Canada is producing record amounts of oil and gas, yet about a third as many drilling rigs are working today as in 2014. Institutional portfolio manager Andrew Johnson, drawing on research by equity analyst Ian Turnbull of the Canadian small cap team, examines why more demand did not translate into more profit for the companies that drill the wells. The piece comes back to a simple idea: businesses that will be busy are not always the businesses that will be profitable.

A year ago, a trade shock gave the Bank of Canada room to cut rates; today, with inflation grinding higher, it may have to hike instead. Canadian equity portfolio manager Vijay Viswanathan and fixed income portfolio manager Crista Caughlin examine what the latest tariffs, and last month’s Canada Investment Summit, mean for Canadian portfolios. They explain why the equity portfolio carries little trade-exposed revenue once exempt commodities like oil and potash are set aside, why loan losses track job losses more than tariffs for the banks, and how a new tax deduction pulls the effective rate on new investment below the U.S. The conversation returns to a simple idea: what matters now is shovels in the ground, not sound bites on TV.

A year ago, global credit spreads were tight and the risks that mattered most were barely in the headlines. Global credit analysts Sandro Morassutti and Marty Lee revisit these themes: the debt funding the AI build-out, the credibility of the Fed and the U.S. government, and fiscal and geopolitical pressure, and assess how each has evolved. They explain why record corporate bond supply has not yet pushed spreads wider, why most of this year’s move has come from government yields rather than credit, and where they are finding value today. Above all, they return to a simple idea: the job is not to predict the next dislocation, but to be positioned with the quality and liquidity to act when one arrives.

Concerns about AI safety and the pace of development have investors asking a harder question: is demand for computing power actually durable? Emerging markets equity portfolio manager Wen Quan Cheong returns from a research trip through Taiwan and South Korea and discusses what AI “pacing” means for chip demand, why inference and alignment could pick up what a slower training cycle gives back, and which parts of the semiconductor supply chain have the strongest structural tailwinds. He explains why margins can widen further down the AI supply chain and what conversations with TSMC, SK Hynix, and Samsung suggest about the durability of this capital cycle. He also shares a non-AI idea outside the spotlight: a port operator in the Philippines. 

Global equity portfolio manager, Paul Moroz, speaks to a wide range of market topics, including what higher discount rates mean for equity valuations and the subtle shifts you might not see in the headlines but that absolutely matter. 

Stay tuned for the second half, where Paul discusses Millennium Prize math problems, humility, podcast proliferation, and entropy—for those seeking useful mental models for portfolio construction, the payoff is worthwhile.
 

Private equity was long the preserve of endowments, pensions, and the ultra-wealthy, but the line between public and private markets is blurring. Private investments portfolio manager Peter Lieu and institutional portfolio manager Kevin Minas explain why companies are staying private longer, how secondaries and continuation vehicles have reshaped the industry, and why distributions matter as much as IRR. They walk through how Mawer built institutional-quality private equity access through fund commitments, co-investments, and direct deals, and why a new mutual fund trust now opens the strategy to registered accounts. Above all, they return to a simple idea: accessing private markets rewards discipline, diversification across vintages, and knowing what you own.

The four largest hyperscalers are expected to spend roughly $700 billion on AI capital expenditures this year, a scale with few historical parallels outside the railroads. Equity analyst Irena Petkovic examines what that spending is actually buying and what has to be true for it to pay off. She explains how the data center has shifted from a cost center to a revenue-producing asset, walks through the four ways hyperscalers monetize compute, and lays out the token economy that underpins the newest business model. She also weighs the early evidence of returns against the risks around token pricing, debt financing, and public backlash, and describes how the team positions the portfolio around all of it.

Labels and mental shortcuts help us navigate a world of too much information, but they turn dangerous when they harden into rigid identities that dictate decisions even as facts change. The article argues for "integrative thinking", a term coined by Roger Martin: holding opposing ideas in tension to find a third path rather than collapsing into either/or choices. For investors, that means keeping the timeless questions of "quality" while staying forward-looking and agile enough to reassess as the world shifts—embracing the "and."

Memory prices have surged, and no one can say where they will be in 2029 or 2030. Equity analyst Shan Rui Yeo explains how the team values SK Hynix when the range of outcomes is that wide: a Monte Carlo framework that runs a discounted cash flow through thousands of scenarios and prices the business on a distribution of returns rather than a single forecast. He also unpacks the leveraged single-stock ETFs that have been amplifying the stock’s daily swings, and why flow-driven volatility can be a gift for long-term investors. Above all, he makes the case that memory can be cyclical, structurally growing, and wealth-creating all at once.

Memory has been one of the strongest corners of the semiconductor industry, and strong returns invite hard questions. In the second part of this series, equity analyst Shan Rui Yeo examines the main risks to the memory thesis: rising competition from China's CXMT and YMTC, the technologies that could reduce AI's appetite for memory, and the wave of capacity investment that could eventually tip the industry back into oversupply. He weighs each risk against the constraints holding it back, from equipment export controls to limited EUV supply, and notes that memory companies already trade at three to five times forward earnings. The conversation closes on a working principle: treat the terminal value as a distribution, not a fixed number.

One of the defining market stories of the past 12 months has not been AI chips that compute, but the chips that remember. Equity analyst Shan Rui Yeo explains how memory works, from DRAM and NAND to high bandwidth memory, and how an industry that destroyed wealth for four decades became disciplined after consolidating to three players in 2013. He then walks through what changed: AI inference has made memory the key bottleneck, memory content is climbing with each new generation of GPUs, and new supply takes three to four years to build. With prices up sharply and customers signing long-term agreements, Part 1 of this three-part conversation lands on a commodity industry whose business model is changing in real time.

Canada has spent a generation underinvesting in the infrastructure and resources that underpin its economy, and that may be starting to change. Canadian small cap equity analyst Dominic Drzazga examines the Build Canada theme: what it actually means beyond the headlines, and what has shifted since the federal election. He walks through the legislative groundwork, from the Building Canada Act to a fast-tracked pipeline of named projects, and explains why the clearest near-term opportunities potentially sit in the middle of the value chain rather than with the eventual asset owners. Above all, he frames Build Canada as a long-horizon shift, one where the discipline is separating the projects that break ground from those that stay on the press release.