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

You want to diversify, don't bank on just one stock carrying the load. Look at a mix of fixed income, preferred shares, good dividend stocks with visible dividend growth, robust dividends. Places to look: energy infrastructure, utilities, industrials, financials. These sectors are all in Canada, as well as being in the US and globally.

Especially in markets like these, you want to inch in incrementally and slowly. Same approach with falling knives.

Case for gold is great. Central banks continue to buy it. Interest rates are probably going lower. Weak greenback. But gold is not just about themes, it's about price. It's had such a huge move, you have to respect the chart.

Need to clean up the balance sheet. Capital intensive businesses. Poured a lot of $$ into capex, and then interest rates screamed higher. Four carriers instead of three. Less immigration. Asset sales need to happen as a catalyst. Still a tough time for wireline and wireless.

Know that anything can happen with any stock. But it's a matter of risk/reward and what scenario is more likely.

Questions to ask during tariff threats: How is the customer concentration?

Suppose you have found a company that sustains little impact from tariffs, survived the last recession relatively unscathed, has no debt, and pays a solid dividend and has a low payout ratio. Are you safe? Well maybe, but now you need to worry about other companies. In a recession, many companies experience sharp slowdowns. Some will not survive. If your “secure” company has 65 per cent of its business with another company, now you also need to worry about that other company. Companies with high levels of customer concentration are always riskier but in a recession that concentration risk becomes even more acute. Ideally, you want to own a company with no customer accounting for more than 10 per cent of its business.
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There may be some evidence of that. It's been an eventful first almost-4 months of the year, and especially since so-called "liberation day". A better name might be liquidation day. People are catching on to the fact that the White House says one thing today and negates it the next, which might make investors less trigger happy. 

Hopefully, there's some longer reflection being made instead of knee-jerk reactions to off-the-cuff remarks. A lot of volatility for sure.

Now it's really a disparate group of stocks. Not at all the way they traded for 2024 and 2023. He favours the ones that have recurring revenue. TSLA was the first to report, and it was a bomb on the quarter. 

GOOG skews more to the service sector side of the economy, which is distanced from tariffs. Very robust business, dominant player in Search advertising. He has no undue concerns about that. DOJ lawsuits are usually more bark than bite. 

Cloud business is growing nicely for all involved in it. 

Not something his firm is all that predisposed to doing. One of the most dangerous phrases that gets tossed around in investing is "buy low, sell high". A better discipline is to "buy high, sell higher" -- that's the approach in their momentum mandate, and it works very well. Momentum is a force of nature not only in physics, but also in the investing world.

And they should, but we'll have to see what tomorrow brings. 

When he looks at the NASDAQ futures, there's a line that goes all the way back to December when it was up around 22,200. The 19,000 level in the June contract is really important as a pretty solid indicator. It was breached earlier today, but has come off now.

He's holding anywhere between 20-30% cash across various accounts and even in his fund. If we get a close over that 19,000 on the June futures, he'll put that cash to work.

For the last couple of years, the whole idea was that you bought on dips. But then everything flipped after the inauguration on January 20. Now you have to sell on rallies, and people are doing that.

Sorry to say, but no. There is a timeline to it though. Trump's going to have to pull back on the rhetoric come the fall, which really means by the summer. Believes the tariff rhetoric will continue until, at the latest, the end of June. Then they have to focus on the mid-term elections, which are a year away. The last thing they want to do is lose the majority in Congress.

So we're still in for some volatility.

For the past couple of years it's been all about generative AI. He thinks that come next year (so starting in the second half of this year) it's going to be all about robotics. 

The bullseye in the chart is all about the hardware -- physical foundation that ensures the robots have all the mechanical capabilities and sensory input. The second ring is all about the operating system and software side -- intelligence that allows decision-making and perception. Finally, the outer ring is all about applications and integration of solutions toward specific industries (such as healthcare, hospitality, transportation).

He'll talk in the Top Picks about a handful of these.

Everyone brings up this word, but it's such a low probability. You can have slower growth, absolutely, with all the tariff rhetoric. But he doesn't think it's going to actually result in a recession. The situation is self-inflicted by Trump, and we've seen over the last couple of days how he can dial it back. He and his people are watching the market and they know how to rig it.

For the time being, Trump controls the stock market and only he can make it a good thing or not--and it's time to go all in on good.