BMO adviser Donald Coxe to halt long-running newsletter – by Martin Mittelstaedt (Globe and Mail – October 30, 2012)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Donald Coxe, one of Canada’s best known stock-market prognosticators, plans to cease publishing his market letter.

For the past 20 years, Mr. Coxe has been issuing massive 10,000- to 12,000-word missives outlining his investing views, laced with a healthy dose of his conservative political philosophy. But at 76, he’s decided to hang up his pen to concentrate on investment advice for the funds he helps manage.

December will mark the last issue of his Basic Points newsletter, which has recently been appearing once every two months.

As an investment writer, Mr. Coxe is best known for his view that the financial world is in the middle of a “commodity super cycle.” That’s a long period during which the prices of energy, food, metals and other raw materials rise – in the current instance, driven by the rapid growth of emerging economies.

Mr. Coxe said producing a market letter while also working as an investment strategy adviser at the Bank of Montreal, which distributes his newsletter, has been a strain.

“I’m only young compared to people like Warren Buffett,” he quipped. “Other strategists have lots of young CFAs working for them. I don’t have anything like that. I do my own work.”

Mr. Coxe began his prognosticating career with Basic Points at one of BMO’s forerunner firms, Nesbitt Thomson, back in October, 1992.

“I feel pretty good about the fact that it’s managed to last for 20 years. In the financial world not many one-person publications survive that long,” he said.

Although Mr. Coxe has worked as an investment strategist and money manager, he got into the writing end of the business to capitalize on the popularity of client reports he gave customers, which began to be circulated by hand throughout Bay Street.

He remains convinced that stocks benefiting from higher commodity prices are the place to be, although not all are equally desirable.

For the rest of this article, please go to the Globe and Mail website: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ideas/bmo-adviser-donald-coxe-to-halt-long-running-newsletter/article4747918/