During the last election campaign, Prime Minister Stephen Harper came in for a little heat when he said, in response to a question from CBC's Peter Mansbridge, that the collapse in equity prices meant that ” there's probably a lot of great buying opportunities emerging.”
Ottawa Citizen reporter Glen McGregor quickly put up HarperDex.ca (mostly, he says, as a fun exercise in some Web programming techniques). The idea was simple: If you had invested $1,000 in the S&P/TSX Composite Index the day after Harper said “Buy”, the HarperDex will tell you what that $1,000 is worth.
McGregor says that, in the 136 trading days since the Buy Call, HarperDex has closed out of the red 14 times.
At 1 pm, with the TSX trending up today, you would now be up $4.12 on your $1,000 investment from the Harper “Buy Call”.
If I'd followed PM Harper's musings that there were probably some good buying opportunities, the Google shares I should have bought then at around $275 are now up to $389.