When Lewis Hamilton lines up at the Canadian Grand Prix this weekend, one Quebec millionaire will be watching with more than a passing interest.
His name is Luc Poirier, and he grew up on welfare in subsidized housing in Greater Montreal.
Today he owns 38 Ferraris stored in a secret warehouse a few kilometers from the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve. The cars include a Daytona SP3, the model that sold at auction for a record $26 million last year.
The path from one to the other started with hockey cards.
At 14, Poirier set up a booth at hockey card shows, where his mom helped him sort packs at the kitchen table and spot a pricing gap his older competitors had missed.
Quebec collectors paid up for French-Canadian players like Pierre Turgeon, Stephane Richer, and Patrick Roy, while the rest of North America wanted Hull, Yzerman, and Gretzky.
So Poirier traded one set for the other, swapping his Quebec stars to local friends in exchange for the English-Canadian superstars and then selling those at a markup to dealers across the broader continent.
It was a classic arbitrage play - buy low in one market, sell high in another. Within two years he had gone from a kid bullied for being poor to driving a Porsche to school.
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The hockey card money funded a computer store on Chambly Road called Services Info, where Poirier picked up a truckload of diskettes at $7 a pack when the going rate was $20.
He sold them at cost and made his margins on everything else in the store, which let him grow to three locations within a couple of years and drop out of the University of Ottawa entrepreneurship program.
His real estate career started by accident, after the landlord on his first store went bankrupt and the bank called to ask if Poirier wanted to buy the building.
He said no, changed his mind a few weeks later, and now real estate is the whole business. His most attention-grabbing recent deal: selling a McMasterville land parcel to the Quebec government for $240 million for a planned Northvolt battery factory, a project the province later abandoned in September 2025 after Northvolt's bankruptcy.
He also has an Embraer jet, a finished Iron Man race, and a climb up the north side of Mount Everest, after reportedly learning to swim only five weeks before the Iron Man.
Buying Ferraris and other vintage cars is now its own corner of luxury investing, with vintage cars rising roughly 185% over the past decade.
But the story underneath the cars is a 14-year-old who spotted a pricing gap and traded it until the gap closed.
That gap was the first thing he ever bought low and sold high.
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