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

Shorting Corporate Bonds – An ETF Recommendation? The riskiest part of the market is the high yield market. SJB-N is the riskiest of the corporate high yield bonds – junk bonds. The challenge is that you have to pay the yield when you are short – about 5% on average. It is expensive to be short high yield.

Sleep at Night Portfolio – If Larry retires, is it safe? If the market went bear, his portfolios would not go down. When the markets are at a high point and don’t look good, his fund goes down but not as much as the market. When he retires, there will be a strong team in place to replace him. His intelligence is being taken into an artificial intelligence process.

Inversion of interest rate curve and does that now reduce recession risk. When the FED starts to cut rates that will uninvert the rate curve. If we were worried about recession then long rates would be skyrocketing and they are not. They are relatively contained. It speaks to economic weakness. The economy is not going to be rip-roaring strong here.

Educational Segment. When he is building portfolios, he is looking for assets that are uncorrelated so he can reduce risk. This is the most important thing if you are taking the sleep-at-night approach. Gold still stands out to him as one of the best asset classes of 2020. He thinks gold still has some upside potential. Monetary policy has not worked well in driving economic growth so it will shift to fiscal policy which will demand that more quantitative easing will have to occur. Jewelry demand is an offset to demand. ETF (investor) demand and central bank demand for gold are the two main points. Investor holdings are the biggest demand for gold. We are back to the level of 2012. That was sparked by QE2 and now we are back to that resistance. If we break through that, there is no resistance to above $1800. He loves the asset class here. Equities give you a 2:1 upside to the commodity price.

Market. We had a list of concerns going into the new year. Trump is not the normal protocol and adds risk relative to norm and we are seeing it play out early in 2020. It is a low interest rate environment and so Mr. Bushell likes dividends. There is no impetus to inflation. You want to be overweight equities. Typically banks don’t underperform for two years in a row, although he thinks that will become more common in the future.

He doesn't follow geopolitics, though he has personal concerns about Iran. Point is, it's noise and it's not a factor in his investing. Gold does well in times of perceived and real war. Gold has had a strong day. His market concern is systemic. The Shiller PE Ratio: PE today is the same as before the market crashed in 1929. The market is frothy, 30% overvalued in Canada, and 50% in America--way above historic averages. "Irrational confidence" explains the current market which is expensive. There's real risk here.

A protection strategy assuming a 20% correction before spring? Things can get ugly before they get profit. First, take profits after a fantastic 2019, then reposition your stocks/bonds ratio, buying more bonds to make your target mix (i.e. 70/30 stocks/bonds). Himself, he's moving a third of his equities into inverse products--like an ETF that rises when markets fall (see his top picks). Investors really feel the pain of a drawdown--people are emotional and irrational. So, probably in the next two years, the market will fall and an inverse product will go up. This is playing defence.

Cannabis stocks already corrected, but you say markets are 30-50% overvalued. So, what'll happen to weed stocks? If the market drops 20%, few stocks/sectors will survive that (most will fall 20%) and cannabis likely will too. It's still early innings for cannabis.

Are bonds better than GICs in terms of income? Bonds come in various forms and geographies vs. GICs are plain vanilla. The main difference is liquidity. To take advantage of a pullback, you can't sell a GIC to suddenly buy, but you can with bonds.

Are renewables or healthcare defensive? Both are more defensive than the overall market, so yes. Renewable energy is the biggest mega-trend of our generation. Probably good to stay in these stocks.

Selling a condo for $400K, and my pensions would cover the cost of me going into a seniors' home. Where would I put the $400K till needed? Sounds like you don't need that $400K. So, this is money you could give your kids and grandkids, which is an important decision to make. Make sure you can cover your costs and you're finished travelling. You can invest this money, being a little aggressive, to benefit your kids.

Maxed out his portfolio which is nothing but ETFs, including 40% ZWU, ZWE and ZWS--all covered call ETFs. Am I giving up too much growth? Plus, what ETFs to buy for Asia? Yes, you gave up some returns in 2019, because of the covered calls. But in 2020 you need to play defense, so hang onto those ETFs. Covered calls are defensive. Asia: India is getting expensive, so don't invest there now.

Holding US stocks in a TFSA? No. The US government charges a 15% withholding tax. Instead, buy a Canadian-domiciled ETF that holds American stocks.

Do a put option on a silver ETF to capture more momentum? No. This is purely speculation. Gold has done very well, and so has silver. You can invest in silver as a proxy for gold.