think companies are overestimating how loyal their employees are to them by forcing them to go back to work. Because people get into this habit of working from home, being productive. And if they can get that from this current employer,

a good portion of them will probably just start looking elsewhere. And right now they have options. Hey, you know what? Stratosphere is a fully remote company. Hit me up. Hit me up if you are a skilled developer. There you go. As do-it-yourself investors, we want to keep our fees low. That's why Simone and I have been using

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track your dividends, and there's other stuff like learning, Duolingo-style education lessons that are completely free. You can search up Blossom Social in the app store and join the community today. I'm on there. I encourage you go on there and follow me. Search me up. Some of the YouTubers and influencers and podcasters that you might know,

I bet you they're already on there. People are just on there talking, sharing their investment ideas and using the analytics tools. So go ahead, Blossom Social in app store, and I'll see you there. And now to get back on the macro here. So obviously, you know, it's making headlines on a daily basis, you know, all these different macro topics. And before you freak out about the economy, and more specifically, your investment in your hard earned money, let's put things in context a little bit here. Well, recessions are backwards looking. So that's because there needs to be data to know for sure

that there were two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. And where this two consecutive quarters came from, I think it's probably arbitrary because who the hell, you know. It's like saying, you know, we're not in a bear market until it ticks 20%. Exactly. So I think, you know, whether the economy is doing well or not, I think just using this arbitrary method, it's a bit, you know,

it's a bit funky in my opinion. But having said that, for all we know, we could actually be in a recession right now and we won't know it until a few months from now because the data is backwards looking. Same thing when you look at the earnings from a company, you know, they may give some guidance, but when you're looking at the earnings of a company, it is backward looking. Anything else to add there before I move on? No, I think that that's good. I like that you touched on that.

It's basically completely arbitrary because it is, but that's the definition we have and I don't see a problem with it. Yeah, exactly. Now, recessions happen. It's part of a normal economic cycle. And honestly, it's healthy in the long run, because if the economy keeps going up, up and up, well, oftentimes it's because of some artificial, you know, government intervention for the most part. And if that goes on for too long most likely what's going to happen is you're going to get a recession but you're going to get a massive recession so it's often better to get some smaller ones that happen more frequently not all companies are affected in the same way by a recession or macro events like high inflation which has made a lot of headlines

and here are a few examples to wrap our heads around it so a company like tesla that elon musk of course will probably see sales slow down if there is a recession because the person with a used car that was thinking of buying a brand new tesla might push back that purchase to times when things are more stable or if the person just lost their job they're clearly not going to be buying a tesla that's costing i don't know 60 grand or whatever the amount is but then you look at a company that you mentioned when you did your first segment like loblaws they'll probably do quite well during a recession because people have to eat and i here, just going back to the basics and the Maslow pyramid that we all

learned in high school can be really quite useful because you can really tell the hierarchy of needs, the hierarchy of needs. Exactly. Who would have thought grade like 10, whatever class that was, was going to pay off so well. Look at that. Yeah. And there are obviously there's companies where you may look and it's like, well, it's not a high need, but it may, you know, when you think about it, might be a high need for businesses,

you know, B2B. We've talked about a lot of that recently. It may be a high need for these type of businesses where, you know, you said cybersecurity on our previous release that it's high up there and something that companies won't cut

if they need to make cuts. So that's another example there and something that companies won't cut if they need to make cuts. So that's another example of a company that should do pretty well in a recessionary environment. One thing that came to mind was I saw the chair of the Bank of Canada had a question about, well, he had many, many questions about inflation, of course, right? Like that's basically the entire panel was asking questions about inflation and they repeated on the panel, like a broken record. It was almost like, it was like a post-game interview for a guy who just lost like in a, like, it's like a post-game hockey, hockey interview. It's like, yeah, Simone, what could you guys have done better? And he's like, well, you know, we got to get pucks deep.

We got to get them in their zone. And you just say that. And they ask you another question, Simone. They're like, oh, could you guys have done this better? And you're like, oh, well, you know what? We just got to get pucks deep and battle hard. So he just had like this stock answer. And he was like, it is our mandate right now.

Number one, nothing else matters to get inflation back to 2%. He kept saying that, kept saying that. Basically, all stops will happen. The one guy was like, are you willing to manufacture a recession to get back to 2%? He's like, our mandate is to get back to 2%. I'm like, okay, so it's a yes. So that's my quick comment there. Yeah. And actually, I made some points here, but because you touched on the Bank of Canada, I'll actually jump to my last point and come back. But you have to take with a grain of salt, you know, the prediction about the economy, even from really prominent sources like the Bank of Canada, like the Fed in the US, because, you know, they are constantly wrong in their predictions. I mean, they sometimes they get it right, but they also get it wrong quite often. And they both recently admitted they had incorrectly forecast inflation. And keep in mind that the role of the Bank of Canada and Fed is often to reassure the market or to portray a specific messaging, which I love that you mentioned the whole broken record,

get a lid on inflation is their mandate. And they just kept repeating that because a lot of, especially the Fed in the US, a lot of analysts will try to interpret what the Fed is saying. And the market is kind of looking at what the Fed is saying to gauge where stocks could be. And obviously that's not what the approach that we do. But usually in the short to medium term, the markets

will be affected a lot by what the Fed Powell in this case is saying. So keep that in mind, whether they are wrong on purpose or not, I think that can go on, you know, it is debatable, but something to keep in mind that they can often be wrong. Yeah, no, it's like economists and weather and meteorologists are just both equally wrong on basically everything. And so it's like, how am I going to put any real weight into an actionable thing that I think about, right? Like of all the things as an investor I can think about for all of the reasons that we're mentioning here of why I put very little to no weight on the macro policy is because how on earth am I supposed to ever make any decent prediction in the short term? If people who do

this all day still can not get a grip on it, it's just not worth spending a second thinking about it. And so maybe that's almost the point of this segment, right? It's like buy good companies, right? It's like, buy good companies, hold on to them, monitor their business performance, and keep buying, keep buying, keep accumulating good assets via their public stock and the types of businesses that we talk about. You know what I mean? It's one big commercial for long-term investing. Yeah. And to be fair, if we try to make predictions on the economy, term investing. Yeah. And to be fair, if we try to make predictions on the economy, we'd be wrong too most of the time. It's just so hard to do. I mean, before the pandemic started, I remember we were talking. I'm like, wow, this is going to be really rough for the economy. But I really did not think that governments would step in in the way that they did. And obviously, I was completely

wrong. Thankfully, i didn't panic sell or anything i had good businesses i ended up you know doing pretty well because of the whole pandemic and the i guess the recovery that happened after that but it's just to show even if you do try to make some predictions of your own or try to make investment just based on that, you'll probably have a hard time. Even like on this latest hike, if you ask me, I'm like, there's no way, there's no way they're going to be this aggressive on hikes. But clearly I was wrong. Like I wouldn't put any sort of like, I wouldn't be moving capital based on those decisions. And I don't plan on ever doing that in my investing strategy because you and I are looking so far out on what can these businesses, these businesses we own, what kind of return can

we expect from them moving forward on a long view? And that's just a completely different way of looking at the world. And everything that you'll hear everywhere, even in casual conversations or online, seems to always be about what's happening right now in the big macro. And it's not that they don't affect these businesses. You just mentioned several examples of how it affects businesses, but we should come to expect volatility in the macro and in the stock market. It's the only thing you should actually come to regularly expect is that kind of up and down. Yeah, exactly. And now something else to keep in mind here. Know if the companies you own have optionality and pricing power, even during poor

economic conditions. People in businesses will cut back on spending during difficult conditions. But is the company you own at risk or will it be resilient? I think that's a great question to ask because obviously if the company has a lot of debt, they have a so-so business, interest rates are rising, the debt is coming due in a year within the next year or two, their cash on hand is not high. Yeah, I would probably consider, you know, trimming or selling that investment. But if you have a good business that has a solid balance sheet, you know, pricing power, optionality, their business is not going to be too adversely impacted you should be okay yeah totally and i mean look at the businesses that are selling off right now too like we've seen big tech compress multiples quite a bit not as much

as like the pure sass names but like i'm thinking like what we'll call magma now since i guess tomorrow facebook's ticker changes to meta so can we roll with magma that's the one i like which is i guess that would be meta apple google microsoft and amazon well even google right it's alphabet it's out oh yeah so we'll have to rethink yeah yeah so yeah and no it's true if you look at those those names i mean and i'm going to talk about this in my next segment actually which is just like these these things keep dominating from a business perspective like if you look at those like there's literally structurally nothing wrong with those even in a tough environment they're just like such good businesses and the multiples have compressed a lot. And so I don't know, you can probably underwrite some amazing IRIs on the magma names right now,

to be honest. Yeah. And I think the next thing for me is, especially for investors, just to remind what your end game is. And if you're a long term investor, short term headwinds might actually be a gift and provide with some great buying opportunities as a long term investor. So remember, the market is forward looking, but not that forward looking. So typically, I mean, I would say most people agree, it's probably like six months to a year, year and a half, I would say that the market will look forward. Beyond that, if you're able to look past that, you may be able to find some really, really good opportunities during a market downturn. It might be painful short term.

Don't get me wrong. But as long as you know what your end game is and if you're 25, 30 years away from needing the money, whatever it is, right? It could be retirement. You could be 20 and maybe you're 15 years away from wanting to buy a house without money know what your end game is and that will put a lot of perspective and put you at ease when you hear all these macro events happening totally agree this is you know i remember i went to so there was this there was this guy that i met right when I learned how to invest. And I know this because he is my uncle's buddy. And I would go, I would like basically show up at their office, bring them Starbucks coffees so that I could just listen in on their investing committee meetings.

And so this I thought was a good way to learn like from professional investors. And I was working as an engineer. So I was just kind of like trying to get my head in the door here. And not because I wanted to work as an asset manager, just to learn, right? And what they would tell their clients is you make money in bear markets, right? Like this is actually where you make money. And there's only going to be a few truly long bull markets in your investing lifetime. If you think about it, like in a time horizon, like how long bull markets are, if you think about your lifetime, okay, your first bull market, you might not be old enough or have enough money to take advantage of. Your third one,

you might be in retirement and you got to be quite conservative. And they would always talk about in your lifetime, the second bull market is the one that's the most important. And I was like, dude, that makes so much sense. And you know what you do? You accumulate as many assets as you can sense. And you know what you do? You accumulate as many assets as you can in the crappy time of credit cycles right before that second bull market in your lifetime hits. And for me, if stocks continue to go down, and I hope they do, that's kind of like what it feels like. And I'm not saying stocks are cheap here. They're actually historically expensive, but the business quality and the margins are insanely good. If you look at the large cap names, like I was just talking about.

And so this is just like a, it's my moment of optimism and thinking about, you know, your second bull market's going to be the one where you make tons of money. So start accumulating assets when they're cheaper. Yeah. And I think obviously we're long-term investors, but there might be some people that are closer to needing the money, but oftentimes you don't need all of it all at once. So there are some ways when you can, you know, plan for your retirement. Obviously there are some professional financial planners that are really good that could kind of help you plan for that. And clearly maybe sometimes it's also a good opportunity to just

reevaluate some of the holdings that you have, especially if you may need the money and you know, in the medium to short term, there might be some businesses, you know what, it's not worth for me to hold that at this point, I'm not at that stage of my life anymore. So it does create a good opportunity in my mind as well to just kind of review things all right let's talk about web traffic oh you haven't there's still there yeah i still have a couple more points it won't be too long i think you'll like sorry i'm stealing your your thunder here go ahead and the second to last point just in case you were lost rated so the second to last i've stared at it for so long. I know. Well, the good thing, I removed the last segment. So we'll just stick to your last one after that. But listen closely to what

the executives are saying about their business, especially on conference calls here. This is really important because a CEO might say, for example, that there will be significant pressures for the company because of a recession inflation rising rates whatever macro event that you want to refer to but what the seal might also be saying is that these headwinds may be for the next year or two and not the long term and long term the business will still be thriving so i think it's really important because they know their business really well and just understanding what they're saying, but understanding what they're saying, because, you know, Target is saying short term their business will be really badly impacted because

they have to discount merchandise because their inventories are too high. I'm going to go on a limb that Target will be fine three, four years from now, but it's probably going to be ugly for the next few years. That's just, you know, that's, I think is an easy example. Yep. I love it. And then the last thing here, just to add on to management here is just, you know, can you trust a management team when they are saying these things? Because, you know, some management teams have way better track record than others. Have they been pretty accurate with guidance in the past or do they constantly miss the mark? I think that's really important because management may be saying something, but if they're constantly wrong, I mean, how can you really trust them? So these are all things I think that can help you kind of weather these macro noise,

I would say, if you own some businesses and just making you feel a bit less nervous having money invested in the stock market. It brings me to like, okay, last year, you could make money buying anything, right? Like you'd pick anything in the market and you're making money. Like June 20, or like from the bottom of March 2020 till November of last year, you could have bought any shit co you could find and make pretty sizable money in a short period of time. And that's like when the greed scale just got off the charts, right? Now, when the tide comes in, you have to remember, and I try to position my portfolio like this no matter what, because this is important really right now. And if you're in this situation where like, I'm holding some crappy companies, I'd probably like to up the quality. This is your perfect chance.

You get like great opportunities to buy high quality when, you know, there's a leak in the bathtub and all the rubber duckies are lower, you know? And so that's what you want. When this happens, like when there's like market downturns or like tough macro environment, you want to be holding quality. There's no time in life to not be holding great businesses. You know, like if your buddy across the street, great businesses. You know, like if your buddy across the street, Simone, he's like, I'm retiring. I want to sell my auto body shop. And you do some research and you're like, ESG, high growth, green tech. Face drive. Face drive. Just throw all the buzzwords in one sentence, do no valuation work, and wonder what happened.

It's a disaster waiting to happen. And so take that kind of simple mindset and owning great quality because these are businesses. They're not lottery tickets. They're not just things that dance around on screens all day, even though it seems like it. If you look at the classic Wall Street photos, those guys are traders. That's really hard to do that predictably for a long-term. it's really hard to do that predictably for the long term. 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

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I'm on there. I encourage you go on there and follow me, search me up. Some of the YouTubers and influencers and podcasters that you might know, I bet you they're already on there. People are just on there talking, sharing their investment ideas and using the analytics tools. So go ahead, Blossom Social in the app store and I'll see you

there. Now, Brayden, what's your last segment? I thought you, you know what it was? You did your, your points in, in some strange orders. And my brain was not quick enough to calibrate on that, but we're, we're here. Let's talk about web traffic. You can look it up. It's like multiple websites that look at this. Like if you just literally Google, like search like most trafficked websites in the world, there's multiple like SEO type companies that will have these like free tools. I'm just trying to grab traffic off the internet and then convert you to their service. It's a pretty smart idea. So the top websites globally, and then I'll go into Canada as well. And I just wanted to, I'm going to skip over a few because many of them are,

as you can imagine, not appropriate. YouTube is the number one most visited site and had, what is that? 46 billion visits in April. Like if you extrapolate that on a yearly basis, it is actually insane. And of course, YouTube has grown tremendously. You've seen it as, you know, on their, on alphabet statements, how fast they've grown. But YouTube is far and away the most trafficked website in the world, okay? It is 19% more visited than the second most trafficked website in the world, which is google.com. So Alphabet owns the top two by global traffic by a long shot on the internet. Now, up next is facebook.com at just under 10 billion visits for the month. So of course, that is tremendous scale. But if you look at that 46, yeah, like basically 86 billion for YouTube and Google combined, and the next one is under 10. And so

I check on this mostly to just confirm my confirmation bias about how well Google's assets are doing. But this scale is just so incredible. And that probably doesn't, that doesn't even include like how many people are doing Google searches just in the Chrome browser. I don't think that would tick that because I think that number would be. No, I think it probably would. would tick that because i think that number would be no i think it probably would you think so well how can google there's got to be more you google searches than youtube visits yeah no it's not it is not hitting google.com probably not yeah actually no no it would what am i saying if you do that search then it's going to bring. Because it brings you to the site. Wow. Wow. Brain off.

Yeah. No. Okay. So how is YouTube just dominating, man? It's crazy how many people are watching YouTube. Kids love it. Adults love it. I love it.

Everyone loves it. Okay. But number four on that list, though, props to them for being number four on that list for a non-for-profit. Yeah. That's right wikipedia.org at 6.2 billion for april just phenomenal like it's great has it been as it recently they've asked you for a buck lately you know sometimes you go on there like we need a dollar it's like

in red texas yeah i i've donated a few times yeah yeah have you donated yeah yeah i have a good guy yeah i don't know if they need it they're probably making cash but that is next to where the next two are adult entertainment sites now the first one is a canadian company out of quebec Out of Montreal, I think. Out of Montreal. That is the hub. I'm not going to say what the first, I'm not going to, this is a friendly, family-friendly show.

Now, Simon, if you see here on the right, it says bounce rate. Okay. So what bounce rate means is if you show up to a site and like quickly click off it, that's a website bounce. Okay? Look how there are two outliers, two unbelievable outliers in the statistics on bounce rate for those adult websites.

People are going to, they're going there with intent. Because, you know, like Wikipedia hasipedia has a 60 bounce rate and the one we're speaking about is 25 bounce rate that is a big row yeah with the exact same bounce rate basically and basically the exact same bounce rate all right next up is twitter.com at number seven 4.5 billion reddit.com 3.8 amazon.com now this is crazy right like amazon.com people are going with like intent to purchase so that's pretty amazing yeah i wonder if them it includes the app when i go on my app to get a prime delivery does that you know or is it like actually you know going to browser putting amazon.com same one for all the big apps right

that's what i that's one question i do have as well and you know what i would think it's the just the dot com web application because instagram's here at number 10 and i believe it would be higher if it wasn't for just like how like there's no whats WhatsApp.com on this list, because that would be number one globally, right? It would 100% be number one globally, just because it's the most used messaging platform in the world is WhatsApp, which is a Facebook asset. So that's the top 10 across. Just looking at the list here, there's Apple.com, which is kind of crazy at number 14.

Blows my mind. Like you're going on apple.com with somewhat intent to purchase, or at least look at the category, like the product offering. And these are not low price items. This is a really interesting one. Hold on. I'm just going to verify before I say it so that it's not some like illegal website. Okay. Yeah. So I'm going to butcher how this is called. Manganato.com. Okay. It's anime. It's like anime shows and comic books. Oh, wow. Okay. This is a big category, man. People love anime shows, anime comic books. It's obviously huge in Japan, but people love this stuff, man.

Incredible. All right, let's talk about Canada. I'll rifle through this. Number one, YouTube. Number two, Google. Number three, Reddit. Canadians love their Reddit. You can see the discrepancy there.

Canadians love Reddit.com. Just flew up the list compared to the global rankings. Wikipedia at number four as well. The adult website same spot number five facebook.com number six twitter.com another adult website and then that anime site top 10 and i'm sure many people listening to this know what that is because this is a big category man i i even know people that love watching anime shows and the stories apparently are quite quite compelling like apparently the writing is quite compelling

i know dragon ball z yeah i'm like okay i've never been into that but i'll yeah i'll take your word for it well i'm just taking other people's word for it and the numbers speak for themselves here but i can fire up some dragon ball z and i can tell you one thing is the canadians do like their adult side so there's quite a few yeah no kidding hey you look at the list it's like a bunch of names i'm not familiar with but i can just tell by the name i'm scared of clicking some of these names like some of these names i mean like yeah i know what they are i wasn't yeah i was born on a tuesday but it wasn't last tuesday but some of them i have no idea and

i'm really you know the one that's impressive and all of that is the last name on the list i'm surprised to see that one you can say what it is you want yeah no yeah that's true it's not that's pg-13 no it's new york times i'm surprised that that would make the top for canadians and it wasn't you know something else in canada that maybe is a bit more canada specific yeah yeah like i don't see any of the canadian news sites here do you nope no the only news site to crack the top 20 is in the new york times i wonder if it has to do with Wordle. Yeah, it could. It definitely could be, yeah. And then I'm just looking on the US list one here.

There's a few different things here. PayPal and Walmart and LinkedIn cracked the top 20. The US seems to be more focused on using the internet for good. Just looking at the list here. Uh-oh, it's a little more of a clean list here. There's still that one in there, but yeah, you know what I mean. Thanks so much for listening for the episode, guys, today. You're going to hear lots of macro discussions. You're going to be hanging out at the bar and your friend's going to talk your ear off about inflation. That's to be expected.

Hell, that drink might cost more than it did a few months ago too. Yeah, no kidding. Especially in Toronto. Oh my God. Oh my God. It's crazy. We're meeting some of you guys next weekend at the TCIJ's game meetup. That'll be really fun. But yeah, no, I mean, like you're going to hear so much about this stuff.

And it's our reminder to not only like touch on it or whatever, but also remember that you're holding a collection of great businesses. Think about how they're going to perform in a different environment. And then look at the valuation, like, is there a margin of safety kind of built into that? And I think that, you know, it's the, it's the old buy great companies, monitor them, add to them, and then do nothing. Like it's really, there's a million things that are going to distract you from your real goals. And this is when you make money is when the greed and fear spectrum swaps and the fear spectrum has completely taken over in the regime. So I know we've done some episodes on the TD investor. They have some like website that tracks just like the sentiment

of behavior on the platform. Since they've started tracking it that tracks just like the sentiment of behavior on the platform since they've started tracking it it has been the most bearish sentiment on the platform which which i assume is just like the most net selling i'm not sure how they're actually measuring that but probably the most net selling on the platform that they have seen yeah it could just be the type of asset type of stocks people are kind of moving putting their yeah moving into so less you know maybe i'm assuming less growth and more you know blue chip dividend or bonds or fixed income whatever it is out of the speculative names yeah because the most sold equity was tesla and the more speculative high valued type category, I would say. And so, yeah, that's,

yeah, the way you said is probably how they're doing it. That's, that's probably a smarter way of doing it, but that is the lowest. The sentiment is the lowest that they've ever seen. And this is, this is one of the largest Canadian discount brokerages. And so this is when you can, if you can take advantage of it. If you're new to the show, please leave a rating. Well, how about this? If you're not new to the show and you haven't left a rating, please go ahead and do that. We really appreciate it. We'll see you in a few days.

Take care. Bye-bye. The Canadian Investor Podcast should not be taken as investment or financial advice. Brayden and Simone may own securities or assets mentioned on this podcast. Brayden and Simone may own securities or assets mentioned on this podcast. Always make sure to do your own research and due diligence before making investment or financial decisions.