The Take Down
Issue #012, Fireworks, birthday karaoke, and eight cheap stocks
Hi, it’s Caroline.
This was one of those weeks where the calendar looked normal on Monday and then somehow contained a national holiday, a belated Father’s Day, an early birthday party, and a Dollarama slime operation. Reader, we contain multitudes.
Also, I got my highlights done for the first time in four months. If you’ve ever built a content business out of your house, you know exactly how a person goes four months without a hair appointment. It happens one “I’ll book it next week” at a time.
This week on Ticker Take: 8 Quality Stocks Cheap Right Now
Thursday we released our conversation with Lorne Steinberg, and the title says it all: “8 Quality Stocks Cheap Right Now.”
Lorne is a true value investor, which means he spends his time hunting for great businesses the market has temporarily fallen out of love with. It’s a wonderful counterweight to a market that mostly wants to talk about AI every single day. Quality plus patience plus a good price. It sounds simple. It is not easy.
If you like the part of investing where you actually get a list of names to go research, this one’s for you.
AI Under the Hood: Agentjacking
Monday’s AI Under the Hood went somewhere a little darker: “Agentjacking.”
It’s a term coined by Tenet, a startup focused on exactly this problem. Here’s the short version. As companies deploy AI agents to do real work, attackers are learning to hijack those same agents and turn them into the threat. Which means cybersecurity, already a massive industry, is getting a whole new layer.
Beyond Tenet, I talked about the established security players positioned for the moment, names like Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Zscaler. When the robots start hijacking the robots, somebody has to play defense, and investors have noticed.
The Week
Monday. Kickboxing for me in the morning, then Jon did a Zoom interview with an upcoming guest while I turned the house back into a studio. We recorded tops and tails in Studio 3 for upcoming episodes. (Studio 3 is a corner of our house. All of our studios are corners of our house.) AI Under the Hood went out.
Tuesday. Highlights, finally.
Then edits, and then a trip to Dollarama with the girls to stock up on slime supplies. Nothing keeps teenagers busy like a chemistry experiment you can buy for six dollars.
Wednesday. Canada Day. Kickboxing in the morning, then a belated Father’s Day lunch at Joeys with my sister and my dad.
Then a casual family dinner out and fireworks at the beach. Fun fact: we’re American citizens too, but we’ve been back in Canada for ten years now, and watching fireworks over the water in our own neighbourhood never gets old.
Thursday. The Lorne Steinberg episode went live. Jon went on the JD Durkin show at the NYSE, beamed in over Zoom from the house, meetings with partners, and one daughter got a haircut. A full-spectrum day.
Friday. Kickboxing, then a day of the invisible work: calls, partner strategy, event prep, and planning sessions for where this whole thing goes next. More on that below.
Saturday. My family threw me an early birthday celebration, complete with karaoke.
Dinner at Casa Madera
Karaoke at Bar+
My actual birthday is July 14, but we’ll be away, so we moved the party up. I regret nothing about my song choices. We sang hits from icons like Roxette, Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Natasha Bedingfield, to name a few. Oh, and my bro-in-law started the night off with “Sweet Caroline!” And we ended it with The Greatest Showman. Jon sang a bunch and took it home with “Unwritten.” My nephews sang “Rein Me In” and we played it on the way home and the entire next day. Such an amazing song!
Sunday. Grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning, walk the dog, set up for our Monday shoot, and try to chill. Even the content machine folds towels.
The business behind the business
Here’s a part of the job that never shows up on camera: this week had a lot of strategy in it.
Between the recordings and the releases, we were deep in partner conversations, event prep, work on an ad campaign, and the bigger-picture planning that a media company actually runs on. When it’s just the two of you, there’s no strategy department down the hall. The strategy department is us, at the kitchen table, usually with cold coffee.
What we keep coming back to is this: the content is the engine, but the partnerships, the events, and the long-term bets are the steering wheel. You can’t just make videos and hope. You have to keep asking where the whole thing is headed, which brands and platforms you want beside you for the ride, and what you’re building toward two years out, not two weeks out.
And speaking of building toward something: the big project we’ve hinted at before is still very much in the works. Progress this week, real progress. I still can’t tell you what it is. But when I can, you’ll hear it here first, and I promise the wait will make sense.
Jon’s AM vs. Caroline’s PM
Jon’s mornings this week: guest interviews, the JD Durkin hit, partner meetings, market prep.
My evenings: editing, thumbnails, slime logistics, birthday party planning, and mentally packing for the trips ahead.
Somewhere in the middle, we run a company. And apparently also a strategy department.
The Wins This Week
The Lorne Steinberg episode is live. A proper value investing masterclass with actual stock names attached.
Jon on the JD Durkin show at the NYSE. Over Zoom this time, which means he made it to the Exchange without leaving the kitchen. Efficiency.
Real momentum on the big project. Still classified. Still exciting.
Highlights after four months. A win for me, my mirror, and every thumbnail I appear in going forward.
Early birthday karaoke. Family, cake, and a microphone.
The Losses This Week
Four months, though. Let’s not gloss over that. Four months between hair appointments is not a schedule, it’s a cry for help.
The slime is everywhere now. We made it to keep the girls busy. It worked. It is also on things.
A holiday week is still a work week. Canada Day fell on a Wednesday, and the videos do not know it’s a holiday.
The takeaway
Lorne’s whole philosophy is that quality plus patience wins. You find something good, you commit, and you let time do the heavy lifting.
I’d like to formally submit that this also describes marriage, parenting, kickboxing, and building a media company out of your house. This week had a national holiday, a birthday party, a Father’s Day lunch, several videos out the door, and a whole layer of strategy work nobody will ever see on YouTube. None of it was dramatic. All of it compounds.
Quality, patience, and showing up. That’s the portfolio.
See you next week.
Caroline
P.S. If you haven’t subscribed to Jon’s Substack for the actual market takes, do that too. You’ll get both sides of our brain.