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June 2026
Global equity markets have recovered from their first-quarter lows. As of May 29th, the S&P 500 returned 11.8% (total return in Canadian dollars), the S&P/TSX 10.6%, the MSCI ACWI 12.7%, the MSCI EAFE 9.9%, and the MSCI Emerging Markets 26.2% year-to-date, with most indexes trading at their all-time highs.
The stock market’s recent gains have been partially driven by a turnaround in technology and software company stocks, though the sector has since experienced a sharp pullback. Continued volatility in software share prices reflects investors’ confusion about perceived long-term winners and losers from advancements in AI. We have taken advantage of market dislocations by selectively adding to our technology holdings consistent with our value-driven investment approach.
Artificial intelligence has become a dominant theme across technology markets. The four largest platform companies – Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta – are expected to spend over $700 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, according to Bloomberg consensus estimates. This level of investment reflects genuine demand for AI computing capacity, from data centres, chips, and the power infrastructure to run them. This raises questions around which companies will earn durable returns from the buildout, and which will absorb the cost without a proportionate improvement in earnings or returns to shareholders.
Our approach to these questions is consistent throughout all other sectors. We continue to implement fundamental, bottom-up research to identify businesses with strong competitive advantages, sustainable earnings, and attractive valuations that offer a margin of safety. Thus, our AI investing strategy, in particular, targets established technology leaders at reasonable valuations where AI accelerates core businesses; disregarding pure-play momentum stocks with stretched multiples.
We have organized our core technology holdings into two groups. The first includes companies that control the end-to-end AI value chain; from proprietary chips and model training through to distribution across millions of users and enterprises. This group of portfolio holdings includes Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft. Their respective dominant platforms create competitive moats that widen with scale as they compound AI investment returns internally rather than passing value to external vendors. The second group consists of established software platforms whose valuations have come to reflect an excessive degree of AI disruption risk. These investments include Adobe, Salesforce, and Constellation Software. These businesses own deep proprietary data, high customer switching costs, and mission-critical workflows, making them the most likely beneficiaries of AI-driven productivity gains rather than its victims. However, earlier this year, as AI enthusiasm accelerated, investors grew concerned that newer AI-native tools would render these platforms obsolete. This resulted in share prices falling sharply and valuations dropping well below historical averages. We view this as a mispricing and an attractive entry point.
The current environment underscores the importance of anchoring the investment process in proprietary fundamental research and ignoring market noise. We are cautiously analyzing artificial intelligence and its developments, ensuring that our holdings have durable competitive advantages. Our focus remains on managing well-diversified portfolios positioned to deliver value across various market cycles.
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