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CALGARY — Financial planner Shawn Lantz of Edmonton says he knew the marijuana industry hype was getting out of hand when he got a call from an elderly client recently.

“She’s a 68-year-old grandma … She phones me up and says, ‘Shawn, my kids bought this weed stock and it’s making lots of money. Should I buy some, too?”‘

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He asked what she knew about the company, had she looked it up on the internet, was it profitable and, if not, could she afford to wait until it was making money to recover her funds? She confessed she hadn’t done any of that and reluctantly agreed to sleep on it.

“She phoned me up the following day because that stock went down about 20 per cent,” Lantz said.

“She said, ‘I don’t care how much money that stock would have made, I just couldn’t handle that kind of up-and-down in my portfolio.”‘

Financial experts say managing their clients’ expectations is getting increasingly complicated as interest in the cannabis industry surges ahead of legalization in Canada, despite fear that the sector is either already in or headed for “bubble” status — overinflated by investor enthusiasm to the point where value explodes with a mighty “pop!”