Looking at oil and gas stocks this year? Think small and Canadian, at least according to the world’s leading energy fund manager.

“Canada is, I think, the place to be in 2022,” said Eric Nuttall of Toronto’s Ninepoint Partners LP. His $950 million (US$752 million) Ninepoint Energy Fund was Morningstar’s top-performing energy-focused fund in 2021, posting a 189 per cent total return that blew away the S&P/TSX Composite Index’s 22 per cent. The second-best performer, Canoe Energy Portfolio Class, is another Canadian energy-focused fund and posted a total return of 101 per cent last year.

Nutall was helped by the overall surge in energy stocks, the best sector in the S&P 500 Index and S&P/TSX last year, and the more than 50 per cent rebound in oil prices as economies reopened and the pandemic receded. The performance comes after a string of difficult — he calls them “soul sucking” — years investing in the oil and gas business.

“I just thought I had to make it to the other side, then I’d be the last man standing,” he said.

Energy investors in 2021 benefitted from what Nuttall called a “disproportionate” increase in smaller-cap Canadian energy companies like Baytex Energy Corp. and Cardinal Energy Ltd., both of which rose over 420 per cent last year. But the fund’s most prescient trade was buying 53 million shares of beleaguered oil sands producer Athabasca Oil Corp. from Norway’s state oil company Equinor ASA in January 2021…read more.

Crypto investors mean that as a compliment of the highest order. Their growing obsession with cubes of tungsten, a material admired for its tightly packed particle structure, hit a new high this week.

What happened: A group of investors called the TungstenDAO purchased an NFT of a 2-ton (but just over 14 dainty inches) tungsten cube for 56.9 ether, or about $250,000. The NFT comes with the right to visit the cube once a year in its private storage room at the Illinois headquarters of its manufacturer, Midwest Tungsten Service.

From metal → meme

Midwest Tungsten Service makes tungsten for industrial uses, but started selling small cubes of the metal in 2015 as desktop knickknacks. That soon evolved into a meme when ridiculous Amazon reviews piled up exalting the “intensity of its density.”

Then, this year, influential crypto investors like Coin Center’s Director of Communications Neeraj K. Agrawal went full magpie on the metal. A few tweets later and Midwest Tungsten Service’s Amazon store sold out…read more.

EdTech is the catch phrase often used to describe the ever-increasing use of technology, educational theories, online delivery platforms and virtual classrooms to facilitate student learning. The EdTech industry is a diverse and rapidly growing market which includes early-stage startups, middle-market companies, and more recently, publicly traded companies that are attracting significant attention from industry veterans as well as retail investors.

Benefits like increased student collaboration, 24/7 access to learning, personalized educational experiences, class management tools and paperless classrooms continue to improve. And the global education market is expected to surpass $285.2 billion by 2027 – growing at a rate of 18.1% according to Grand View Research.

One of the most recent offerings comes via veteran e-commerce ad management and automation company Adcore (TSX:ADCO). Founded in 2006 the company went public on the TSX Venture exchange in 2019 just prior to the pandemic, and despite the timing, has more than met investor expectations for world-wide growth and expansion, as evidenced by their elevation to the TSX main board in March of 2021.

On July 21st the company announced the launch of Amphy, a live, active participation platform that specializes in connecting teachers to a global audience of students. It features a broad selection of classes on topics ranging from business and language instruction, to cooking and fitness, with particularly strong emphasis on instruction for both kids and young adults.

The secret sauce for Amphy is the live, fully interactive nature of the platform. No static recordings, powerpoint slide decks or re-hashed, out of date offerings. The personal connection and personalized feedback makes for highly effective learning – correcting language pronunciation in real time, immediate feedback on a musical instrument, swapping ingredients in a cooking class, critiquing a yoga pose – examples of what can only be achieved in a live environment.

From a business model perspective Amphy employs the same philosophy as Adcore’s digital advertising platforms. Provide a outstanding user experience for clients (teachers and students), offer seamless back-end systems (payment and billing, scheduling, reminders, administration), and drive the platform using cutting edge digital technology.

Only 6 months after its beta launch the platform has 200+ teachers, offering over 800 classes in 70 different categories, being accessed and purchased by thousands of students. “We’ve been overwhelmed by the positive feedback and rapid growth of the Amphy marketplace in such a short time,” explained Adcore CEO Omri Brill. “Amphy is the right product, at the right time, done the right way.”

For investors, Adcore’s commitment to support Amphy with continued capital investment, plus technical and marketing support, bodes well for their plan to become a dominant player in the live-learning market. Shareholders in Adcore now have the opportunity to participate in the rapidly expanding segments of both AdTech and EdTech – a multi-stream value driver of significant potential.