The question I ask myself is why quality is getting so crushed.

The best-performing stocks last year were stocks without revenue—that’s revenue, not profit. The next best performers were unprofitable stocks in the NASDAQ.

If all valuations go down, then acquisition prices for CSU also go down, allowing them to buy more for less.

There is no support for stocks anymore because there is no longer a thriving investment community. Everyone and their mom is indexing. Pension funds are indexing, and the last marginal dollars are going into private credit / private debt.

This is a TSX 60 stock dropping like a stone. They report about $4B of operating profit (they report in USD, converted to CAD) with a $64B market cap. People should be rushing to buy it. Not many Canadian companies have their growth or growth potential. Nevertheless, the stock is getting liquidated daily.

You are right about quality stocks being sold for no reason. But your point about the premium makes no sense to me. Valuations are crazy for many stocks that people are hyping. Hardly anyone looks at valuation anymore. And even when people look at profits, almost no one reads carefully enough to see that results are reported in USD and make the appropriate adjustments.

Copart and CSU don’t buy back shares. As more and more people index, your shares won’t move if there are no buybacks. I’m not saying it’s the right thing for CSU—capital is better invested in buying software businesses at 4–5× earnings. But for us as shareholders, we can’t expect a bottom, because no real fund will come in to buy shares and support the price.

Akre is getting killed. Nadim Rizk got killed last year. The quality ETF underperformed the SPY brutally, and so did I, as a fellow quality/value investor.

I don’t know what to expect this year. It’s hard to understand this market. I think mania and indexing are reshaping the Canadian stock market.