A Comment -- General Comments From an Expert (A Commentary)

Owning the tech giants. AAPL has underperformed the broader S&P 500 index since last fall. Great balance sheet, but perhaps not enough EPS growth at 9%. You want to see strong revenue growth, and looking back 5 years, AAPL's is only about 4%. High margins let it do well. Is this sustainable? Ahead of AAPL, he'd prefer FB, GOOG, MSFT, or AMZN, which all have higher revenue growth and each of which he owns.

Fast food stocks. Doesn't see a ton of dividend growth ahead in QSR. Even though there's growth in Popeye's, it provides only 11% of total revenues, so it will be hard to affect the whole company. It will perform OK, but have to keep our eyes on the Delta variant. Yield is about 3.3%, and thinks it's secure. Instead, he'd suggest SBUX on a pullback, DPZ or YUMC (which he owns).

Clean energy ETFs. ICLN is the go-to clean energy ETF in the US, well diversified. For CAD, look at the ZCLN, which is very similar. Some of these ETFs have fallen over the last few months, but now are stabilizing and moving higher. One of the mega-trends. Watch that most stocks have already priced in positive moves, where the average PE of the stocks is about 52x. Be careful of valuations.

Canadian tech names. Canadian space if fairly limited. There's SHOP, CSU, OTEX and that's about it. Maybe also BB. Look to the US and Asia for tech names. Loves FB and GOOG. Clampdown in China is presenting opportunities. Try NVDA, TSM, MSFT, MA. Some of these names make a lot of sense when you look at the valuation.

US financials. Likes the US financials, such as JPM. It has great management and execution, yield of 2.35%. He owns some of the European financials like UBS, as well as HSBC, PRU, and WFC.

Tech sub-sectors. Bullish calls: he's overweight on semiconductor foundries, designers, integrated manufacturers both on memory and analog. Also overweight on the cloud stacks from AMZN to MSFT and GOOG, and the platform players that use the various infrastructures, plus SaaS. He's underweight on the gaming side and perhaps neutral on social media.

Billy Kawasaki’s Insights - Billy’s most-liked answers from 5i Research. If interest rates rise, utilities, real estate ,communications and tech tend to be weak. Dividend stocks also decline as there are alternatives. However, markets have done well when rates were rising. Unlock Premium - Try 5i Free