Did you know Dollarama had a big share sale last year? I didn’t. I didn’t even know they had an IPO in the first place. It’s hard to know for sure how a stock like that will perform, but this graph is, to me, at least, not entirely unexpected:

IPO price in 2009 was just over $17. So it’s been like this a while now.

I’m not sure I’d have been willing to toss 5 grand (the minimum purchase last December) on that bet, but it definitely seems like a sensible investment – dollar stores are a super-low-margin business, but Dollarama absolutely dominates the market in my neck of the woods. That suggests they’ve got a formula that’s working very well for them, which translates into a reasonably good bet, as investments go. Growth might not be in the hundreds of percentage points, but it’s likely they haven’t capped the market quite yet.

I learned about their offering from the “IPO Centre” at Questrade, where I’ve started a self-managed RRSP. I’ll be posting occasionally about how that’s working out.

Thus far, opening the account has been the biggest challenge. I’m not sure exactly what Questrade’s deal is, but they phoned me a bunch of times to try to get me to fill up the baseline $1000 investment purse in the first week or so I was with them. That wasn’t the greatest experience, to be honest, but there was never a consequence attached, so I ignored it. The really weird part, though, is that despite not yet having reached that baseline, it appears that my account is open for business.

When you log in you’re dropped into their Trading dashboard, which looks like this:

Money and identifiers cropped out because I like to keep my own things, thanks.

I like this interface, and those bits along the left hand side seem pretty useful, although the News bit is…well, let’s just say I know I’m going to have to develop my own research discipline for what I want to do here.

I figure I’ll spend the next couple of months just watching and researching, and then I’ll actually start doing trades. There are things that would be nice to move on immediately (various blockchain currencies, for example), but investment is a long run deal, so I’ll hold off until I feel halfway informed about at least the basics.

I’m an investment novice, but if you have any questions, leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to offer or find answers to them.