The 10 Greatest Acquisitions in Canadian and U.S. Stock Market History
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Investing is simple, but don't confuse that with thinking it's easy. A stock is not just a ticker. At the end of the day, you have to remember that it's a business.
Just my reminder to people who own cyclicals, don't be surprised when there's a cycle.
If there's uncertainty in the markets, there's going to be some great opportunities for investors.
This has to be one of the biggest quarters I've seen from this company in quite some time.
Welcome to the Canadian Investor Podcast. I'm Simon Belanger. I'm back with Dan Kent. We have a fun episode today. So we'll be talking about the greatest acquisitions in Canadian history. Well, you'll be talking about those and I'll be talking about the top five acquisitions in U.S. public markets. I think it'll be fun. We'll do it back and forth. You have four. I have five on the U.S. side and also Canada. Just a few honorable mentions because there are some big acquisitions that happen in the U.S. And of course, this is subjective.
Yeah.
So clearly, let us know if you don't agree with these assessments, especially at least for me on the U.S. side, like especially number four and five. I had a lot to choose from. And spoiler alert, a lot of tech names. But I think it's going to be a fun episode. I had... Took me quite a bit of time to do the research and go back to like original articles because I said, I think I used a timeframe of the last 50 years. So the best one, the last 50 years for me.
Yeah, this segment took quite a bit of time. I initially thought about it because we had talked about it a while, that Tormont acquisition of AVL, that kind of generator housing and switchgear company.
What criteria do Simon and Dan use to define the 'greatest' acquisitions?
I kind of thought that is a very good acquisition. Obviously, it's too early to determine whether it will be as successful as a lot of the ones we'll talk about, but I kind of thought it would be a good segment to go over. some of the bigger swings in Canada and then you obviously in the United States. And the one thing, as you had mentioned, I'm sure we missed some. It's very hard to nail this down precisely, especially in the US market. The Canadian one was a a bit more obvious but it still took a lot of digging and you know going back to like you mentioned articles from like the 90s to kind of get prices and like the reasonings why and stuff so yeah if you have any opinions on you know ones you think are better just let us know and maybe we'll dig into them and do a v2 version 2 episode
Yeah, exactly. And just before we get started, just some housekeeping here. You'll probably notice in the next couple of weeks that our podcast cover will change. So we're going over some rebranding here. So we're close to having the new podcast cover finalized. So just be on the lookout. Don't be surprised. Just want to give people a heads up if they do see it. So they're like, oh, what's this show? It'll still say the Canadian investor on it, but you'll see a different podcast. podcast cover as well for the show that Dan Foch and I do. So our live recording that we've named the Canadian Macro Investor. So just be aware of those. There's going to be two different covers for that show and the one that Dan and I do.
So just a little bit of housekeeping. So let's get started. So Dan, you'll start since you have four and then we'll go back and forth. So you'll do one on the Canadian side. I'll do one on the U.S. side.
Yeah, so the first one would be Alimentation Cousteau buying Circle K. So I think this would be one that would be hard to debate as to whether or not it would be one of the greatest acquisitions from a Canadian company. So back in 2003. They took a pretty gigantic swing and bought Circle K from ConocoPhillips. CouchTard is up around 6,500% from this point. That wouldn't be including reinvested dividends. And this acquisition is mainly the reason why. So... I'm pretty certain back then I kind of looked up market caps. They were like Custard was around a $500 million company. And that would have been in Canadian dollars. And it ended up paying just more than $1 billion for Circle K. So you're talking about more than twice the size of the company.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–1:45
2
What criteria do Simon and Dan use to define the 'greatest' acquisitions?
1:45–15:54
3
How did Alimentation Couche‑Tard's 2003 acquisition of Circle K transform the company?
15:54–47:35
4
How did Apple’s 1997 purchase of NeXT save and reshape Apple into a tech giant?
47:35–51:05
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Canadian Investor
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