Articles & Insights

No intended spin on Shakespeare’s Hamlet Soliloquy, “To Be or Not To Be” but it works since Central Banks find themselves in a uncertain decision inflection point – do we pause on rate raises or continue?

Today in the middle of May as I write, the S&P500 sits just north of 4,100. It has been used as a good gauge of market value and direction, it is basically a measure of the performance of 500 of the most successful American public companies. For perspective on where the market sits today, at the end of 2019 the S&P traded around 3,200. That was 3 months prior to the Covid crash in March of 2020.

The Economic Club of Canada’s annual panel of economist forecasts event was once again held this January. They highlighted the continued economic risks North America must navigate, namely, inflation, interest rates, recession, commodity prices, geo-political tensions, and housing.

Happy Spring. Headline news is as sensational as it has ever been these days. So much has changed just since the fall of last year; a war in Eastern Europe and raging inflation has gripped everyone’s attention. Q1 2022 was not a good quarter for investors, both equity markets and bond markets were down, some with more conservative portfolios actually fared worse than those with predominantly equity portfolios. In times like these it is more important than ever to take a step back, keep things in perspective and think through fundamentals. Not just fundamentals on investment policy, but revisiting your own cashflow analysis, needs for the future, projected net worth – the work that we’ve always done to gain perspective on how we are trending in order to help us make better decisions today.

Sustainable Investing is an approach that incorporates environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in the investment process. This in today’s investing community has become front and centre. Never before has there been such a push towards such important drivers of change in the world.

2020 will go down as one for the history books. The first reports of a mysterious virus quickly turned into a pandemic, global shutdown, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And yet, by the end of the year, markets had recovered beyond expectations.

COVID-19 has impacted our mental health in profoundly different ways. Dealing with it has been disruptive in the least and tragic at its worst.

All dealer organizations in Canada such as Manulife Securities require the completion of “KYC” information when opening new accounts. KYC stands for “know your client”.

What a crazy world we live in. For the last number of weeks, we have been jostling around to find our new normal. I still have my surreal moments… on a daily basis.

The title to this year’s economic forecast is…the same as last year. Admittedly, I will fail to earn any creative title credit, but the fact of the matter, there are similarities between 2019 and 2020 with a few exceptions.