Happy New Year!!
I hope everyone found some time to relax and enjoy the holiday season.
We had some big news on the family front: my oldest son, Jacob, and his wife, Gabi, announced they’re expecting their first child in June. That one landed a little differently for me. I’ve hit most life milestones without much of an existential crisis. I’m turning 53 this year, but I’ve always reconciled the passage of time by thinking of myself as a “young 52.” Becoming a grandfather feels like a moment that deserves a pause. It’s much harder to string together the words “young grandpa” and make them sound believable!
“Coincidentally,” the timing lines up with another milestone — Kristy will also be retiring in June. She’s been contemplating it for a while, but my standing question was always what she planned to do with her time. It turns out she now has a very good answer! In her world, being a grandmother is a full-time profession. It didn’t even give her pause to learn she’s technically too young to “retire” from teaching and will instead have to resign. She’s going out with a smile!
I, on the other hand, will be working for a long time yet. Partly because I genuinely enjoy what I do, partly because experience has finally caught up with confidence, partly because I’m looking forward to eventually bringing Jordan into the business — but mostly because I’m increasingly concerned about the cost of grandchildren! The not-yet-born baby received more Christmas gifts than anyone else this year. I’ve long included “don’t have kids” on my list of financial-prudence recommendations, but I’m fairly sure grandchildren are about to leap to the top of my personal liability ledger!
We had a relaxed Christmas: lots of time with family, a wedding that let us reconnect with old friends, too much food, and some reflection on the year behind us. I made a few resolutions for 2026 and am looking forward to settling into them as we move forward.
President Trump, meanwhile, apparently had “give Venezuela a rebrand” on his New Year’s resolution list and has already gotten a head start on the rest of us. Any futurists predicting a calm and orderly 2026 are off to a bad beginning!
From a market perspective, 2025 will go down as a good year. We didn’t get a classic Santa rally — just some choppy year-end trading — but the result was still solid double-digit returns from a volatile twelve months. More importantly, the market enters 2026 on firm economic footing. Momentum exiting 2025 was strong: U.S. jobless claims briefly dipped below 200,000, holiday spending exceeded expectations, and GDP tracking models are pointing to roughly 3% real growth in Q4 on top of more than 4% in Q3. That’s not an economy rolling over — it’s one carrying meaningful forward momentum.
AI continues to be the dominant driver of economic and market activity. At some point, AI will shift from magic to math, and there will be a repricing as investors focus less on speed of adoption and more on sales, margins, and revenue durability. For now, fear feels more sentiment-driven than fundamental — there are real earnings backing up the numbers.
Nvidia now carries an eye-watering ~$5 trillion market cap, yet trades at a forward P/E of roughly 22, well below its five-year average. It really is selling that many chips. That’s no guarantee it continues indefinitely, and for the first time in a long while I’m not recommending an overweight to technology. Valuations are frothy and priced optimistically. But I’m also not prepared to bet against it. A neutral S&P 500 weighting today is roughly 50% tech and tech-adjacent companies, so concentration risk is real even without an overweight. Still, history suggests that when productivity accelerates, equity markets benefit — even if leadership changes. There will be casualties in the AI arms race, but the survivors are likely to form the infrastructure that carries us forward.
Trying to quantify geopolitical risk is almost a joke at this point. Tariffs, wars, global instability, and sovereign accountability becoming optional have all ratcheted up uncertainty. There are more plausible triggers for global conflict than I can remember in a very long time.
Canada is moving through a slow, late-cycle adjustment shaped by the lagged effects of higher interest rates, softer consumer spending, and ongoing affordability pressures. Economic momentum has clearly cooled, and while inflation has eased from its peak, progress remains uneven. Canada needs to diversify trade to wean us off the U.S., but I’m not sure we’ll be able to follow the “Donroe Doctrine” playbook and simply take over whichever country has the imports we need most. I’ll bet Venezuela’s oil infrastructure gets an overhaul before we get a pipeline. Our number one import is cars — maybe we could get away with just kidnapping Elon Musk?
From a Canadian investment standpoint, this is a more selective environment. Broad economic tailwinds are limited, and returns are increasingly driven by company fundamentals, balance-sheet strength, and pricing power rather than easy growth. Periods like this tend to reward patience, diversification, and a focus on quality.
At the end of the year, Warren Buffett retired from Berkshire Hathaway at age 95. A true paragon of the industry, he’s had a foundational influence on how I think about investing. I’m not sure I’ll last quite that long, but his career was aspirational. Buffett is famous for distilling wisdom into simple phrases — “Be fearful when others are greedy…” is the most quoted — but I’ve always liked his perspective on time: “If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes.” Time, as he says, is the friend of the wonderful business.
We’re not trying to own companies for the short term. We’re not timing rotations from Minnesota Somali daycare centres into Venezuelan oil companies. We want durable businesses that will still be good businesses years from now, regardless of what markets throw at them.
Our family are big Harry Potter fans. The books were fantastic and arrived at exactly the right ages for our kids as it felt like each new release matured alongside them. Every Christmas we rewatch the movies, and the best part for me is Kristy’s reaction — she can recite the dialogue word for word and yet still gasps in surprise and wonder during the dramatic moments.
The older I get, the more markets feel like rewatching a movie I’ve seen before. I may not know the exact lines, but I recognize the plot. There will be tension, anxiety, and drama — but if you stick it out, it all works out in the end.
“Capacity” has become an important regulatory term, measured through time horizons, income, net worth, and age. Those things matter, but I think capacity is just as much about resilience and mental toughness. Markets are volatile. The combination of structural change from AI and geopolitical upheaval has created a cauldron of chaos that makes forecasting impossible.
The good news is that it’s always been impossible.
The even better news is that it doesn’t matter.
We build portfolios that match your capacity. Structurally, that means ensuring money is available when you need it — that’s the easy part. The hard part is accepting that if you want returns above inflation, you will go through periods where you are unhappy with markets (and your advisor!). Volatility is the price of admission for growth, and it is resiliency and mental toughness that is needed to get you through hard times.
The average holding period for a stock today is less than a year. That isn’t investing — it’s speculation. Jacob was born 27 years ago, the same year I started in this business. The transition from dad to grandpa feels like it happened in a blink. I may not have Buffett’s longevity yet, but I’m confident the advice I’ll give our new grandchild will be the same as when I started: real wealth comes from patience, long-term thinking, and ignoring the noise.
I’m looking forward to catching up with everyone over the next quarter. We’ll be reaching out to schedule client reviews, but if you’d like to meet sooner, please use the scheduling link below.
Stay disciplined. Be optimistic. Be resilient.
Jeremy
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