In the previous issue of Invested, we explored the economic impact that the lack of mental health care has in Canada and around the world. In this issue, we look at examples of external forces that affect a person’s mental health and how funding sectors outside of health care can decrease the overall economic burden. In the previous…

Since the onset of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008 – and maybe back to the Dot Com bust in 2000 – market participants have become accustomed to easy financial policy and a supportive Federal Reserve (Fed). As discussed in Inflation – Why So Much Focus?, “[s]uccessive Federal Reserve Chairs have now followed Mr….

Financial markets are always changing. This is not a new idea, but rather an accepted truth about their very nature. Being the sum-total of human consensus, markets capture and distill a great deal of information about a given entity into a single number: the price. As time has progressed and technologies and economies have grown,…

I’ve been writing for some time about how the constraints that the Federal Reserve (Fed) is operating under make it such that it’s likely they will overreact to inflation, thus causing a recession. Despite the gravity of the ‘R’ word, the recession that is likely to materialize should be mild given we’re coming off a…

With roughly one third of Canadians being affected by a mental illness in their lifetime[1], it can be argued that the historically underfunded sector of mental health care doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense in the obvious humane sense, but it also doesn’t make sense economically.This is true, not just in Canada, but globally….

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”- F. Scott Fitzgerald Readers of Viewpoint’s publications over the…

Factor investing has become commonplace in the world of investment management ever since Eugene Fama and Kenneth French published their three-factor asset pricing model three decades ago. Since then, a lot of dedicated work has gone into uncovering new factors and sources of excess return unexplained by the factors that came before them, launching a…

In the wake of an entertaining FIFA World Cup, many of us may be reeling in our recollections of the wide variety of memorable upsets that took place. Whether it be the Saudi Arabia team starting their tournament with a victory over eventual champions Argentina, or the Moroccan team knocking out Spain, the tournament was…

As we reflect on 2022, most investors will agree that it was challenging year. However, we can also take a prospective view that the challenges of 2022 have provided a much healthier opportunity set for investors looking into 2023 and beyond. For equity investors, depending on the strategy, most diversified indices saw losses that clustered…

A well-known adage is that risk and reward go hand in hand. To increase your potential upside, you must be willing to withstand increasing levels of uncertainty as to whether that upside will be achieved. The prospect of becoming a famous actor in Hollywood sounds enticing, until you realize that there are very few leading…