James Connor welcomes Jonathan Wellum, CEO of ROCKLINC Investment Partners, to discuss Warren Buffett’s decision to build cash reserves, the overvaluation of tech stocks like Nvidia, and why precious metals might become key to protecting portfolios. Wellum also covers Buffett’s increasing exposure to energy stocks, concerns over baby boomers’ equity exposure, and the broader high market valuations. With markets on a complacent and continuous rise, could a significant shift be near?
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Jonathan Wellum 0:00
One of the smartest guys in investing history, certainly in our lifetime, is building a lot of cash, and he has a substantial cash hoard right now, when Buffett’s building cash like that, I think no the market should pay attention. It does tell us that. I think the valuations are high. Hi
James Connor 0:21
and welcome to wealthion. I’m James Connor. Well, here we are in the month of October, which has historically been a very volatile month, but the markets continue to climb this wall of brewery. And it doesn’t matter what’s happening in the world, in China, the Middle East or the US, the market just keeps grinding higher and making all new all time highs. Even Nvidia hit a new all time high earlier this weekend. It has a market cap of $3.4 trillion now. But I can help but think that there’s a real sense of complacency setting into this market. To help me make sense of this current environment. My guest today is Jonathan Willem of rocklink investment partners. And rocklink is a wealthy, UNendorsed financial advisor for Canadian investors. Jonathan, thank you very much for joining us today. How are things in Toronto?
Jonathan Wellum 1:06
Not too bad getting a little cooler. But the colors, the fall colors, are beautiful right now, so we’re enjoying those for at least the next week or two. Yes,
James Connor 1:14
it’s a beautiful time of the year. So Jonathan, even though you’re based in Toronto, much of your portfolio is comprised of us names, so you’re well acquainted with the US markets. What’s your take on the US economy right now? Do you have any concerns?
Jonathan Wellum 1:28
Well, this the concerns that we’ve talked about even you know in the past. First of all, the economy is chugging along. It’s it’s amazingly resilient. It’s probably one of the most resilient economies in the world, and that’s testimony to a very dynamic market, and certainly a dynamic economy and dynamic investors down there. Also, I think it’s indicative of a lot of deficit spending. And so as we know, the government is spending on about 6% of GDP or more in terms of its deficit. So debt continues to go up, but overall it’s been very resilient. It’s not growing quickly, as we know the numbers, and there’s been lots of adjustments to the to the employment numbers and so forth, but it has been chugging along, plodding along better than, certainly the European economies, better than the Canadian economy, and as we know, China also, although they’re doing a lot of stimulus. So overall, not too bad for the US, but we have the same concerns. A lot of deficit, you know, deficit spending, massive debt. Where does all this go? These are all structural. It’s going to be very difficult to get out of that situation. And they’re going to have to, you know, more and more pressure to continue lowering interest rates in order to get the interest cost down and to keep the economy above above water. It’s
James Connor 2:40
amazing how you can stimulate an economy with a few trillion dollars.
Jonathan Wellum 2:46
Well, when you have an economy, that’s what, 2024, 25 trillion, and you’re putting, you’re spending, you know, you have a deficit that is around a trillion every three months, four months, yeah, that’s a lot of that’s a lot of spending. The other thing is, you’ve got this open border, and so all of the spending, maybe at what, 1015, 20 million people, depending on who you’re listening to, have come across the border. And you’ve got all the cities, you know, putting putting these people up, all the money being spent, flying them all over the country. There’s just a lot of stimulus these. These are also individuals who can, you know, work for lower wages and so forth, and stimulate the market that way, and the US has also, over the last number of years, made major investments in capital, in capital initiatives, capital spending, and so their productivity gains are some of the best in the world. So that’s also certainly helped their economy much more so than say, in Canada, we’re really struggling.
James Connor 3:36
So let’s talk about valuations now. And I made mention at the onset that NVIDIA hit an all time high earlier this week. The market cap is $3.4 trillion now. And I want to put this into perspective. This is greater than the market cap of the entire Toronto Stock Exchange, okay, which is around 3 trillion. And how do you feel about the current valuations?
Jonathan Wellum 3:58
Well, I mean overall, as you know, the S P, if you take the S p5 100. And of course, that does include some real big heavy weights like the Nvidia and Amazon, Apple and so forth. The typical suspects Are you trading about 2122 times earnings, which is on the high end of historically, what one would expect. And certainly you can’t call that a value market. If it’s gonna be more of a value market, it’d be more like 14, 1516, times. It’d be much more appropriate. So the overall market is expensive, but when you look at some of the outliers, like Nvidia, clearly that’s much higher than 20 times earnings, is trading more like 40 times revenue. And so from our perspective, we just can’t buy a company like that. We don’t buy momentum. We don’t buy for short periods of time. We’re trying to buy based upon the next three to four or five years and buy it on a discounted cash flow basis and so forth. So companies like Nvidia, and our view, it’s an amazing business. It’s changing a lot of. The market place in terms of its chips and AI and all of that. But we don’t invest in companies just for their impact on the market. There ultimately has to be the cash flow that is tangible, that we can see, that we can value. Otherwise we look elsewhere and we get the benefit of investing in other companies that are benefiting from AI. And so we actually do own some Amazon which benefits from the AI. We own Snyder electric, which is part of the, you know, building the data centers in AI. And even the Brookfield companies are, you know, expanding and, you know, owning a lot of assets in the AI space. So we don’t have to be in Nvidia to benefit from the longer term trends. But we are very, very careful about overpaying and trying to chase stocks just based upon momentum. We leave that up to other people who are much smarter than us at doing that. We’re not smart enough to do that. We like to really get down to the brass tax and being able to value based upon cash flow or asset value, things like that, which matter to us as value investors.
James Connor 6:01
So q3 numbers are going to start coming out in earnest this week, and we have a number of banks reporting in the US, Bank of America, Citi, Morgan, Stanley, we also already saw numbers out of Goldman, Sachs, they were beat. And last week we saw numbers out of JP Morgan, the stock popped 5% on the back of their numbers. It’s trading at or near all time highs. It’s up 30% on the year. And I was really intrigued by comments out of Jamie Dimon. He said he was referring to the US consumer, but he said the consumer is fine and is on strong footy. And I guess this kind of threw me for a bit of a loop, because we saw so many companies in q2, came out, and they all cited the fact that they missed their numbers because of a weak consumer. They just weren’t spending money. And we saw Home Depot, Nike, Airbnb, Starbucks and so many other companies come out more, and they all cited like this, the US consumers just not spending money. What’s your takeaway on, on what’s happening with JP Morgan and what’s happening with the US consumer?
Jonathan Wellum 7:05
Yeah, so let’s back up a second. I mean, from our perspective, as we’ve talked about in previous, you know, previous interviews, we’re not really big fans of the banks in general. So, you know, we we don’t have, we have, we do not have a lot of exposure. The banks have done well this year with the interest rates, you know, settling down and getting the inversion out of the out of the yield curve and so forth, their margins have been a little bit better and and the write offs have not been as large as I would have expected. And so overall, the banks this year have done well. But it doesn’t change our overall thesis for the next number of years that we have a very indebted consumer. We have a governments that are way overextended, and we have corporations, in many cases also that are overextended, and they might even have to, you know, again, as they have to reprice their debt over time, that also is going to be an interest increasing cost to them. So from our perspective, the big picture is we’re cautious on leveraged financials because of the massive amount of debt out there, both on the on all three levels that you know, the personal, corporate and government sovereign debt, having said that, the banks are turned in Good, good, solid numbers this year so far. And I think you know, the write offs are up a little bit, if you if we are looking at some of the numbers from the more the consumer banks, there’s some pressure on the consumer that that we’re seeing in credit card spending, it’s up and so forth. I was a little surprised that Jamie Dimon being as as as calm and cautious a common I think I wouldn’t say enthusiastic, but just calm in terms of his comments, and, you know, thinking that consumers is reasonably strong, I don’t think that’s justified by looking at the broader markets and also the consumer discretionary spending, and we’ll see. But again, that’s the beauty of the market. From our perspective, we can look at other places which have lower risk with also good upside, and we can avoid areas that we think that could could develop into, you know, future problems. So we’re looking ahead, and we’re just looking at the overall indebtedness, and we’re saying, hey, let’s be careful, fortunate like in Canada. If you look at the Canadian situation, our biggest position has always been TD Bank. For many years, we sold out of our position completely about two months ago, a month and a half ago, two months and we’re quite happy to be out of that one. But then that’s a specific name that’s come under pressure because of the, you know, anti Money, money laundering problem in the US, and now there are limited growth opportunities in the US as a result of fines and restrictions. And so we’re quite happy to be out of that. But overall, the banks have done better than I would have anticipated, given the stretching of the consumer and the rapid rise in interest rates. And so we’ll just going to have to see sometimes it can be, you know, a lag effect, and it can take a few more quarters. And so we’re watching that very closely.
James Connor 9:53
So, and I’m glad you brought up TD Bank. I was going to ask you about that. And so just to lay the ground. On work for our viewers, TD Bank got hit last week on the back of an official ruling out of the SEC. The fine was over $3 billion number of restrictions on terms of future growth in the US, and that’s what was driving the growth at TD Bank, and now it’s probably the worst performing bank in North America. It’s down 8% on the year. So would you not revisit it, given the evaluations, or do you think it’s there’s more to come on the downside? Yeah, it’s
Jonathan Wellum 10:27
good question. And so no, we will revisit it. We’ll it won’t be for a few more months. We’ll let things just settle out, because our overall view in the banks is is neutral at best. And so we’re not enthusiastic about it. We’re looking at other spaces, but it is setting up for a perfect opportunity to buy a very well run bank. I mean, obviously they made a major mistake in a couple of the segments in the US. And unfortunately, that can happen with collusion amongst a number of employees, and it was serious. And as we know, if you get into trouble in the States, they’ll take you out to the woodshed and really beat you up and extract as much money out of you as possible. But the bigger issue for TD Bank is that they are now limited in growth. You know, they’ve been slapped and so from a regulatory point of view, they really can’t grow the business in the states now for a couple of years. And that is probably the biggest impact in terms of valuation on the bank, because Canada is already super saturated. As you know, it’s already an oligopolistic situation up here. So it’s, it’s really not a lot of growth in the Canadian marketplace, and everybody’s up to their eyeballs and debt anyway in Canada. So expanding their balance sheets in Canada is going to be a trickier business. So that’s, that’s something though, that we will be definitely looking at. And there could be a great entry point and opportunity when this thing, when all the dust settles, and that shouldn’t be too far out, and certainly banks learn from their mistakes, and we’ll see about that. Could be a great opportunity. Yeah,
James Connor 11:53
I recently spoke with another fellow Canadian, David Rosenberg, and his big concern is one of complacency, and he’s also concerned that many people are too overexposed to equities, especially baby boomers. And he’s made mention of the fact that no one does research anymore. They just buy right and are you concerned that there’s this level of complacency out there, and regardless of what’s happening in China, China’s maybe imploding, regardless of the hostilities in the Middle East, regardless of what’s happening in the US or in this upcoming election, the the S, P and the Nasdaq, just keep going higher every day. Do you are you concerned at all but this level of complacency that’s out there?
Jonathan Wellum 12:33
Yeah, no. I mean David Rosenberg, I think is an excellent analyst. I followed him from his Merrill Lynch days and and keep, keep up with what he is saying. He’s is a, he’s a very, you know, prudent individual. He’s very numbers oriented. He gets right into the nitty gritty. And I like that. And he’s, he’s prepared to take a contrary position, which I love. And so I do think that he is exactly right. People are complacent, and that’s largely because, with interest rates being so low, up until more recently, you had to sort of look for a dividend. You had to look for that return. You weren’t getting it on cash. And so people did go into the market. And we’ve now had, I mean, other than the covid situation, where the price, you know, the stock market’s dropped for a couple of months, but not for very long. We really haven’t had a down market in any substantial way since 2010 so, you know, you’ve got 1415, years of a bias to the upside, and there’s no question, then you get complacency into, you know, being priced in. And so people just start to expect that they’re going to get 10% rates of return, 15% rates of return, year after year. But as I think David Rosenberg also points out, you’ve got this massive aging of the population, and you’re going to have more and more people living off of some of their investments. And so if they are heavily weighted in equities, and there’s anything that happens to the equity markets, they could they come off a little bit. You could get a knee jerk reaction, more of a knee jerk reaction, because of the allocation to equities is so high that people could come out, and that could certainly cause a larger down, down draft in equities. So no, I think people need to be careful, and there is a certain degree of complacency. The way we try to get around that is we do own what we hope to be assets that can go up when the market goes down. And so, you know, we have a little bit more in precious metals, certainly a lot more than the average investment advisor or the average Canadian is we would be running, you know, high teens, maybe, maybe 18% of our assets are more exposed to precious metals and some of the commodities, which we think would be somewhat of a hedge over time to a week to a week stock market. So, yeah,
James Connor 14:40
Jonathan, you’re a big follower of Warren Buffett and his style of investing, and he’s been raising cash in recent months. What does this tell you? I know you can’t really speak for him, but what are your thoughts you’ve been following him for a long time. How do you think he’s thinking? Yeah, one
Jonathan Wellum 14:56
of the first, first people that when I got into. Business with Michael Lee chin back in 1990 Michael said, Whatever you do, Jonathan, study every single thing you can about Warren Buffett, read any books that have been written on him and so forth. And I think it was one of the wisest councils that I ever received early on in my life in the investment business. You know, Warren Buffett is a genius. I mean, this is a man who just has strictly from running a hedge fund to building and then investing and turning that into owning companies, created a business that’s worth more than a trillion dollars, just as an investor. I mean, it’s just shocking his investment performance, and he makes it sound very simple, and he does have very, very simple principles that he adheres to, but the ability to execute on those simple principles is very difficult. The man is a financial genius and and so when he does go in and out of the marketplace, I mean, typically, is a very long term investor, and so he loves being in the market, but when he starts to build substantial cash positions, I do think you need to take note and certainly process that into your analysis and use use that as another data point and how you should be investing. For us, it tells us that one of the smartest guys in investing history, certainly in our lifetime, is building a lot of cash, and he has a substantial cash hoard right now. He sold down his position in Apple somewhat. Now that was a massive position. He did very well. And he’s also sold down substantially his bank positions. And he built some of these big bank positions, as you know, back in 2008 2009 when he took warrants and supported some of them, when they were basically just about ready to go under bankrupt in the financial crisis when the government had the TARP program and was spending money to support the market. And so when Buffett’s building cash like that, I think no the market should pay attention. It does tell us that I think the valuations are high. He wants to have powder dry, and I think it does set him up for a major transaction if there is a downstroke in the marketplace. And that’s just the nature of it. I think it’s impossible to read it any other way. He sees market as high opportunities is not substantial. Particularly, remember, he his opportunities have to be big ones too. So he can’t buy small cap stocks in any significant manner. He’s got to buy medium to larger cap stocks and and so I think he’s being very cautious and careful that the selling down to the banks, I think is very interesting. I think that does tell you that he’s concerned about the overall economy, and potentially the leverage that’s built into the economy, the indebtedness and he’s
James Connor 17:36
been adding to his energy holdings, the big one being Occidental Petroleum. Yes, exactly.
Jonathan Wellum 17:41
Which is, again, more of a commodity, more inflation protection. I think the, as you know, with the ES, you know, the environmental, social governance, all of the pushing of the green agenda and so forth, making it sound like energy. We’re not going to be using oil and gas in the future. That’s incredibly naive. We’re going to be using oil and gas for decades to come. And therefore you can actually buy some of these energy companies at four or five times, you know, cash flow, some of the cash flow, free cash flow yields, and some of these, some of these energy companies are as high as 10 to 1011, 12, 13% so when you can buy free cash flow yields of that extent versus, you know, half a percent or 1% Nvidia would probably, probably lower than that that I think, you know, a value investor is going to, you know, sharpen his pencil and buy some of those assets. And I want
James Connor 18:32
to spend a couple of minutes on your investment style at rocklink and how it compares to that with Warren Buffett. And maybe you can just tell us about it. And what’s your investment style?
Jonathan Wellum 18:43
Well, we try to use many of the same principles that Warren Buffett utilizes. And that is, that, do we try to look at companies with with moats, good protection around them, predictable businesses with a track record that is, is excellent in fairly, you know, strong long term growth industries try to buy companies again that really do produce free cash flow, and are good investors in terms of investing back in their business. So they, you know, they have their own built in, you know, hurdle rates and things like that. So you get this natural compounding. And so, you know, we try to utilize, you know, strong balance sheets, very defensive businesses, but can grow, grow quickly. So, you know, we that’s where we try to utilize a similar type of investment philosophy. We’re not looking at speculative stocks. We’re not looking at junior securities. We’re not looking at stocks that have, you know, great idea and sound it might turn out well, but they’ve already proven, and by their track record, that they know how to make money, and they have a cash flow that’s coming out of that we can value, and we don’t have to be, you know, making wild assumptions in order to justify the valuation of those businesses. So some of our top holdings would include business that are in the technology. Space. So we would have, you know, something like Roper technologies, which is a major software kind of company, but a lot of industrial software, so it’s a leader in a number of different industry verticals. We love that type of business. As you know, software business, a great cash flow business reoccurring. You get embedded in people’s businesses. You have high retention rates, things like that. Buffett, of course, does not invest in precious metals, and so we would differ with them there, but when we go into the space, we try to go through royalty companies. So they’re really investment bankers to the mining businesses. And we like that, because they do create a cash flow stream that you can value, and you can look at the counterparty risk in countries that they’re in. And, you know, build up a comfort zone with the risk profile, things like that. And, you know, we own some consumer, you know, consumer staple businesses, which, of course, Buffett likes companies like church and Dwight. We’ve gone nestle in the past. We’ve We’ve lightened up our position there more recently. And in Financials, you know, financials, even though we don’t own some of the banks, we also certainly will invest in other financials, like the like the Brookfield companies, which are, you know, infrastructure, but also financial companies, and, you know, Burford capital, which provides litigation, finance, things like that. So in all the companies that we’re looking at, do they have a long standing business? Are they run by sharp people? They know how to allocate capital. They’re generating free cash flow. We can value them in the marketplace and justify what we’re paying for them today, and the future looks pretty bright for them in terms of the industry dynamics and growth opportunities.
James Connor 21:33
You mentioned royalty companies. So what royalty companies do you currently own? We do
Jonathan Wellum 21:37
have exposure to, you know, the big the big ones, you know, Franco Nevada, and we’ve actually started adding a little bit more to it, once it got sort of knocked down a little bit because of the trial and tribulation there in in Panama, with the cobray mine, where they they had the copper mine shut down. But we do also Franco Nevada and wheat and precious metals has been a very, very large holding for us for some time. And Randy Smallwood runs a, you know, a really beautiful business. There are lots of, lots of growth and good capital allocator and Osco royalties. And we also have some sandstorm, which is a very strong company. We their profile. They have a doubling, it looks certainly built into their business, a doubling of revenue over the next five years. And I think Nolan Watson’s position that company very well. Even if the price of gold goes sideways, you’re going to get a lot of growth in that business over the next few years. So those are some of the, some of the major royalty positions that
James Connor 22:33
we have. And how many names would you have in your portfolio?
Jonathan Wellum 22:35
We like to focus I mean, one of the things that from our perspective, is people often deworcify, to use Peter Lynch’s old expression. I think he had that in one up and one Wall Street. But fantastic book he wrote back in the late 80s, early 90s, and so you can be in too many places. That’s why we don’t we’re not big ETF guys and index investing. So we typically have 20 to 25 stocks with our top five or six companies being, you know, 35 to 40% of the portfolio. So for us, it’s all about knowing the companies, researching them, and then having a heavier focus on the companies that we really like that we think are well positioned and can grow very quickly over the next little while. And we think that’s the way that you can outperform and also manage risk, because you understand the businesses really well. So
James Connor 23:25
we both reside in the city of Toronto. So I gotta ask you about the Canadian economy now, and the GDP per capita has been in decline now for five years. Productivity levels have been declining for nine or 10 years. What’s your take on the Canadian economy? Yeah, it’s
Jonathan Wellum 23:41
in rough shape. I mean, we have had abysmal leadership. I mean, leadership that, again, in all due respect, is incompetent, just grossly incompetent, particularly well at the federal and prevent most of our provincial governments too. There are some exceptions, but certainly at the federal level. So how can you expect to grow an economy if you’re not in incentivizing the investment of capital back into the economy, if you’re not rewarding capital to go back in, you’re not going to have productivity gains if people are investing in capital, what do our government do? They tie it up in regulations, and then they want to tax it more. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up, so it’s exactly the opposite of what you do, then they add more and more taxes. We’ve, you know, we’ve taxed energy. So we’re an energy producing country. We’re one of the largest energy, you know, producers in the world. We have the largest reserve, some of the largest reserves in the world. And we’re importing energy into our country because we can’t get pipelines built across the country so we can move, you know, from east to west and so forth. And then we’re putting carbon taxes. So we load up our energy with extra taxes, which then it gets reflected throughout the whole economy. Everything is impacted, because everything requires energy. And then you flood, you know, immigrants into the country beyond what we need, by far, beyond what we need. And. Um, who really can’t get absorbed into the workplace, and in some cases, don’t have the skills anyway, and so they’re subsidized to the social welfare program that we have, which is under stress. And so then you’re going to have on a per GDP basis, or, you know, it’s no way you can grow the economy very quickly. And then you’re taking all these, all the new, new and new entrants into the into the economy, so your GDP per capita, it’s going to fall. I mean, it’s not, this is not rocket science. So we need a complete overhaul and reversal of the policies in Canada, Absolute 180 degree turn lower taxes, lower regulations, energy costs have to get down, stimulate the private sector, take the taxes off capital and let people invest back in this country and and, and we need private initiative to take over. And government needs to be slashed. The size of government needs to be cut substantially right now in Canada, about 46% of our GDP is government. That needs to be dropped by about 15 to 20% over time, or we will. There’s no way we can get out of this. You cannot have the government the most ineffective, inefficient allocator of capital in the economy, controlling almost half the resources. It just doesn’t work. It never has worked. It never will work. And so a lot of our western countries need to come to grips with these realities, and we need to again, stimulate the private sector, hold the private sector accountable, make it competitive and and make sure, again, that’s a rule of law is is adhered to and, and we can change it dramatically and very quickly in Canada, because it’s a rich, rich country, and it’s endowed with tremendous assets, both both physical assets and also human assets. And just
James Connor 26:37
to provide a little bit of context to our American viewers, the Canadian government and all their infinite wisdom, imposed two new taxes this year alone, capital gains tax and also this carbon tax that you just mentioned. And they did so at a time when people are really hurting economically, right? So it was done at the worst possible time.
Jonathan Wellum 26:57
Well, in a warning to our American friends that are watching this, the Trudeau agenda would be, in my view, very, very closely aligned with the Harris waltz agenda in the United States. I mean, that’s what Kamala Harris has talked about, increasing taxes on so called rich people. But I mean, basically, as we know, it ends up anybody who’s working and capital taxes and putting, you know, increase in capital tax, which which is, which is crazy. So one of the biggest strengths in the US is lower taxes, lower rates on capital taxes. So you have investment. And of course, when you’re making investments, it benefits everybody across the the complete continuum of economics. And so a warning to our American friends, be very circumspect and careful when you go into the your election next next month is, I guess it’s just three weeks away from when we’re taping this. There is a sharp, sharp difference between the two parties, and certainly from an economics perspective, one will be very much detrimental. Similar to what we’ve seen in Canada and you
James Connor 27:58
touched on immigration, this has been another big issue, not only in the US, but also in Canada. And once again, our government, just to provide a little bit of context for our viewers, they brought 1 million people. Came into Canada last year, new immigrants. Half of them were, I guess you could say, allocated toward the Greater Toronto Area. And we have a population of 5 million people. So our population grew by 10% in one year. So you could imagine the tax and how stressed resources were, the education, the healthcare system, infrastructure and so on. Yeah, and
Jonathan Wellum 28:31
in sort of similar, although I think the situation can has been even worse when you look at the numbers that have come in as a percent, as a as a percentage of our base, and certainly the concentration, as you point out, in the Greater Toronto Area, or maybe in Vancouver. So there’s certain areas where a lot of these new, new immigrants come and you don’t have the infrastructure, you don’t have the schools, don’t the hospitals, you know, even the highways to put the cars on, they may move people around, nor the homes. And so you have this increasing price in the homes. And I think again, when listening to what’s going on in the US. And, you know, we’re fairly knowledgeable, because it’s, it’s, it’s bigger than life. To us in Canada, what’s going on in the US? Similar things increasing. You know, costs of housing, it’s very difficult, hard to get into. You know, in terms of health care costs are also escalating and so on. And that’s again, because we’re not assimilating new immigrants at the rate, which is healthy in which, you know, we can actually add the resources invest back in, you know, these different industries that are required and so, yeah, I mean, again, you go back to the political decisions that are being made are not positive decisions for anybody, including even some of the new immigrants coming in. I mean, I was just in a cab, taxi from the airport last week we could go coming home from a trip, business trip. And was talking to the gentleman that was driving me, and he was originally from India, and he said he’s got friends now that are going back home they can’t afford to live in Canada. I thought, my goodness, this is something else. So when we hear that, more. More when people come, they think that somehow it’s just going to be, you know, the land of milk and honey, and there’s going to be all this prosperity. But it’s not. It’s it’s a tough slug for new people coming into the country and then trying to buy a home or a place to live or rent. Rental costs have doubled in the last six, seven years. It’s very, very difficult and very expensive now to live in our countries.
James Connor 30:21
So we there has not been an official election announcement yet. But what do you think is going to happen in the next election? Let’s just assume it’s in 2025
Jonathan Wellum 30:31
Yes, I think that the Liberal Party, the liberal NDP coalition, has initiated policies that are completely destructive of our country long term, in terms of prosperity, freedom, that, you know, the heavy regulations and so forth. So the standard of living has been going down. So there’s no question that Pierre poilievre, and this is, this is reflected in the polls. I think he’s been masterful getting his message out and also laying out what he would do, which is the opposite of what we see with the liberal NDP party. So I think that, you know, if there were an election anytime soon, he would win by a landslide, we would see a major change in this country. So between now, though, and when the election looks like it might be called, or it has to be called, about a year from now, a lot of things could change. I mean, we’ve already seen within the Liberal Party itself, a lot of the back benchers now opposing Trudeau, there’s less, you know, they’re very concerned about being No, of course, not winning the election. So we could, I think, I think we’re going to see some changes in the next number of months. I don’t know exactly what they are, but when you have a party that’s going to go from, you know, a lot of seats down to almost nothing. There’s a big incentive on the part of individuals to go after the leader and to try to make a change prior to the election and and so there’s going to be a lot of pressure on the liberals and NDP to make some changes, or they are going to be completely eviscerated in the in the next election. And you know, of course, I I wouldn’t mind seeing that, but I think that politics, being what it is, I think some some cooler minds might might be talking to to Justin Trudeau and maybe trying to convince him either to change change policy, which I don’t think he will, or to get out of the way and maybe have a different leader. We’ll have to see it’s going to be, it’s going to be, it’s going to be interesting to watch. A lot of things could be changing in Canada the
James Connor 32:24
next, next year. Yes, I’m looking forward to it. Well, Jonathan, that was a great discussion, and I want to thank you for spending time with us today and sharing your thoughts. If someone would like to learn more about you and about your firm, rocklink, where can they go?
Jonathan Wellum 32:36
Probably the best place to track us down would just be on our website, which is www.rocklink.com so very easy, rocklink.com now link is with a C, not a k, so l, I n, C, and, and, so you can just go on There info@rocklink.com or you can phone us. 905-631-5462, which is actually linked and and talk to anybody. I’m extension two, you can track me down, but also our business, business development team, we’re here to serve you. We’d love to talk with you, and then as a endorsed Financial Advisor with wealthion, where we’ll free of charge. You know, look at your situation, give you our opinion, and you can take that and and, or you can, you can walk, and you don’t have to, you know, you don’t have to, have to work with us, but we’re more than glad to speak with you and tell you how you know we would, we would run your money, and how we would make some changes to your portfolio, and give you a bit of our analysis on that. Would love to do that. We have a number, quite a few wealthy on listeners have come in to us as investors and we and they’re fantastic people. We love working with
James Connor 33:46
them. Very good. Jonathan, once again, thank you.
Jonathan Wellum 33:49
Thank you very much. James. Well,
James Connor 33:51
I hope you enjoyed that discussion with Jonathan Willem, and it provided you with some insights on what might happen in the coming months in both the US and also Canada. We all need help when it comes to planning and preparing for our financial future. And if you have a financial advisor and you’re happy with them, then great, stick with them. But if you don’t, or maybe you want another opinion, consider having a discussion with a wealthy on endorsed financial advisor at wealthion.com/free, it’s a free service that wealthion offers to anyone who has an interest. You can find out more information@wealthion.com slash free. And if you like this content, please subscribe, like and share, and now you can check out this next video.
