Opinions
Michael Bowman A Comment -- General Comments From an Expert A Commentary N/A Aug 27, 2015
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For the TSX, recent moves are probably not due to earnings. The tariffs were a bit of a wakeup call. The headlines are pretty scary, but things may not be as bad as they looked at first blush. When you really look into it, MUSCA is still in place and protects about 85-90% of the trade we do with the US.
Canada also has agency to start looking at better trade relations with Europe and Asia. We started shipping our LNG. He's actually fairly bullish on Canada.
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.
Markets. He has never seen the market so oversold as it was on the weekend. Has trouble with the 10% correction. The rally back to uneven has to be longer than 24 hours. Doesn’t think it was a correction, but doesn’t know what it was. If you look at the cause of it on Monday, a couple of hedge funds in the US along with the US$, were quite offside and they were going to shut down the position to hedge that position, and shorted the S&P 500. We have to look at our conventional way of valuing stocks. It is different this time. Stock markets are not driven by analysis; they are driven basically by investor behaviour. We have all kinds of issues in the marketplace now. We have to re-evaluate things and realize that markets are driven by weather, terrorism, geopolitical events, etc. 84% of trades are done by computer trading and only 16% are done by individuals. We have to be looking at stock charts because it tells you what the actions of investors were, throughout that time period of looking at the chart. Investor psychology and investor behaviour is what now drives the marketplace.