Dan Dupont on market trends and portfolio strategy

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Well, thank you, everyone, for investing with me for maybe a bit over 15 years.

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I've been on Canadian Large Cap officially over 15 years now, so it's been a

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fun ride. And as you know now, we are focusing on

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downside first and foremost.

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So market trends for us means that we have to monitor what could come our

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way, what could become eventually cheap enough, and to have basically the

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ability, the willingness, and the capital to deploy when that happens.

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And right now, I would say...

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We've seen some interesting moves in the past few weeks, not necessarily around

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geopolitical movements for us because oil going

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from fairly priced to slightly expensive to much

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more expensive has not meant any opportunities for us.

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I think it's been the same in a lot of areas around that.

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For us, it has meant opportunities in AI a few weeks ago related

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to AI. Software companies that have been punished too much for example

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was a fertile ground for us So that's how we react is being ready for

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anything and when things come our way, we will deploy capital But we're not

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trying to predict anything I don't know when the Iran war will stop or

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end or whether it'll extend for a week or a year or a decade I

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will let the market decide and we'll let the marketplace come to us and we will

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take these opportunities Just like we've done for over 15 years now

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Well, the approach per se doesn't change.

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The process has been the same for a long, long time.

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The positioning has changed somewhat over the last few weeks.

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It remains extremely defensive because as I look around the

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investment horizon, we don't see a lot of opportunities that are cheap enough

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for us yet. We've seen a few in the past few weeks in software,

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but outside of that, we stay quite heavily invested in things that we

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understand well that are not very cyclical.

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And that are still cheap enough for us. A lot of staples, for example,

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are included in that. But outside of that, the movement in

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a lot of sectors around the Iran war has not really given us

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a lot opportunities, at least for now.

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So maybe the market will give us more.

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But we're being patient, as usual, and we will be very, very

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swift in deploying capital when the opportunities are there.