About Me
Hello and welcome to CopyCat Invest, my Investment Portfolio Newsletter. My name is Jamie Kozak and I was a Portfolio Manager at a very reputable firm named North Growth Management in Vancouver, Canada for 13.5 years (September 2003 to January 2017) when I made the difficult decision to resign to set up this site. I was part of the four-person investment management team and focused on Canadian and U.S. equities. Anyone who knows my investment style knows that fundamentals are key to my investment analysis - focus on revenue and earnings, growth, cash flow, balance sheets, business strategy, etc. I am a CFA charter holder and have been since 2003. If you are unfamiliar with the CFA designation, I encourage you to peruse the website of the CFA Institute. The CFA designation is internationally recognized as the gold standard in Finance, promoting the highest standards in excellence and ethics. Throughout my career, I was not subject to any investigations and I pride myself with acting with a high degree of professional conduct and ethical standards. For those who might wonder, I am not sitting on a fortune and cannot just sit on a beach and watch the world go by. I hope this site helps subscribers grow their portfolios in addition to learning about investing which hopefully results in contributions to help keep me "employed".
I graduated from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby in 1998 with a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Finance and Marketing. I find the Marketing concentration provides a good perspective to look at companies through a non-financial lens. I was also a couple of courses shy of a minor in Economics. My non-business electives included Philosophy and Archaeology (cue in Indiana Jones theme song). After university I started working for TD Bank (now TD Canada Trust) in the retail division as a Personal Banker. This helped me get in tune with clients needs and interests. I moved to TD Private Investment Counsel as an assistant to a couple of Portfolio Managers and while this was more administrative, I was eager to move into a role that was more investment focused. That became my stepping stone to North Growth and the start of my career as an Analyst and Portfolio Manager.
Outside of my career, I am an avid skier who also enjoys hiking, golf, motorcycling, food, wine, coffee, and travel. I am active with CFA Vancouver attending local university events to offer guidance and advice to students and I'm also a mentor with SFU's Mentors in Business Program in addition to the CFA Institute Research Challenge where I guide a team of students into crafting a professional research report.
I hope you enjoy my newsletter and welcome your feedback.
Jamie Kozak, CFA
How This site works
This site will contain full disclosure on the companies and their weights in my portfolio in addition to my thoughts and analysis. There will be a full trade ledger with dates and executed prices and the weight of the trade. Trades will be communicated to subscribers as soon as practicable.
Copy Cat investing has its perils for numerous reasons. When copying someone, investors are not usually privy to the analysis and reasoning for the investment nor are they privy to subsequent changes. I thought of this site because over the years, friends would periodically ask me what I’m investing in and invariably my response was “our Funds”. Even if I was to talk about individual stocks, they would not be privy to changing information. This site gives me a platform to not only tell investors what I own but also provide them with updated information and analysis as things change. By no means does this mean my investing will be perfect or absent of risk, it just means I’m monitoring the investments and updating my analysis.
This site is not meant to provide advice to investors, it simply tells investors what I’m doing and why. It is not a site to get hot stock tips for short-term traders. I will provide my insights and analysis on my holdings. I am not a 1-stop-shop for all equities therefor I will not extensively write about companies I do not own. Investors can accept my thoughts, further research them, or completely disregard them.
How can subscribers make the most of this site?
Determine your desired cash allocation and deploy your portfolio gradually unless you think a significant rally is more likely than a possible pullback. If your portfolio is not large enough to invest in all the names while keeping trading costs low, select the names you prefer. Pay attention to recent stock price movements and my trading history. I cannot provide advice which companies to choose or when, I can merely tell you what I own, why, and when I did my trades. I aim to keep my trading commissions to 0.2% or less (20 beeps or bps, 1% is 100 bps) in aggregate, sometimes they will be higher but they should not be more than 0.5%.
What does it cost?
Unlike other investment newsletters, I am not currently imposing an upfront subscription cost, feel free to sign up with no cost or obligation. My goal is that some investors find value in my site and analysis and choose to follow my investment activities. My vision is that investors who find value in this site thoughtfully determine the value to them - I recognize this will be different for different people and at different times. Some investors might think about the value as a regular subscription, others might think about it as a percentage of their gains, while others might think about it as a percentage of their portfolio. Considerations obviously are the size of an investor’s portfolio or how closely they follow my portfolio. I recognize the honour system doesn’t work for everyone but I know it works for some people. This site is not intended to be free in perpetuity so I reserve the right to eventually block users who are taking advantage of this business model. I do not expect payment monthly or even quarterly so blocking users wouldn’t necessarily be swift. I just ask users to be reasonable and thoughtful. I would also ask that when users do submit a payment they provide a short explanation; I will not challenge the rationale, this is just for me to understand where users are coming from. In this day and age where investors feel they have no input on fees or that fees are not transparent or fair, I see this site as being innovative as investors determine not only the magnitude of the “fee” but also the timing. Should contributions be minimal or nil, I would convert the model to a subscription model although I would rather continue to have subscribers determine their "fee". I hope subscribers would recognize and appreciate my efforts and analysis and also recognize that if nobody pays, eventually this site will cease to exist and those who value my efforts would no longer benefit from them.
I will not be selling advertising or user information. I will not be getting paid by companies to write about their companies. My only compensation will be my investment gains and what subscribers pay.