Back in my early days I did still buy individual stocks, and in fact, I still own some BCE, but I am an Index Investor (mostly) now.
Why? well, for a lot of reasons, but the main one is due to the primary law of economics, which is if someone wants to buy it, the stock price is going to go up, and that is what is happening right now. Rumors of at least 4 possible “suitors” for BCE have driven the price of the stock up to levels not seen since 2000, and almost $10.00 higher than it’s 6 month low (of $28.00 Cdn). Why am I talking about this? Well, it is a stock, and I do talk about stocks occasionally (mostly to tell how lousy an investor I am), and it is a Canadian Icon as well.
So who is looking to buy this “Canadian Blue Chip” (note the quotation marks, that is what it is called, not what I call it)? KKR and three large pension funds are looking at BCE right now. This means that BCE could be like the Toronto Maple Leafs and other interesting companies, owned by a Pension Fund. It’s interesting that the big money in investing right now is coming out of the pockets of retirement funds. There is a lot of money there, but what happens when people start retiring?
- If the pension fund is successful in dealing with a huge number of baby boomers retiring and drawing on the fund, what happens to the excess money? Suddenly you have huge amounts of money looking to do things?
- If the pension fund is competent how does it deal with the money drain? Does it start selling things? Who is going to buy the assets being sold? Will this drive down the prices?
- If the pension fund mismanages, and implodes, what happens then? Yes, let’s not talk about that one too much, it’s depressing.
All interesting doom and gloom questions that we shall see play out over the next 10-15 years folks, stay tuned!
Epilogue
BCE has been a good dividend stock to hold, it has had a good run for now, but the question is what will they do in this changing media world?
