Stock price when the opinion was issued
He's been buying. Great valuation, holding-company discount, decent growth rate of 6-8%. Nice dividend with a good payout ratio. Technically over its skis, but likes the name long term. Better entry at $44-45.
Only problem is that when bull markets start to give way to bear markets, people look for areas immune from tariffs. If the economy rights itself, and you see $$ going into names like tech again, this type of name will fall off. If we go into a real downturn, money will leave the market and this name will go lower along with everything else.
The theme for today is "What wins Stanley Cups is defense." Very defensive name. Rare combination of dividend that grows every year by ~7%, value, resilience. Trades at discount of 23% to NAV; he expects this to narrow to 10-15% as the company scales more into alternative assets.
Tepid sentiment on GWO has provided an opportunity to buy; now has upwards earnings momentum. Trades at 9x PE, growing at 14.6%. May be able to get it slightly cheaper. Yield is 4.80%.
With rates going down, you could consider a fixed-rate preferred. He's been buying POW.PR.D, yielding about 6.1%. Beauty of it is that it doesn't reset, it's perpetual. So if the BOC moves rates lower, these preferred shares won't reset to a lower level. Gets more valuable as the BOC lowers interest rates.
Feels the problem over the last decade or so, is that they used to sit on cash and then jump at opportunities, but haven't really been jumping at acquisitions recently. There hasn't been any growth in the mutual fund industry or even at Great West (GWO-T). In 2009, the dividend was at $1.40, and stayed at that until 2015 when they raised its to $1.49. The average growth rate of the dividend over the last 5 and 10 years has only been 5%. He would avoid this.