A game noir from the mind of Stan Douglas + MORE Apr 21st

National Film Board of Canada
The Vancouver of 1948 could have fallen out of the pages of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled fiction. Prostitutes, gamblers and corrupt cops worked Hogan’s Alley, a racially mixed eastside area of mean clapboard houses, booze cans and jazz joints. The once-grand downtown Hotel Vancouver had been replaced by a newer version a block away. It was in a state of terminal decay, home to bookies, homeless war veterans and others down on their luck. For Vancouver’s Stan Douglas, an internationally renowned photographer and visual artist, it is an era with parallels to the economic meltdown of 2008-09: “transitional moments” of financial hardship, institutional collapse and uncertainty.
These were human stories worth illustrating, and to do so Douglas set aside his cameras and entered a partnership with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) to produce Circa 1948, an interactive digital recreation of those two lost landmarks—the alley and the hotel—and the equally lost denizens who inhabited them…

TORONTO – Falling mining stocks pushed the Toronto stock market slightly lower Monday as traders look to a heavy slate of earnings news coming out during the week.
The S&P/TSX composite index declined 5.88 points to 14,494.51. The Canadian dollar was down 0.04 of a cent to 90.76 cents US.
U.S. indexes were positive with the Dow Jones industrials up 28.35 points to 16,436.89, the Nasdaq composite index was ahead 8.56 points to 4,104.07 while the S&P 500 index climbed 3.38 points to 1,868.23.
On Monday, traders will look to results coming in after the close from Rogers Communications (TSX:RCI.B). Rogers acquired additional wireless spectrum during the January auction for $3.3 billion, which will be needed to allow consumers to stream NHL games on their mobile devices. Rogers scored a $5.2-billion multi-year deal for the national rights to all NHL games last fall and its shares climbed 15 cents to $44.42.
“There’s a bit of a transition going on in that industry,” said Craig Fehr, Canadian markets specialist at Edward Jones in St…

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CALGARY – Smart Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:SMT) (TSX:SMA), a developer of electronic white boards used for education and business applications, says co-founders David Martin and Nancy Knowlton have resigned from the board of directors — triggering the end of the company’s multiple-vote shares.
As a result, the largest group of votes is now held by funds advised by Apax partners, with 31.1 per cent. About 31 per cent of its shares were widely held as of Thursday, ahead of the holiday weekend.
Martin and Knowlton had 23.5 per cent of the class A voting shares after converting about 79,500 class B multiple-vote shares as of April 17, the effective day of their resignation, and semiconductor giant Intel Corp., had 14.4 per cent.
Martin has been replaced as chairman of the company’s board by Robert Hagerty, who has been a director of Smart Technologies since July 2010.
Smart Technologies became a publicly traded company amid high expectations on July 15, 2010, when its stock opened at C$18…

I love writing on this blog and over the time what I’ve been writing about has changed significantly but one thing has remained. Mondays are my favorite day because I’m usually able to open a new long & short tech trade. I started last weekend with that exact intention once I saw I’d have a free spot. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens, I didn’t find a trade that I felt good about. A few years ago, I would have forced myself to find one but I’ve learned the hard way that those usually don’t work out. Just as a reminder, when looking for possible trades, I do the following:
-start with the list of tech stocks that I follow
-remove stocks that I currently have positions on
-take out stocks that are reporting earnings in the next few days (as we enter the earnings period, that takes out quite a few)
-remove stocks that I don’t have a good feeling about and would rather not trade (most China-based stocks, Blackberry, Groupon, Twitter, etc)
-stocks that I do not have a good enough sense of in terms of valuation
Once I did that, I ended up with 5 stocks! I usually get 12-15 or so from which I look for pairs…