Key Takeaways
- Boreal Markets was founded to fill a gap in Canadian financial journalism: honest, independent analysis for retail investors rather than Bay Street cheerleading.
- We operate under strict editorial independence no sponsored content published as editorial, no undisclosed conflicts, no coverage in exchange for advertising.
- Our obligation is to the reader, not to the companies we cover, the banks that advertise with us, or the promoters who would prefer silence.
- Two years in, we’re proud of what we’ve built and committed to the principles that make it worth building.
Two years ago, I left a comfortable position at a well-known Canadian financial media company to start Boreal Markets. My colleagues thought I was making a mistake. My family was worried. My accountant was, diplomatically, concerned. I started Boreal Markets anyway, and two years in, I want to be honest with you about why and about the principles that guide everything we do here.
This isn’t a standard editorial policy statement. I find those useful as reference documents but thin as actual explanations of what a publication believes. What I want to do instead is tell you the story of why Boreal Markets exists, what makes us different from what was here before, and what we owe you as a reader who chooses to trust us with your time and, implicitly, your investment thinking.
The Gap I Saw
Before I started this publication, I spent twelve years covering Canadian capital markets first as a sell-side analyst at a major bank, then as a journalist and editor at two established Canadian financial media companies. Both those experiences taught me something I couldn’t ignore: the gap between what retail investors needed and what they were getting from Canadian financial media was enormous, and growing.
The sell-side exists to generate transaction revenue. That doesn’t make sell-side analysts dishonest many of the people I worked with were genuinely trying to produce useful research. But the business model creates systematic pressure toward bullishness. Initiating coverage with a “Sell” rating generates no relationship capital with the company, no access for future IPO mandates, no goodwill from investor relations teams. Initiating with a “Buy” does. Over time, that pressure shapes what gets written and how.
The financial media landscape had its own version of this problem. The business model for most Canadian financial media in 2022 was built on a combination of advertising, content marketing dressed up as editorial, and in the junior mining space what I’ll call pay-to-play coverage, where companies paid for profile pieces that appeared in editorial formats without clear disclosure.
I don’t want to overstate the dysfunction. There were and are excellent journalists doing honest work in Canadian financial media. But the incentive structures were misaligned in ways that made it very hard to publish consistently honest analysis about specific companies, specific sectors, and specific investment risks. I saw that gap and thought: someone needs to try something different.
What Editorial Independence Actually Means Here
I want to be specific about what we do and don’t do at Boreal Markets, because I think the words “editorial independence” get used loosely enough that they’ve lost some meaning.
We accept advertising. We are not a charity, and producing quality financial journalism at the depth and frequency we publish requires revenue. Companies can buy display advertising on Boreal Markets. They cannot buy editorial coverage. The line between those two things is bright, explicit, and enforced. If a company that advertises with us does something we believe our readers should know about a missed milestone, a dilutive financing, a management departure that matters we will cover it honestly, or our senior editors will want to know why we didn’t.
We disclose conflicts. If I hold a position in a company I’m writing about, I say so. If any Boreal Markets staff member holds a position in a company they are covering, that is disclosed in the article. This is non-negotiable. I believe that good analysis can coexist with disclosed conflicts, but undisclosed conflicts are a form of dishonesty toward readers that I will not tolerate.
We do not accept payment for editorial coverage. There is no “premium package” that gets a company more favorable mentions. There is no IR relationship that comes with implicit expectations about the tone of our coverage. We have turned down significant revenue from companies that wanted to buy editorial influence. I expect we will continue to do so.
What We Still Get Wrong
I want to be honest about our limitations, because I think that honesty is itself a test of the principles I’m describing. We are a small team. We cannot cover every company, every sector, every story that matters to Canadian retail investors. We make editorial judgment calls about what to prioritize, and those judgment calls are inevitably imperfect. Sometimes we miss a story that matters. Sometimes we over-invest in a theme that doesn’t develop the way we expected.
We have also made factual errors. When we do, we correct them promptly and transparently, with a dated correction notice at the top of the article. Our corrections policy is published on the site and it is not aspirational it describes what we actually do. I think the willingness to correct errors visibly and without defensiveness is one of the more important signals of editorial integrity, and I am proud that it’s a genuine practice at Boreal Markets rather than a policy that lives only in a style guide.
What We Owe You
We owe you honest reporting. We owe you the willingness to publish analysis that isn’t popular with issuers, promoters, or advertisers when that analysis is what the evidence supports. We owe you transparency about who we are, how we’re funded, and where we might have interests that could color our judgment. We owe you corrections when we get it wrong. And we owe you the intellectual respect of writing for an audience that is capable of handling complexity, uncertainty, and the occasional uncomfortable truth about markets or investments they hold.
What we don’t owe you is a bullish take on everything. We don’t owe the TSX-V a promotional presence. We don’t owe Bay Street deference. We don’t owe any company the kind of positive coverage that turns a financial news outlet into a marketing vehicle. The day we start providing those things is the day Boreal Markets stops being worth reading.
The Bottom Line
Boreal Markets exists because Canadian retail investors deserve financial journalism that works for them rather than for the companies they’re investing in. Two years in, I believe we are delivering on that promise more days than not. The work of building something genuinely independent in a media landscape that makes independence difficult is ongoing and imperfect. But it’s the work I care most about doing, and I’m grateful every day for a readership that makes it possible.