The media blames Trump for everything. His actions cause chaos, but perhaps he’s tackling bigger issues in unconventional ways? Despite the noise, markets are stable, yet fear persists. Distilling what we learned from the World Outlook Financial Conference, we’ll help you stay rational and focused, and understand how this all affects your family.
During this 60 minutes webinar, followed by Q&A, we’ll cover the following, and much more:
- Beyond the Headlines: Understanding implications of Trump’s key actions including cost-cutting, tariff threats and economic shifts.
- “Trump-Proof” Your Portfolio: Building a durable, nimble portfolio amid political and media-driven volatility.
- Opportunities Ahead: Key sectors poised to thrive despite uncertainty.
- How this affects you: Don’t let all this noise distract you from focusing on achieving your Life Goals.
- The Power of Integration: A look at our financial planning process and software, designed to keep you on course.
Webinar recorded on March 4th, 2025
Full Transcript
00:00:05
Good evening and welcome to Thrive despite the political mayhem, nimble investing aligned with your life goals.
00:00:14
And thank you to everyone who’s probably been laughing hearing our pre broadcast shenanigans.
00:00:20
We have a new goat go to meeting app interface and so we’ve been having more than a little bit of our share of fun.
00:00:29
That’s a great offset to to Chicken Little, who happens to be the person who’s in charge of all of our media right now, of course.
00:00:36
And that is a big part of what we’re going to talk about here tonight.
00:00:41
So Sandor is the guy on the left, I’m the guy on the right. You guys already know that.
00:00:46
So let’s get right down to it. We’re going to talk a little bit about why clients choose us.
00:00:52
You know that sovereignty, the individual, the Western Canadian way of life and we are very much reality driven looking beyond the spin.
00:00:59
And of course, now that we are in silly season, also known as election season, it’s going to be worse than ever.
00:01:08
So we’re going to talk about this a little bit more later.
00:01:10
But of course, how we work as a firm is we focus on your life goals.
00:01:14
So our three-step process is basically helping you clarify your life goals and update them over time, find the right people, tools and strategies to help you reach your life goals and help you stay on track through a process of ongoing vigilance.
00:01:29
This is our model for that. Again, we’re going to talk a little bit more about this at the end.
00:01:34
We’re going to show you a little bit about how our fabulous financial planning software works and how that can help you with getting a lot of clarity and a lot of confidence with the achievement of your financial goals.
00:01:47
So tonight’s agenda, we’re going to talk a little bit beyond the headlines, talk a little bit about Trump proofing your portfolio structure is your friend when it comes to portfolio management.
00:01:57
Not everything is bad in the world right now.
00:01:59
There are definitely some opportunities being created by this mayhem.
00:02:03
We want to talk also though, about how this effects you personally.
00:02:07
And that goes to the financial planning process and focusing on your life goals.
00:02:12
And we call that the power of integration.
00:02:15
And of course, the most important aspect of this is the mindset to manage through mayhem.
00:02:20
And we’re going to share you share with you also some of the wisdom from the World Outlook Financial Conference.
00:02:26
Now we’ve postponed this webinar till tonight from three weeks ago for completely separate reasons.
00:02:32
But in some ways that’s kind of good because we’ve had three weeks, three additional weeks, 3 important weeks of of world events and especially here on the Canadian stage.
00:02:44
So let’s talk a little bit about the politics and how that’s affecting everything else.
00:02:49
Of course, these are the political players causing stick handling through the mayhem.
00:02:55
Of course we have the Green Goblin of Volodimir Zelensky.
00:02:59
On the the upper left there Double O 8, Keir Stormer, the world’s most boring politician, Little Napoleon, Emmanuel Mccraw, Vladimir Putin and carbon tax Mark Carney.
00:03:11
And on the right there we have Danielle Smith, NPR Polyev.
00:03:16
And in the middle we have the the Trump Meister himself, along with JD Vance and the latest member of the the latest target of Democrat and media hate, Elon Musk.
00:03:32
So of course, right now, three weeks after we were originally going to do this broadcast, we’re faced with a Canadian election.
00:03:39
The unfortunate reality is that Trump’s bluster and his trolling have given the Liberals a big bump in the polls.
00:03:49
And whereas Poly Evan, the Conservatives had about a 20 point lead and we’re looking like they were cruising to a majority government, that is very much in doubt right now.
00:04:00
There are some suggestions in the last day or two from some recent polls that Carney’s popularity has peaked.
00:04:08
A few weeks back, when Carney was yet to be installed as the, as the heir to the Prime Minister’s Office, I was saying to clients that it felt like the Canadian mainstream media was trying to do the same thing that the US mainstream media did when they dumped Joe Biden and replaced him with with Kamala Harris.
00:04:30
And it’s a pretty similar playbook and it seems to have been pretty effective.
00:04:36
But I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
00:04:37
We’ve got I guess 5 weeks less a day to to see how all of this plays out.
00:04:43
One of my biggest fears honestly, in all of this is that if the Conservatives fail to get a majority government, then I think there’s a an ever increasing chance that you’re going to see talk of separation from Alberta, might possibly include northern BC and the province of Saskatchewan.
00:05:06
But the reality is that that has been rumbling here in Alberta and again northern BC and Saskatchewan for the last five to seven years, even before the the recent shenanigans with the Liberals, with Trudeau proroguing Parliament and, and, you know, basically creating a smooth path without parliamentary interference to, to crown Mr.
00:05:33
Carney as the successor to, to Prime Minister Castro. So I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
00:05:40
You already know where I stand on that, and we’ll show you some reasons why we’re hopeful that the conservatives can come back.
00:05:48
But obviously, in all of this, Trump is the wild card.
00:05:51
He’s very definitely been high on his own supply.
00:05:55
It’s hard to say that Trump seems more confident than usual or more overconfident than usual, but it certainly seems to be the case right now.
00:06:04
He definitely hasn’t recognized that the damage that tariffs can cause to his own economy, never mind what what they can do to, you know, 50 or 60 years of very diligent work in North America on creating a free trade zone and the integration to everybody’s benefit of the Canadian and American economies.
00:06:28
However, what Trump has correctly pointed out, and this is painful when when a foreign politician does it, he quite correctly pointed out that we have very poor border security when it comes to the active ingredients for making fentanyl and other other very dangerous hard drugs.
00:06:49
Also open borders in relation to screening for terrorists coming in through Canada.
00:06:54
Of course Canada has been the tide for the second worst deadbeat NATO partner and of course we can barely keep up our NORAD obligations.
00:07:06
And of course, the big one has been fentanyl.
00:07:09
Now, all of that being said, we don’t like Trump, it’s tariffs and we don’t like his behavior right now.
00:07:18
I’ve been a fan of a lot of his policies over the years.
00:07:22
But right now there are there are some things that he’s very definitely gotten clearly very wrong.
00:07:28
And tariffs is is a really big one.
00:07:31
Another one that I would say is, is the fact that he has, he’s not paying, I would say due regard, due respect to the 5025 mile undefended border that exists between our two nations, the longest undefended border in the history of the world and an interdependence that has worked for for everybody.
00:07:59
That being the case, we have to deal with things as they are, not how we wish he was behaving.
00:08:06
The reality though is that U.S. debt is the biggest problem to be solved. Look at that.
00:08:11
the US has been the world’s unpaid policemen, policing trade routes, naval routes primarily.
00:08:18
Of course they’ve also been doing the majority of the NATO funding and they’ve been carrying the the the heaviest part of the NORAD responsibilities as well.
00:08:28
The US has started to recognize that we’re shifting back to a multi polar world from kind of the the two superpower world pre dissolution of the Soviet Union.
00:08:41
They’ve recognized that China is a formidable competitor that’s having to redefine foreign policy and bolstering defensive positions both with Greedland for their minerals in a very ham handed way, I’ll say, and also in dealing with the issues around the Panama Canal.
00:08:59
Now with smaller countries such as Denmark and Panama, the US can throw its weight around pretty well and get its way, but it’s not quite as easy with larger countries geographically or militarily, we’ll say.
00:09:16
And of course, they’ve been focusing on trying to secure strategic resources, including technology.
00:09:22
And the big one, of course, with that is around semiconductors.
00:09:26
And we might not like his his tactics, but they are negotiating from, from a position of strength.
00:09:32
And the way that we respond is going to be critical.
00:09:36
There have been many changes with how Trump has been approaching this whole tariff thing.
00:09:40
The latest deferral has been to say, OK, it was first, it was going to be March 4th, which was the original date of this, of this webinar.
00:09:51
Now it’s going to be April 2nd, and he’s calling it Liberation Day.
00:09:54
And the latest as of today coming out of the White House is that they’re looking at 2 stages of tariff implementation.
00:10:02
The first is targeted emergency tariffs to raise revenues for, for tax cuts that he wants to implement right away.
00:10:10
And the second stage would be more longer term, I’ll say, better thought out reciprocal tariffs that that might be less harmful, but still will achieve the economic gains that he’s looking for.
00:10:27
So again, the US debt, that’s the biggest problem. So right now, we’ve got all Trump all the time.
00:10:34
The mainstream media, of course, has been obsessed with Trump.
00:10:38
On the left, they’re losing their cool.
00:10:42
And people on the right have been all say a little bit too far over their skis celebrating.
00:10:49
And it’s time to get serious about being serious about business and and political management, especially on the foreign policy side of things.
00:11:01
So the question is Trump good or bad for business or maybe a little of both?
00:11:06
Well, what do markets think?
00:11:08
Well, if we take a look at on the on the left side there, you can see that’s where the S&P 500 was when the day that Trump was elected at 5782.
00:11:18
And here we are at 57 seven 5751 as of yesterday and the close today was 5776, so basically flat.
00:11:28
And on the TSX, we were at 24387 on US Election Day and 25314 is where we were yesterday and we’re at 25339.
00:11:42
So basically up, up right around 3.8, three, .9%.
00:11:48
And that frankly is going to be largely due to recovery in oil, but also the the bump in the mining and metal stocks, especially.
00:11:57
An interesting factor here, though, that has become even more apparent over the last three weeks, is that Elon Musk, who is of course, in charge of Doge, the Department of Government efficiency, he’s gone from being a hero to the left to being zero.
00:12:14
Of course, you know, Musk stepped up and overpaid for for Twitter, now called X.
00:12:20
And he did that for the sake of wanting to establish free speech again.
00:12:25
And he’s been active in supporting free speech in the European elections.
00:12:32
And, you know, he’s been widely criticized for that.
00:12:36
But he’s also done some things like shedding light on injustices in the UK, like the, the rape gang cover up in, in the UK, the Rotherham scandals and, and the like.
00:12:49
And of course, his big focus right now is on fiscal prudence.
00:12:52
And I find it really, really remarkable.
00:12:56
I’ll have to say that the, the Democrats have revealed themselves.
00:12:59
All they have left is rage and violence.
00:13:02
Of course, Tesla’s, Tesla dealerships, Tesla owners are, you know, the subject of fire bombings and vehicles being damaged.
00:13:12
They’re getting spray painted and keyed and things like that.
00:13:15
And right now, the latest polls show that the Democrat Party is polling at about 27%.
00:13:22
So perhaps Martin Armstrong’s models are correct when it comes to predicting the end of the Democrat Party.
00:13:29
I guess only time will tell, but what this really comes down to is that it’s all about the debt, stupid.
00:13:36
the US is in excess, has in excess of $36 trillion of federal debt.
00:13:42
Their debt servicing costs are just over a trillion dollars annually and that exceeds the their massive defense budget.
00:13:51
Call it the military industrial complex budget. And in many ways that’s kind of a tipping point.
00:13:59
And of course, they’re trying to bring bond yields down so that over the next year when about 25% of the federal, federal treasuries come up for renewal, come up for maturity, that they can roll those over at a low rate.
00:14:16
So we’ll get to see if if they managed to do that. Debt is not simply a problem as a gross number.
00:14:26
It’s really a function of the level of debt to GDP.
00:14:28
And we can see here that the US is at about 120% debt to GDP.
00:14:34
So that is a very dangerous place to be.
00:14:36
Obviously, it’s not as bad as the European countries and it’s not as bad as Japan, but it’s still an incredibly heavy debt load.
00:14:43
Now here in Canada, we’re in a better position. We’re at about 107% of GDP.
00:14:50
And frankly, we can, we can thank Stephen Harper for the vast majority of that.
00:14:55
We can see how our debt to GDP spiked in 2020 with with COVID.
00:15:02
But prior to that, we were one of the most responsible countries in the world when it came to developed countries in the world when it came to debt to GDP.
00:15:12
But here we are now, GDP per capita.
00:15:19
When I’ve been listening to some of the political pundits, I’ve heard them say something that I don’t often agree with.
00:15:27
And it’s it’s often hyperbole. And so this is the most important election of our lifetimes.
00:15:32
And this time, I think it’s actually true, certainly in Canada.
00:15:36
In my opinion, this is the most consequential federal election of my lifetime.
00:15:41
And I was born 5 weeks to the day after Canada’s 100th birthday.
00:15:45
So I’ve been around 57 1/2 years and certainly when I look at the at the scope of, of what’s been happening in Canada in the last 50 to 60 years, we’re faced with a really clear choice.
00:16:00
Now, here’s what I mean.
00:16:02
If we go back to here, 2015, right around here, that’s when Justin Trudeau got elected and you can see for the first time and you can see that our productivity per capita has basically flat lined.
00:16:17
Whereas in the States, their productivity per capita has continued to grow and very, very substantially.
00:16:25
And the projected gap between Canada and the US for 2024, this was back in 2023 and they hadn’t yet had the official numbers, was a $22,100 per year gap in GDP per person per capita.
00:16:42
That’s remarkable.
00:16:43
And then if you take a look over here on the right, and this is from the IMF in the World Economic or their World Economic Outlook from October of last year, you can see that Canada’s productivity has been a laggard for 10 years.
00:17:01
And that happens to coincide with the last 9 1/2 years of Liberal rule in Canada.
00:17:07
To me, this is essentially, in a nutshell, why we can’t afford another another term.
00:17:15
So we talked a little bit about Trump proofing A portfolio.
00:17:21
Regardless of how I or anyone else feels about politics, we always have to be practical and not be ideological.
00:17:29
The reasons I’m concerned for Canada are practical, but they’ve flown from the ideology of of our governing federal party for the last 9 1/2 years.
00:17:43
Same thing holds true for in the States.
00:17:46
We have to look at the policies and their effects and filter out or plug our ears and not listen to to all of the screaming from the media and just be really practical and understand that, OK, this is going to create some volatility.
00:18:01
But remember always that danger or a crisis includes danger and opportunity.
00:18:07
So rather than getting crushed by the the tidal wave of all of the aggressive stuff coming out of the US, we think we should ride the wave.
00:18:16
And we’re going to talk a little bit more about that, where some of Trump’s policies we think will spur some growth.
00:18:24
Now the wall of worry, you’ve heard that expression before saying that markets, equity markets especially, climb the wall of worry.
00:18:32
What that boils down to is a tactic used by the mainstream financial media, and it’s the whole thing of having an apocalypse du jour.
00:18:41
Every day there’s something else.
00:18:43
Mainstream media’s is designed to create ongoing fear, whether it’s fear of missing out on the upside or fear of loss of capital.
00:18:52
So here’s just the last five years.
00:18:53
I could show you charts going back 5060, a hundred years and show world events, but here’s some major events that that we might have read about in the history books.
00:19:03
But we’ve all experienced these in the last five years.
00:19:06
So if we go back here, the S&P 500 was oh, in the neighborhood of about 3350, I think 3350, almost 3400.
00:19:16
And here we are at 5700, fifty, 805 years later, ha.
00:19:24
But we had some really, really terrible things that happened in there. There’s the COVID crash.
00:19:29
2 days ago was the 5th anniversary of the bottom after the, the COVID, COVID market scare.
00:19:37
And we’ve had here US civil unrest in the US election.
00:19:41
And of course, the consensus was there would be a recession soon.
00:19:44
And then we had the default of the Evergrand real estate firm out of China.
00:19:50
That was going to be the end of the world. Apparently it wasn’t here.
00:19:53
We have a recession coming soon up. Maybe this time they got it a little bit a little bit correct.
00:19:58
Certainly the markets were were trailing downward and here we have Russia rolling into Ukraine.
00:20:05
And then, oh, at both the same time actually, we had the the trucker’s convoy here in Canada and, and Chrystia Freeland got the banks to to freeze the bank accounts of people who simply donated to a completely legal protest.
00:20:22
And then here we had FTX collapses.
00:20:24
That’s the, that was the crypto exchange company that was run by Sam Bankman Freed and yeah.
00:20:34
And then here we are, SVB, Silicon Valley Bank collapses.
00:20:38
And then here we have the Hamas massacre in October, October 7th of 2023.
00:20:44
And again, oh, we’re going to have another recession and here we are.
00:20:50
The net effect of all of this is that there’s always going to be something serious that the media is going to try and get us to worry about.
00:20:57
Sometimes it’s real. Very often it’s actually only a perception.
00:21:03
But the question is, what did you do during this time frame? How did you behave?
00:21:07
Did you get into the general panic from COVID and through the fear of loss of capital?
00:21:15
What happened as a result of that is that we saw a lot of money flowing into GIC is not for the sake of having dry powder, but for seeking supposed safety.
00:21:23
But if you did that, when did you get back into the markets? That’s the that’s the conundrum, right?
00:21:28
It’s always easy to get out.
00:21:29
It’s always hard to get back in because you’ve taken a position that things are too risky.
00:21:34
Well, then the markets, they take off to the upside.
00:21:39
A lot of people are sitting on the sideline still looking and waiting for the perfect time to get back in, which will never come because they’re waiting for a time when they’re not scared.
00:21:48
And then we could have, if you’re missing out, take hold like happened in 2023, in parts of 2024, which was over concentration in large cap tech stocks like the Magnificent 7.
00:21:59
And of course, we had crypto going mainstream, which was a great thing through 2024, but since the beginning of 2025, not so much.
00:22:11
So a lot of people’s convictions being tested.
00:22:15
I want to point out something here about Gics becoming tempting and we had clients who fell into this category as well in the one year or sorry, the blue line is one year Gics and then the green line is five year Gics.
00:22:34
And you can see right around here when the rates peaked on one year and five year Gic’s, that was exactly when dividend growth stocks were turning the corner and moving to the upside sharply.
00:22:49
So the period of maximum euphoria about Gic’s and the period of maximum pain in dividend stocks was exactly the time that you should not have been going in into Gics and should certainly be sticking with your dividend stocks or at least getting back into them if you had bailed on them.
00:23:11
Now through all of this, of course, investor behavior is key.
00:23:15
Patient and discipline decision making versus impulsive or emotional decision making.
00:23:20
We’re going to talk a little bit about some other things around how our portfolio managers run portfolios, but there are some things of course that we should be doing, can be doing and must be doing.
00:23:31
Frankly, as individuals, we have to be living within our own means.
00:23:35
We have to be disciplined with our savings. We need to be regularly adding to our portfolio.
00:23:41
If if we’re still working, we need to avoid the big mistakes due to excessive risk taking and excessive panic.
00:23:49
Of course, we need to make sure we have sufficient different types of insurance to avoid a plan being derailed by a health event, including death.
00:23:58
And we have to take care of business at work, whether you’re an employee or whether you’re self-employed and it’s your company.
00:24:06
So those are the things that you can control.
00:24:09
When it comes to what’s going on in the markets, though we’re going to go back to the big picture, these themes are still all intact.
00:24:15
Capital flows continue from the private sector or sorry, from the public sector, from government debt into private entities.
00:24:26
So that would be equities, publicly traded or private companies and also private debt.
00:24:33
And of course, money. As of now, money continues to to flow heavily still into the US.
00:24:40
Now while the US is a more chaotic environment than it has been in a long time and that’s saying something.
00:24:46
The fact is, is that Europe is still not in great shape as as a going concern though it’s had a temporary bump in its equity markets, the last actually basically the first quarter of this year.
00:25:02
The flow preference is still for equities when it comes to bonds.
00:25:07
Interest rates are trending down short term, but the long term theme, the long term uptrend or the long term trend in bonds is rising interest rates, declining prices.
00:25:19
And that is because of declining confidence in government.
00:25:22
And of course there’s gold and other real stuff that that is needed for making things.
00:25:29
And for the time being, the US dollar is still the reserve currency of the world.
00:25:34
Armstrong’s models put the end of that somewhere around 28 or 29.
00:25:40
And that’s roughly the same time that that Socrates has projected that we’re going to be in a position where the US is breaking up into into numerous smaller subcountries, A Balkanization, if you will.
00:25:58
Five years ago, 10 years ago, if you suggested that the people, they would have thought that was crazy.
00:26:03
But today, when you look at the level of polarization in the US, makes you wonder if it’s going to take that long to get there.
00:26:10
And as always, structure and flexibility equals durability.
00:26:13
And that’s expressed in how we manage client money. We call it forward thinking portfolios.
00:26:19
We have the core which is stable income generation, which is comprised of private alternatives, which includes private credit, infrastructure and real estate and corporate bonds, not government bonds.
00:26:31
Stocks you can tolerate in the income and growth category and then the opportunity seeking stuff in growth and small cap.
00:26:40
Now the stocks you can tolerate part is probably the most difficult thing for people to to stay in, or we call it stocks you can tolerate because that’s the part that most people struggle with the most.
00:26:54
And it’s, you know, when markets are going up, everybody likes, hey, let’s be in an ETF that just buys the market because every, you know, because nobody beats the market on the upside.
00:27:04
And then when things start to come down, nobody really likes being an index investor.
00:27:09
So we don’t do index investing for the most part. If we do, it’s very active.
00:27:17
But mostly we are in the world of very nimble equity management, lots of sector and geographic rotation, stock rotation from company to company and position sizing.
00:27:29
So you don’t always have to be all in or all out of a particular stock, but you can, if your maximum position is going to be say 4%, you can start with one or 2% and ease in.
00:27:42
And when things get get really overvalued, you can go from a full position down to a partial position, still retaining some some ownership of those companies, but not getting completely out, but still de risking your portfolio.
00:27:56
And of course our managers actively manage cash levels.
00:28:00
3 weeks ago, we were in the neighborhood of seven to 10% in cash depending on the mandate.
00:28:07
And those cash levels have have come down because we’ve been doing some buying in the last little while.
00:28:15
But that is an active ongoing process where it’s not all risk all the time.
00:28:23
It’s de risking portfolios when markets are high because of course, when price is high, risk is high.
00:28:29
And of course, we also do currency hedging in the portfolios and actively use option strategies for lowering the downside when markets get very rough.
00:28:39
Now the results have been very good.
00:28:43
As of the end of February, our pension or dividend grower model returned 18.8% on the one year.
00:28:51
The growth or momentum style did 25.7%.
00:28:56
Now you see those numbers there under beta, well, the market by definition has a beta of 1.
00:29:03
And if it’s if your portfolio has a beta higher than one, then you have more volatility than the market.
00:29:10
As you can see in both of these cases, the the dividend grower model has 39% less volatility than the broader market and even the growth or momentum style has 20% less volatility, which is which is the result of great active equity management.
00:29:31
You’ve seen this one before. Not all dividend stocks are created equal.
00:29:34
Our portfolios emphasize and overweight the dividend grower and initiator style.
00:29:40
This long term highest rate of return of any category, any style of of investing and the lowest volatility.
00:29:49
So again, the closest thing to a free lunch that that we have in the world of investing, we see a lot of opportunity still in the commodity markets.
00:30:00
Certainly a few weeks ago we think we saw a bottom in energy stocks in oil and gas stocks.
00:30:08
Obviously the precious metal stocks have continued to to do well.
00:30:11
We have a very substantial position in those still.
00:30:14
We also have a substantial position in physical gold and a long standing position in in the nuclear space.
00:30:23
That has been most recently the weakest part of of our core and explore strategy which has been focused on commodities.
00:30:32
As of February 28th, our one year return there has been 20, 1.2% and since inception 15.79%.
00:30:41
We’re pretty proud of that because that goes back now four years.
00:30:44
And as of March 18th, in fact last week that was the 4th anniversary of running that strategy and we have standard deviation that is very, very slightly higher than the benchmark which is half the S&P 500 and half the TSX.
00:31:00
So that’s been working well and we continue to see that as the the best place to invest, certainly on the Canadian side of things because generally speaking, Canada with our fading and stagnant or possibly fading productivity per per capita, overall, we’re not a great place to invest right now.
00:31:25
But in the things that you see in your screen here, precious metals, base metals and different forms of energy, those are things the world continues to need and which Canada has in abundance.
00:31:38
So we are still bullish generally, especially in the US on consumer discretionary, a large part of the US population is not doing well, but the top 20% that are doing well are certainly driving the consumer discretionary sector.
00:31:57
US financials are are well priced and have a strong growth outlook and real estate continues to to shine in most parts of the US except of course if you were in a blue state that people are leaving places like like California and the tri-state area in the in the the US.
00:32:18
NE geographically though the US still has the strongest economy.
00:32:25
The Canadian economy is decidedly weaker.
00:32:29
We know that we have higher unemployment, we have the productivity gap as as we’ve talked about.
00:32:34
And despite having a massive housing shortage, we’re still in a position where we can’t seem to get our act together and start building enough, enough houses or apartments or or any kind of living accommodations.
00:32:49
And I’m not sure if it’s related to having let in so many screened immigrants without having a place for them to live or having, you know, 400,000 student visas a year, not keeping track of those.
00:33:06
I don’t know, you think that has anything to do with supply and demand? You tell me.
00:33:12
Europe, of course, is not doing well.
00:33:15
Their markets have bounced recently from a really oversold condition.
00:33:19
In fact, that’s the best part of the equity portfolios on a year to date basis outside of the commodity sector here in Canada.
00:33:27
Longer term, I’m still not, I’m still not optimistic on Europe, particularly because the non-us NATO countries seem to be wanting to perpetuate the war in Ukraine that that Trump is speaking with Putin and their their various diplomatic teams continuing to talk to each other to try and bring an end to that war.
00:33:54
But the folks in the rest of Europe appear intent on on wanting to continue the war.
00:34:01
The notable exception to that is Hungary, led by Viktor Orban, of course.
00:34:09
And Hungary recognizes that the key to its, to its economic future is, is a stable and reliable energy supply that that comes mostly from Russia.
00:34:25
And they are advocating more for, for peace negotiations as opposed to war escalation, which is what the rest of the EU seems to want.
00:34:35
Looking at the corporate fixed or at the fixed income side of things, we’ve had pretty attractive yields here, still 6% plus yields, 7% yields in the preferred shares.
00:34:46
We had a good year last year.
00:34:49
Our, our managers did between 6 and 10% depending on on the part of their portfolio or how aggressive they were.
00:34:59
We also had, we have a mixture of conservative and and, and, and more growth oriented fixed income strategies.
00:35:07
So that’s kind of the range there.
00:35:09
But even the most conservative end of our of our corporate fixed income strategies did around six to 10, did around 6% and XBB which is an ETF that is considered to be one of the benchmarks for fixed income in Canada did 4.12%.
00:35:31
So we’re happy with that.
00:35:32
But on a go forward basis, we’re definitely going to require again, nimble management, some well timed moves to capture potential capital gains and also to look at setting up shifts to other asset classes as opportunities come to fruition In fixed income and more so than before, sovereign debt certainly looks vulnerable.
00:35:56
So we’re staying away from that.
00:35:58
On the alternative investment side of things, of course, we like this because it adds diversification and it reduces risk.
00:36:06
The benefit of alternatives is that they tend to protect capital during periods of market declines, like in 2022 when bonds and stocks were down by about 11.8%.
00:36:19
Alternatives were the only positive asset class besides cash or GI CS.
00:36:24
They were generally up in the the three to 5% neighborhood in what was otherwise a very terrible year.
00:36:30
And generally speaking they’re going to improve your overall portfolio.
00:36:35
Return yields these days are in the 5 to 9% neighborhood.
00:36:38
And with a number of the private alternatives that we have, particularly on the private credit side of things, we see the yields rise when short term rates rise.
00:36:48
So it’s a little bit of, I’ll say a buffer against the rising interest rate environment longer term.
00:36:54
And again you can see there on the right hand side the different types of private alternatives that we have in 2024.
00:37:02
This is the area of client portfolios where we actually had the most mixed results.
00:37:07
So we had some very strong returns in the in the kind of plus 10 to plus 12 + 13 neighborhood.
00:37:16
But we also had some some issues on a couple of the, the, the private credit securities and those have held the alternatives category down for 2024.
00:37:29
Fortunately, of course, both the bond and the stock portions of portfolios did very well last year.
00:37:36
But what this really comes down to have to say is keeping your eye on the ball.
00:37:40
And it’s not about them. It’s not about what’s happening out in all of the rest of the world.
00:37:45
It’s about you and your family.
00:37:48
And so let’s shift our focus to talking a little bit about that and how we work with clients on the planning side of things.
00:37:56
So of course, you’re familiar with seeing this model.
00:38:00
We focus our wealth advisory services on your family’s life goals.
00:38:05
Those are the specific objectives that flow from your values, beliefs, and priorities as individuals and as a family.
00:38:13
So they’re right there in the center. So how do we do that?
00:38:17
How do we turn this model this this model of ideas into an actionable plan? Well, software helps.
00:38:27
Software helps an awful lot.
00:38:29
We have very sophisticated financial planning software that powers our process and it’s customized for each client.
00:38:37
It’s goal based. It has a pretty streamlined what if analysis capability.
00:38:43
It’s a little bit tricky to get to learn how to use as I’ve experienced recently and there is more adept at that that functionality.
00:38:53
It has an AI assistant and it produces some really great reports.
00:38:57
Now, why would we want to have a plan in the 1st place?
00:38:59
Well, I guess it comes down to this whole idea is that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do.
00:39:05
But if you can map out your personal road map, it focuses your actions and it also brings into into focus what you actually need to do in, in terms of investment return to meet your goals.
00:39:23
So this is the process that we follow, the financial planning process.
00:39:28
The Canadian Financial Planning Standards Council breaks it down into 6 steps.
00:39:34
I’d like to break it down into three steps.
00:39:36
And here we have just another way of looking at it, which includes kind of four steps, but it’s all basically the same idea.
00:39:43
We have the information gathering stage, which could be a lot of work if you haven’t done done budgeting or organized your financial situation prior to that.
00:39:53
But we look of course at what your goals are in terms of retirement time frames, retirement lifestyle.
00:40:00
We have to look at your your income, whether it’s from employment or perhaps from retirement.
00:40:07
Pensions including CPP, Old Age Security could be a defined benefit pension from work if you’re one of the fortunate few who still has one of those.
00:40:18
But also looking at what your expenses are, what’s coming in and what’s going out and is there a positive or a negative balance on that cash flow and how do we fix it if it’s a negative balance?
00:40:30
And of course, we integrate in any of your corporate assets, any dividends you might be pulling out or looking at a company sale, including real estate, not just your principal residence, but also investment real estate if that’s something that you hold.
00:40:46
And of course, looking at all your other assets and liabilities in different categories, looking at insurance and a big one these days.
00:40:55
And I’m certainly experiencing this one right now with my kids being adults and a couple of grandchildren now supporting them and how you can give them a hand up without making it feel like a handout.
00:41:09
And then if you’re lucky enough, you could have a bit of a bucket list, some things you’ve always wanted to do.
00:41:15
So we take all that information and start working in our financial planning software.
00:41:20
And we use a set of assumptions around portfolio returns and inflation, determine what your cash flow is.
00:41:29
And then we’ll look at how you’re going to generate income during retirement, what are called D cumulation strategies.
00:41:35
That’s drawing from your investments, also looking at your state values and taxes.
00:41:41
And we can play with a few what if scenarios, of course.
00:41:45
And kind of implicit in this whole thing is looking at a risk analysis, looking at sensitivity to factors like longevity, inflation changes, returns, differences in spending if you get bumps or cuts in in income from different sources.
00:42:03
And also looking at the activity levels that you have during retirement.
00:42:08
I like to say that there are three phases of retirement.
00:42:10
There’s go, go, slow go and no go, and you have to understand the financial implications of all three of those, looking at any potential insurance gaps and of course, looking at other factors that might include lifestyle changes that you might need to make in terms of spending patterns, but also other things like concentration risk.
00:42:30
And then we get to the action.
00:42:32
Of course, nothing matters until you take action on a good plan, right? It’s applied.
00:42:40
Knowledge is power, so we go through and develop the strategies to achieve your goals, put the steps in place short, mid and long term.
00:42:51
And that includes collaboration with other professionals like portfolio managers, but also with accountants and estate planning professionals.
00:42:58
And then of course we update it through regular reviews or life changes.
00:43:02
And this is an area where just in my own practice over the last couple of weeks was working with some clients in their early 80s.
00:43:14
They’ve been clients for 24 or 25 years, I can’t remember exactly.
00:43:20
And they were contemplating a change of residence for some, some pretty legitimate reasons in in terms of benefit burden of where they were.
00:43:30
But they wanted to know what the financial implications would be of that before making that decision.
00:43:35
And through the use of the software, we were able to actually show them what the the best course of action was.
00:43:43
And it was really very interesting to see, despite the fact that we had done probably 15 financial plans for for this client couple over the years, to see how this analysis was able to show them what the best decision was for them to make.
00:44:04
And the relief that came from that was really incredible.
00:44:08
And this is someone or this couple are people I’ve been working with, as I said, for 24 or 25 years.
00:44:15
And yet the the benefit of, of seeing things laid out in a plan, that benefit had not faded.
00:44:25
And in fact, it was perhaps more valuable than ever just for helping them make the decision as to when they make a move.
00:44:32
So this is a few screenshots from our financial planning software.
00:44:38
This is an actual client couple that we have given, sorry, the term false names.
00:44:50
We’ve we’ve basically scrubbed all, all their names and any identifying markers.
00:44:56
So we’ve anonymized it. Yes, thank you. You can tell I’m tired. So we anonymized everything here.
00:45:04
And what I like about this particular set of software is that it is so sophisticated that it provides with very simple answers to complex questions.
00:45:13
And I like it because of these kind of analog type of gauges that we can see here, the top left based on the factors that we put in all, of all of the investments they have their, their growth, their expenses, all of the the different time frames they have this particular couples at 133% of their retirement funding need.
00:45:37
And that’s great. And hey, maybe there’s some strategies that can help improve that situation.
00:45:42
So the software actually helps make our job a little bit easier by coming up with strategies that we would normally have to explain hypothetically, but it actually shows us what might happen to go up or down from this 133% if we do some different things.
00:46:02
So if we increase the savings to Tfsas, increase your funding by about 8%, etc, etc, as you can see here.
00:46:11
But what I also like to say is that it is not just about the retirement goals in this particular scenario.
00:46:22
We implemented a number of the the, the changes that were in the strategy box there.
00:46:27
But we have these other goals that this particular client family had.
00:46:31
They had a renovation that they wanted to have funded. They wanted to buy a boat.
00:46:35
This is a couple that lives near the water and there was also a new car in the offing was a few years further down the road.
00:46:44
And while they didn’t have a specific legacy target, it tells us what the what the effect on, on the state is ultimately over the long term.
00:46:55
So again, it’s not just about retirement, that’s great, but there are shorter time, shorter term retirement goals that that people have.
00:47:04
And you know, it might be a bucket list, you know, round the world trip or you know, three months away in, in the South Pacific, in Australia, New Zealand and you know, the Cook Islands and Fiji, etcetera.
00:47:19
So we can put all kinds of things in here and we can solve for them to see if they are in fact affordable.
00:47:29
All right.
00:47:30
And then we have some different, different ways of looking at things, looking at the cash flow and see what the benefit or what the totals all add up to be and see where there might be any shortcomings.
00:47:44
And of course, we can also integrate in holdco and trust account assets to see how those work, see where the money comes from, from within.
00:47:52
Perhaps could be a family trust, it could be a testamentary trust that that we’re the beneficiaries of, or it could be our own corporation that’s, you know, switched from being an active operating company into a holdco.
00:48:10
And we of course integrate all of that into the big picture.
00:48:14
And of course, we can package it up quite nicely and look at everything in a very short summary, which is nice.
00:48:23
One of the things that I’ve learned over time is that if a financial plan is too complicated with too much information, it actually is less likely to be implemented.
00:48:35
So we take the sophistication, sophisticated processing power of the financial planning software and can actually boil it down to simple steps and show simple answers frankly to pretty complex questions.
00:48:49
So that’s what we want to show you a little bit of tonight.
00:48:52
We haven’t shown any of that before in any of our previous webinars.
00:48:57
And we wanted to I guess pull the curtain back and let you have a look at that process that we follow.
00:49:05
And of course, that’s something that that we offer to all of our clients and everyone that we’ve ever done these financial plans for has found them to be of very, very high value.
00:49:17
So getting back to all of this, whether it’s on the portfolio side or on the financial planning side of things, if we want to have progress, we need 3 equal parts of time, money and the willingness to change.
00:49:29
And of course, if we’re going to stick to outdated investment strategies or tolerate suboptimal results with our current advisor and don’t have a comprehensive financial plan, well, you’re probably not going to get progress.
00:49:43
So one last thing I’ll mention, I mentioned this in previous times and just a moment or two ago that applied knowledge is power.
00:49:53
So if you’d like to get some help on these matters, you can answer the exit survey and Sandor will also be sending out a follow up e-mail.
00:50:02
We’re happy to provide a complimentary consult.
00:50:05
And of course, you can visit our website, I- wealth.ca and you can sign up for our video and webinar library.
00:50:15
So if you’re not in a position where you can take in webinars like tonight’s webinar on a live basis, at least you can watch it on a recorded basis at your leisure.
00:50:26
That’s one of the great things about modern technology.
00:50:29
So thank you very much everybody for attending.
00:50:32
I’m going to pause and take a breath here and I believe Sandor has some questions and we will go ahead and do a question and answer period for the next 10 or 15 minutes here.
00:50:44
If we have some questions, I’m just waiting here for Sandor to pop in.
00:52:22
All right, Welcome back everyone. Thanks for sticking around.
00:52:26
So question here, how much should I have in my, sorry, we’ve got a little bit of feedback here.
00:52:41
All right.
00:52:41
So how much should I have in My Portfolio in Canada if the Liberals win the election and how will your how will your portfolio managers respond?
00:52:49
Generally speaking, we have a benchmark of around 40% of equities in Canada.
00:52:56
It can vary up or down from that basic benchmark.
00:53:01
Our managers are always looking for the best opportunity on a risk versus reward basis.
00:53:07
Something that our portfolio managers have already been doing is raising cash where appropriate on an individual stock by stock basis and where, what types of investments would would we have within Canada?
00:53:24
Well, I think I made that fairly clear that our our preference on that side of things is, is definitely on the commodity side of things, whether it’s in base metals, precious metals or oil and gas, the uranium sector, etcetera, because those are things that the world needs more of and we have plenty of them.
00:53:49
Are the risks associated with tariffs that everyone is talking about overblown?
00:53:55
Well, that’s one hell of a loaded question. The answer is maybe.
00:54:03
The fact is, is that we don’t know what the end result is actually going to be.
00:54:09
Certainly Chicken Little has been raised from the dead like Lazarus with all the talk of, of tariffs.
00:54:17
But as we’ve seen certainly with, with Trump is that, you know, he walks loudly and carries a big tariff stick.
00:54:24
And he seems to be more focused on using tariffs as a, as a blunt force tool to get what he wants in, in other areas like Canada with NORAD and with our border and with fentanyl and with immigration security and, and the like.
00:54:45
But the other side of it as well is that he, he also seems to think that tariffs are great economic policy and they’re terrible economic policy for your domestic audience.
00:54:59
Because of course what they do is they raise, they raise prices for everybody.
00:55:03
It is in fact, taxation without representation if the, if the White House imposes tariffs on, on imported goods and it’s the same thing as raising taxes, but doing it without the consent of Congress, which is an interesting way to think about tariffs.
00:55:22
And honestly, we’re just going to have to wait and see what happens.
00:55:26
I think it’s, it would be, it would be wise if, if Trump would wait to see what the, what the results are of the Canadian federal election, because right now there isn’t really anybody who has any authority to make any decisions about what Canada’s positioning will really be on these things.
00:55:51
My approach has always been that it’s better to talk through things than to draw a line in the sand or dig your heels in and, and be stubborn and basically look at at trying to understand, you know, of course, knowing what’s important on your side for you to achieve, but also understanding what the other side is most what’s most important to the other side and trying to find some way of creating a win win situation.
00:56:22
So this one, it’s it’s tough to know. Do you believe the polls in Canada? Also another big question.
00:56:35
Polls are largely marketing.
00:56:38
They are, they’re supposed to be about telling you what the electorate is thinking.
00:56:45
But depending on who is sampled or oversampled and how the questions are actually asked, they can actually be used to affect how people vote as opposed to understanding how they intend to vote.
00:57:01
So in again, many ways, polls are marketing. So it’s hard to know.
00:57:07
We saw that certainly in, in the polls in 2016 and in 2024, how you know, Hillary Clinton was supposedly, you know, a 95% probability to, to become president based on the polling and based on the mainstream media talk.
00:57:25
And, and certainly at the beginning when Kamala Harris was, was installed undemocratically by the Democrat Party to, to run against Trump, you know, supposedly she was running neck and neck with Trump.
00:57:41
And of course, we, we know how, how that turned out. So it is hard to know.
00:57:46
I did see something today on the, on the the free e-mail service from Juno News, which is run by Candace Malcolm and Kian Bexty, who both used to be with different news organizations.
00:58:05
And they’ve gotten together with Juno News.
00:58:08
And their most recent polling is suggesting that we’ve reached peak Carney.
00:58:15
And then he has very little left to gain.
00:58:17
He appears to have already taken a lot of the NDP votes from the NDP and basically they’re consolidating behind the Liberal Party in an effort to to try and win a majority.
00:58:35
We’ll have to see how all of that works out.
00:58:38
Jag meets saying company aren’t really in in very good stead right now.
00:58:42
The NDP so broke that Jag meets riding a bus across the country as opposed to as opposed to having a chartered jet.
00:58:53
Let’s see a few more questions here.
00:58:56
Where do we feel that cryptocurrency and digital currency are are heading?
00:59:02
Both scare this particular individual asking the question.
00:59:08
My personal view on cryptocurrency is that you should treat it like a trading vehicle, but not necessarily as something which is an asset class that is going to retain its value indefinitely.
00:59:26
That view is shaped largely by Martin Armstrong’s views on it.
00:59:32
You know, certainly I know people who have substantial positions in, in various crypto currencies and depending on when they bought it, they’re in good shape.
00:59:44
But I would, I would look at it as something that if you’ve got a big position in it, you should look at trimming into strength.
00:59:54
And if you’re, if you don’t have a big position in it and you want to buy some weight for pull backs.
01:00:01
And certainly we seem to be in a pullback mode until very recently or even possibly still continuing with some of the bigger ones like like Bitcoin and Etherium and XRP and some some of the others.
01:00:17
Those are just the the main ones that I’m have a bit of familiarity with comment here.
01:00:26
Both major political parties seem to be pro war does.
01:00:31
Armstrong give a timeline where a default or currency crash occurs.
01:00:35
I set a break of 63.17 cents with signal a breakup in Canada.
01:00:44
And I, if I’m recalling correctly, I actually think that that was that break that he mentioned during the World Economic Conference was 68.16, not 63.17, unless there’s something more updated that I that I haven’t seen.
01:01:04
Going back to the whole issue of both political parties in the states being pro war, there was a lot of hope that that that Trump was actually going to be the anti war candidate.
01:01:15
And right now, it’s kind of a split decision, certainly making huge efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
01:01:23
But the Trump administration also seems to be bound and determined to escalate into a major military conflict with Iran, which is very sad because, of course, you know, death and destruction or death and destruction.
01:01:39
Yeah.
01:01:40
To me, that’s one of the most disappointing things about the Trump administration so far is that their Doctor Jekyll with the Ukraine Russia war tried to shut that one down, but appear to be actively involved in in trying to create one in the Middle East.
01:01:56
So that’s very disappointing, but the break of whatever, whether it’s 63.17 or the 68.16, that indicates the breakup of Canada.
01:02:08
Hopefully we don’t get there.
01:02:09
But I have to say that I am increasingly concerned that if the Liberals do get elected, that we’re going to see a significant rise of the independence talk here in Western Canada.
01:02:22
I don’t think that statehood or you know, what’s the other term like for Puerto Rico and Guam, they’re they’re not states, but they are, they’re territories.
01:02:38
I don’t think that that’s realistic. I think we’d want to be independent.
01:02:43
Yeah, I don’t think that we’re going there.
01:02:47
I could be wrong and maybe that’s just my hope talking because I’d like to see Canada stay together.
01:02:51
But I can certainly understand the position of many Albertans where they’re saying, you know, if we don’t have a better deal within Canada, why would we stay?
01:03:01
And I understand that. I, I’m completely sympathetic to that, to that position.
01:03:06
Well, Canada see capital controls because we’re part of NATO.
01:03:11
Don’t know, I think the capital controls are likely to be more of an EU thing, but that’s that’s beyond my my pay grade really.
01:03:23
OK.
01:03:25
And so for that for that person who was asking questions, he asked a whole bunch of questions and I’m not going to I can’t answer all of his questions because a lot of them are related to his personal portfolio.
01:03:37
So another question here from Chris, if you want off the Trump roller coaster, where do you invest?
01:03:46
Honestly, I don’t think that there is anywhere that is not on the Trump roller coaster because he takes up all the oxygen in the room and he seems to be the person who is he’s throwing EU s s weight around.
01:04:03
I don’t I don’t think that there, I don’t think that there’s a place to hide.
01:04:09
I think there’s just a series of smart decisions that you can make and look at the areas that will be that will benefit from his policies.
01:04:18
And certainly I think that the energy sector is one of them.
01:04:21
The gold sector certainly, certainly benefits pretty substantially because Trump, of course, you know, being the the captain chaos, you know, creates a lot of demand for gold as a hedge against chaos.
01:04:38
OK, next question here. Will Canada join the EU to avoid the USD?
01:04:50
I don’t think that there’s a very high probability that Canada will join the EU, partly because we’re not in Europe, partly because we would be in much worse financial shape if we aligned with the EU due to their incredibly heavy debt load and their regulation and their heavy-handed way of dealing with with various states.
01:05:21
How safe are preferred shares during a market correction?
01:05:26
Well, that depends on what kind of market correction we’re talking about.
01:05:30
If interest rates are going up, which is bad for bonds, preferred shares will also tend to to be hurt by that depending on what kind of preferred shares they are because there are perpetuals, there are floating rate and there are rate reset preferred shares.
01:05:51
But during a market correction on the equity side of things, preferred shares can also sometimes get caught in the middle with those as well because they are equity, although their preferred equity not common equity.
01:06:04
Longer term, You know, if we look past the volatility, I think that well, I know the preferred shares are are considerably safer than in common shares because they have a higher position in the capital structure.
01:06:18
And I actually think that there’s a fair amount of value in the preferred share market.
01:06:29
OK, what are our views on gold?
01:06:34
Well, I think you’ve heard that throughout the the presentation, gold has crested above $3000 an ounce, seems to be holding it.
01:06:41
The biggest reason I think is central bank buying.
01:06:45
And that’s because gold is not, is not a political asset.
01:06:51
It has no, it has no counterparty risk or anything like that.
01:06:55
And just in this past year, gold actually surpassed the euro as the second biggest of reserves for for central banks around the world after the US dollar.
01:07:11
And I’m certainly hanging on to my gold positions as we as we go forward.
01:07:19
Are we bullish on oil with Trump’s drill baby drill mantra, will that not put downward pressure on oil?
01:07:27
That’s that’s a question that we have been have been wrestling with really for the last five months since the US election.
01:07:39
In reality, a lot of the price of oil is, is based on geopolitical risk and demand from developing countries.
01:07:53
If the regulations in the US around drilling licenses and or drilling leases and you know, opening up different areas both on shore and and offshore and particularly up in, in, in Alaska, they could certainly drive prices down.
01:08:14
That would be good overall for for the consumer based economy.
01:08:19
Not so good here in Alberta, of course, but as a long term investment, I’m certainly continuing to hold my position in, in oil and gas stocks.
01:08:31
I think they’re a good value.
01:08:34
And I also think, well, I, I know this for a fact that Canadian oil and gas companies have the best balance sheets that they have in the history of the sector.
01:08:44
So I’m happy with that. They’re making money at 50 bucks. So and there’s another question here.
01:08:52
What are your views on the Canadian dollar silver and copper ACS? That’s three questions.
01:09:02
So you’re getting your bank, we’re going to start charging you for your questions there. Mr.
01:09:06
KB the Canadian dollar to to me the outlook is is based largely on what happens with our upcoming federal election.
01:09:18
I think we’re in big trouble if the anti growth policies of the Liberals are implemented and we’re in a much stronger long term position if the Conservatives are elected.
01:09:32
It’s a, it’s a the value of a currency versus other currencies, particularly against the US dollar is really a vote of confidence and also the overall strength of your economy.
01:09:43
So my view on the Canadian dollar is, is, is based on what happens on April 28th, silver definitely undervalued compared to gold.
01:09:56
Everybody that I’ve read and listened to for probably the last year or two has said that there’s far more upside left in the silver market than in the gold market.
01:10:08
I’ve yet to see that come to fruition.
01:10:10
I also have a pretty healthy position in silver miners as well within my own diversified portfolio and I’d be holding those for the longer term.
01:10:22
Copper ETFs, that one’s a little bit tougher.
01:10:28
Copper has certainly had made a nice turn here in the last three to four weeks, really going from about 4 bucks a pound to the the $5 a pound neighborhood, which is obviously a big percentage move.
01:10:41
I wouldn’t invest in copper ETFs directly. To me that’s too much concentration.
01:10:49
If you’re going to invest in the sector, you might want to consider, you know one of the well the the granddaddy of all copper producers, which you already know the name of which I won’t mention here because we’re not supposed to talk about specific stocks.
01:11:06
But yeah, so base metals I think generally are going to be certainly a requirement on a go forward basis when it comes to the future for war potential.
01:11:19
So that’s that ties into it as well. So all right.
01:11:24
So I think we’ve covered all the questions that we can cover here and we want to thank everybody for for joining us tonight and for sticking around for the question and answer period.
01:11:38
It’s been a very, very chaotic first quarter to say the least.
01:11:45
The next 30-4 days are going to be really important on the Canadian side of things.
01:11:52
And, and if you want some excitement, all you have to do is open the news feed and see what’s new in Trump world.
01:11:59
Because there seems to be a big surprise or a hiccup or a change of pace or another Molotov cocktail coming out of the lighthouse pretty much on a on an hourly basis.
01:12:12
All right. Thank you very much everybody for attending.
01:12:14
And we look forward to connecting with you soon, seeing if we can be of service to your family.
01:12:19
And we welcome your questions and inquiries. Thanks very much.
