The discount is a question. We intend to answer it in public.

Canadian companies change hands for less than comparable American ones. That sentence has been true for long enough that most people on either side of the border have stopped asking why. Fund managers quote it as a feature of the terrain. Promoters quote it as a reason to buy whatever they happen to be selling. We started this publication because neither answer satisfied us.

A discount is a price. A price is the market's current opinion. Sometimes the opinion is lazy: a thin trading line, a filing system American investors have never opened, a currency they have to think about, a sector they stopped following in 2012. Sometimes the opinion is right: a company that needs to raise money every eighteen months is cheap for a reason, and the reason is on page forty of the annual information form. Our job is to work out which, one company at a time, and to show the work.

So here is what this letter will do. Every two weeks or so, we will tell you what the desk has been reading, what it concluded, and what would make it wrong. The research briefs do the heavy lifting; the letter is where we say what we think. We will write as "we", because a small group of people reads the filings and argues about them before anything is published, and nobody here wants the sentence "I think" standing between a reader and a number.

Here is what it will not do. It will not tell you what to buy. It will not use the vocabulary of urgency that the stock-promotion business runs on. It will not pretend a company presentation is an audited statement. It will not publish a figure without a date, a currency and a document you can open yourself. If we cannot verify a number, we will say so and leave the field blank, because a blank is honest and a guess is not.

We are starting with the themes where the gap between how Canada is talked about and how it is documented is widest: uranium, copper, gold, energy, defense, and the small bench of technology companies the American market rarely prices. The first briefs are already in the library. Two companies at a time, the macro case first, the bear case at the same type size as the bull case.

One habit we promise to keep: every piece ends with the thing that would change our view. Not a summary, not a flourish. A date, a number, or a decision that we will be watching for, so that when it arrives you can judge us by it.

What would change our view of this project itself is simple. If, after a year, the briefs have not helped a reader understand a Canadian filing better than they did before, we will have written a newsletter rather than a research desk.

We will say so.