Opinions
Patrick Horan A Comment -- General Comments From an Expert A Commentary N/A Jul 20, 2015
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Believes momentum will continue. What's holding us back are Donald Trump's tariffs, which are very specific. About 90% of goods are moving across the border tariff-free under USMCA. It's a very complicated setup.
On the other hand, our economy's been "liberated" by turning on a big gas and a big oil export facility on the West Coast. These have pumped a lot of $$ into the Canadian economy. Gold production with the price rising has also added a lot.
The pessimism around Trump's noise has flattened the housing market. But we are going to get rate cuts, which should hopefully rekindle that market. Bruce's wife is in real estate, and so he's had feedback that housing is starting to pick up a bit.
The TACO part of Trump is coming through, and people are starting to ignore Trump and just get on with their lives. The outlook looks very good.
Canada has lots of technology expertise, so we're well-equipped for the AI revolution and will benefit from that.
For Canadian energy, we're finally turning on exports to countries other than the US (who always paid us at a discount). So now that we'll get a better price, Canadian energy is probably in for a better run than the world is. Canada enabled Putin 20 years ago, because we wouldn't build pipelines and he did.
The unemployment rate remains the same. But the job-loss number isn't too surprising given that we are expecting a bit of softness in the Canadian economy in the middle 2 quarters of the year. Jobs market will continue to be a bit choppy, especially with the push and pull between part-time and full-time.
That Canadian manufacturing posted gains is surprising, but is probably just a result of the ebbs and flows of the economy. And there's the tariff issue affecting everything.
In the US, technology makes sense. Financials also make a lot of sense in this environment. Likes industrials, they've been right at the top of the 11 sectors so far this year in terms of performance. Among the very diverse healthcare industries, you have to be selective; some names have been beaten up, others have held up quite well.
He's being very selective in the Canadian market and somewhat cautious.
When you look at the US market, we're seeing about 8.5-9% YOY Q2 growth. That's more than expected. Good news. Technology continues to lead -- great reports from MSFT, NVDA, GOOG over the last month or so. About 81-82% of US companies so far this quarter have beaten earnings expectations.
The word he'd use right now would be "resilient".
In his portfolio he has AMZN, AAPL, GOOG, and NVDA. Those are the names he favours. META screens well, but he doesn't own it because you can't have 90% of a portfolio in tech/Mag 7 names. MSFT always seems expensive.
TSLA is a different animal entirely, based on expensive valuation. Concerned about management and where management attention is at any given moment.
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Markets. After the decline of today, the mandate of not investing in resources is feeling pretty good. When his portfolio was started about 8 years ago, resources had really had their best time and he felt okay on missing out on a couple of good years. Gold is a pretty good barometer of inflation, and given how much it fell today, he’ll be looking for the hard value guys to come in and support the price. It had felt like capitulation. People are selling because the price is down, as opposed to having a view that there is something fundamentally that has changed. Gold companies right now are trading somewhere pre-2001 levels. It is phenomenal that they have not made a return for 20 years. He would be surprised if gold did not have better days in front of it. Believes in the strong US$ and that the US have their act together. They are building sort of a new economic platform, based mostly off the consumer at this point. Feels Canada is not very far behind. Expects the dollar to continue getting strength, but where it is going to get this from is not going to be the same as where it got it from over the past couple of years, primarily the euro and other developed markets. Thinks its strength will come from pockets of emerging markets. The stronger US$ means you have to be a little bit more selective. You want to be in stocks that have high barriers to entry, so they can offset some of the dollar pressure with price increases. You want to be in domestic consumer oriented stocks. Technology and banking stocks fit into this category.