Capital Markets

Buying a stock is often the easy part. Selling forces you to deal with uncertainty, FOMO, loss aversion and the possibility that the move continues without you. Here’s how I think about it.

A simple way I read an uptrend: follow the higher highs and higher lows, understand the channel, and stay with the move until the structure tells me it has changed.

Small public companies move through recognizable phases: formation, financing, execution, growth, reinvention and sometimes failure. Understanding the phase changes how I see the opportunity.

Before I enter a trade, I want to know the setup, entry, target, stop, thesis and risk/reward. Planning those decisions before money is on the line helps me trade with more discipline.

Public and private venture capital can fund very similar entrepreneurial journeys. The difference is where ownership, liquidity and capital formation live.

My two primary trading setups are swings and breakouts. One looks for movement within an established structure; the other looks for price escaping that structure into a new move.

One of my favourite setups is the first meaningful breakout from a quiet trading range. I’m looking for a stock beginning to move before the story is already obvious to everyone.

One of my simplest position-sizing checks is emotional: if a trade is making me unusually anxious before it has even moved, I may be taking too much risk.

Support and resistance are two of the simplest technical ideas I use. They help me see where buyers and sellers have historically shown up, frame risk and recognize possible swing or breakout setups.

A short trading lesson that changed how I think about exits: selling a stock does not mean losing the opportunity forever. If the setup returns, I can always buy it back.

A lot of trading is emotional. My idea of trading zen is staying calm enough to see what the market is actually doing instead of making decisions from fear, greed or hope.

Technical analysis became much more useful to me when I stopped treating charts like random lines and started seeing them as a language with structure, patterns and probabilities.

A stop can occasionally take me out of a trade that later recovers. I still prefer that inconvenience to letting one failed setup turn into a major loss.

I’ve spent decades around penny stocks and small-cap companies. I think the label is less useful than understanding the venture underneath the ticker.

For an early-stage public company, financing is often part of the operating model. Here is how I think about private placements, dilution and financing the next milestone.

When I look at an early-stage public company, I keep coming back to four things: people, project, structure and capital. Then I look at what could change the story.

Reverse takeovers are one route private ventures can use to enter the public markets. Here is the practical way I think about the transaction and what matters afterward.

Hope is not a trading strategy. I want my decisions grounded in the price action and structure actually in front of me, not the price I wish a stock would reach.

A trading journal gives me a record of the plan, strategy, entry, exit, stop, risk/reward and result so I can see what is actually working and keep improving my execution.

In early-stage public companies, management is often the difference between an interesting asset and an investable venture. Here is what I look for in the people.

The project gets the attention, but the share structure tells me what I actually own. Here is how I think about shares, warrants, options, debt, dilution and pricing history.

A catalyst matters to me when it changes the value of a venture or the probability that the company can become what it says it can become. Not every press release does that.

A public shell can look like an empty company from the outside. In the right circumstances, what it really provides is an existing public-market vehicle that a new venture may be able to build from.

Capital Pool Companies are a distinctly Canadian public-venture structure. I think of them as a purpose-built public vehicle looking for the venture that will become its operating business.

Warrants can make a financing more attractive to investors, but they also create future dilution and a potential source of capital. I want to understand both sides.

A good small-cap story gets my attention. Due diligence is how I decide whether the people, project, structure and capital underneath it deserve that attention.

Dilution is not automatically good or bad. The question I care about is what the company creates with the capital it receives in exchange for issuing more ownership.

A great venture can still be a difficult security to own or trade if there is no liquidity. I want to understand both the company and the market for its shares.

Becoming public creates an ongoing disclosure relationship with shareholders and the market. I think of that transparency as part of the infrastructure of public venture capital.

A public venture is never just management and shareholders. There is an entire professional and regulatory ecosystem around the company that helps finance, govern and operate the public vehicle.

Early-stage public companies need to communicate, but attention is not the same thing as value. I want investor relations to help the market understand real progress rather than replace it.

Raising money is only half the capital question. The harder part is deciding where each dollar can create the most enterprise value and what milestones that spending should produce.

The exchange or marketplace does not tell me whether a venture is good, but it does shape the investor audience, liquidity, requirements and capital-markets environment around the company.

A public company can raise directly from its network or work with dealers and brokers to place a financing. The structure changes who is doing the capital-raising work and what comes with it.

A rollback can make the share count smaller and the per-share price larger, but it does not create business value by itself. I care about what the restructuring is preparing the company to do next.

The same company can be financed and valued very differently depending on the market around it. Understanding cycles helps me separate the venture from the environment it is trying to build in.

Running an early-stage public company means building the underlying venture while also operating the public-market vehicle around it. Those are connected jobs, but they are not the same job.

Running the book turns a capital raise into an actively managed process. Track prospects, commitments, amounts, shares, finders, follow-up and total progress while building momentum toward the close.

A business can be good and still not be investable. Here’s how I think about the difference between building a business and building an opportunity capital can understand, evaluate and want to participate in.

Finding investors is not about finding everybody with money. It’s about identifying the people, funds and groups whose mandate, experience, cheque size and interests actually fit your business and financing.

A practical way to turn investor research into a qualified working list based on sector, stage, cheque size, mandate, relationship path, status and next action.

Investor outreach should be targeted, professional and relationship-driven. How I think about introductions, first contact, the deck, follow-up, no’s and building trust over time.

Many financing problems appear before the first investor meeting: unclear positioning, weak fundamentals, poor materials, unrealistic terms, bad targeting and incomplete legal preparation.

The first meaningful financing order can change the psychology and momentum of a raise. What a lead order is, why it matters and what to think about before accepting one.

Investors are evaluating more than your pitch deck. They’re looking at the business, market, management, ownership, evidence, financing terms, risk and whether they trust you to execute.

My practical framework for reading stock charts, keeping emotion out of the decision, finding swing and breakout setups, planning entries and exits, managing downside risk and continually improving as a trader.

Before you start pitching investors, make sure the business itself is ready to be financed. A practical capital-readiness review covering positioning, market fit, management, KPIs, ownership, brand and story.

Raising capital is a process, not a pitch. A practical guide to preparing your business, building an investable opportunity, finding the right investors, creating momentum and closing a financing professionally.

Many of you here might not yet know much about who I am, some of my life experiences, and why I may have anything of value to add to the conversation around the topics I'm exploring. Learn more about me in this post as I share who I am, and some of the wild ride I've been on thus far...

Most people hear venture capital and think private startups and Silicon Valley. There is another world I’ve spent most of my career in: early-stage ventures financed and built through the public markets.