Voyager Q3 2025 Commentary – Turning Market Disruption into Growth and Alpha

Voyager was up an estimated +10.30% during the 3^rd quarter. Other than generating positive quarters for our investors, one thing I enjoy most about my job is meeting exceptionally intelligent individuals who are passionate about expanding their businesses and then investing alongside them and their teams.

Below is a list of the companies that Devon and I interviewed over this past third quarter. This due diligence effort is where we dedicate the most time and brain power so we can stay informed and discover money-making ideas. This is at the centre of our investment process, and the key to Voyager’s outperformance versus its benchmarks and most of its peers. This quarter, we put in extra effort to determine the impact of tariffs and the pace of Artificial Intelligence adoption. And I also had the opportunity to give some constructive feedback to the CEO of Air Canada on how to make business travel more efficient in the future! As luck would have it, the one vacation I scheduled over the summer was impacted by their strike in August.

SAMPLE OF MANAGEMENT TEAMS SCOTT MET DURING 3RD QUARTER

SAMPLE OF MANAGEMENT TEAMS DEVON MET DURING 3RD QUARTER

Certain companies on the list above are already holdings, or under consideration, in Voyager. Others may be suppliers and/or customers. We build Voyager one idea at a time by executing this bottom-up research process and patiently checking off boxes on our investment checklist. One such company we first wrote about two years ago is a homebuilder called Glenveagh (GLV) from Ireland. It is important to note that I first toured Glenveagh, and some of their housing sites back in 2018 on a research trip to Ireland. I have completed many of these types of trips globally over the last three decades. My colleague, Devon, is now enhancing that foundational research by embarking on such treasure hunts as well.

We had GLV’s CFO in our offices earlier this year and also had a Zoom call with their CEO and CFO following their most recent earnings release in September. I believe that Glenveagh is an excellent example of the value Voyager brings to investors’ asset mixes and how we are finding similar opportunities across different industries and geographies. Many of the opportunities that we are finding share the following attributes that are important to our checklist:

• Adding automation to operations to improve margins e.g. GLV rolling out robot saws that replace the need for 10 bodies in a tight labour market
• Very limited competition after the 2008 housing crisis wiped out many competitors – GLV has only one public peer
• Underfollowed with only 4 sell-side analysts covering GLV
• Started buying shares underwater from GLV’s 2017 IPO price
• Underappreciated hidden value on the balance sheet with a land bank carried at historical cost versus at least a double if marked to market
• Low supply with growing demand leads to pricing power
• Low-cost producer as they continue to invest in standardized pre-fabrication facilities
• New exclusive technology that will help bring the build-cycle from 26 weeks to 10 weeks by end of the decade and improve ROCE
• Improving access to capital with an increasingly strong domestic banking industry with healthy deposits
• Management compensation tied to improving earnings per share growth and Return on Equity
• Meaningful insider equity ownership and alignment with shareholders – CEO owns 2% of the equity personally
• High single-digit Free Cash Flow yield, below market price/earnings ratio at 10x and less than 1.5X debt to EBITDA leverage ratio give us comfort in balance sheet strength
• Market-share growth from smaller and less well-capitalized competitors
• Tuck-in acquisition opportunity upside
• Buyback that has reduced share count by over 37% over the last 5 years

INVESTMENT CHECKLIST

PUBLIC EQUITY WORLD IS SHRINKING WHILE PRIVATE WORLD HAS GROWN – BETTER VALUE IN PUBLIC MARKETS

In the end, we are looking to hold stocks in the portfolio that, in some way, are underappreciated. Most people have heard that there is a housing crisis, but no one we have encountered in the Canadian, U.S., or even UK housing markets is aware that the government of Ireland is providing initial down payments for first-time homebuyers, and that Ireland is the only jurisdiction where it is cheaper to buy a house than rent an apartment. For example, a first-time home buyer could purchase a home up to 550K euros and get 100K for their deposit from the government. At today’s ECB interest rates, it would cost approximately 1200 euros a month to carry that home! We have every confidence, that as the Irish government frees up more land and speeds up municipal approval processes, that Glenveagh can double the amount of homes they sell into the end of the decade. Thus, we think we are getting a growth stock at value prices. As we always say, we want growth but we do not want to pay a lot for it.

In early September, both Devon and I went to Japan and South Korea, respectively, to continue searching for underappreciated and undervalued companies in waters many of our competitors do not consider or tread in person. First and foremost, we were able to upkeep research on investments that we made earlier in the year, like Minebea Mitsumi, a power semiconductor and ball bearing provider in Japan. When they came through our offices in the summer, they shared with Devon that they have 60% global market share in small ball bearings, an under-appreciated but important component in new cooling technologies, robotics, electric vehicles, and electric trains. With most of their competition in China, and most of their downstream end-market customers making significant efforts to avoid sourcing their parts in countries subject to intense tariff negotiations, we saw upside in their potential to not only increase market share, but also expand their margins as sole ex-China producers of key components in ball bearings. Regardless of the dust settling with regards to U.S./China tariff negotiations, there is not a sense of certainty from companies that the agreement between the two world powers will remain stable. Heavily cyclical industries – like the ones Minebea services – must be certain of their part-sourcing strategies to ensure that they are able to catch the other end of the downturn that they have experienced in recent years, especially after COVID supply-chain woes. In power semis, they will also see significant margin expansion due to their power-efficiency capabilities for technologies in automotive power supply, power density capabilities in small-scale med-tech tools, and lithium-ion battery protection in fast charging environments. These are applicable to consumer devices and electric vehicle applications. With vertically-integrated manufacturing and the increasing adoption of robotics at their facilities, we are confident that they will be able to grow share in their key components, as well as accomplish their operating margin expansion goals to go from 20% in 2025 to 30% by 2029.

LONG INVESTMENT: MINEBEA MITSUMI (6479 JT)

Another key insight in Japan was the relevance of Nintendo-adjacent video game publishers into the historic launch of the Switch 2. Devon was able to meet with Capcom, Konami, Nexon, and we made further investments earlier this year in Square Enix which has risen 56% YTD. Recall that we aggressively built–up positions in companies like Square Enix that had net-cash on their balance to weather the tariff storm. With Netflix and similar studios bidding on any and all IP they feel is relevant to their content-production efforts, many of these developers can stretch the dollar value of their proprietary IPs fuarther. Alongside this is their constant publishing efforts in Japanese TV, which provide steadier cash flows for Japanese video game companies versus their global competitors that rely on micro–transactions and yearly game releases instead of quality game development. This has led to release-fatigue among many U.S. publishers, as well as massive hype-cycles around releases of multi-year projects—like we have seen with another Voyager holding, Take Two Interactive—in the lead-up to their new title release of the GTA franchise from Rockstar Studios early next year. Quality entertainment consolidation is a theme we have seen as consumers are more selective about where they spend their limited discretionary dollars, to the benefit of IMAX, who we have mentioned before and continue to hold in the portfolio. We feel that video game companies who are able to maintain stable cash flows with mobile and TV projects, and incubate their studios for longer-developed releases, largely benefit as a result.

The week, after our research efforts in SE Asia, Devon made his way to Nashville for U.S. small-cap discovery, aiming to find quality businesses with great operators who fit our process and benefit from themes and tailwinds that we have identified over the past few years. One of those companies is Skywater Technologies (SKYT). They are a direct-foundry and advanced-packaging model in the domestic United States for legacy node semiconductors. Semiconductors are such an interesting industry that is so vitally important to the future of every business in the world. As disruption accelerates on the back of AI, robotics, full self-driving, and quantum computing, we remain adamant that every company has to pay attention to tech momentum. Many application layer products will enable even the most boring, old-economy businesses to accelerate their momentum and disrupt tech-illiterate competitors, and all of the above are reliant on hardware from across the nanometer spectrum. As well, so much of that supply chain that we all inherently rely on is precariously positioned in the South China Sea, and even though there is limited capacity in the U.S. to build chips, there is not enough to service the entire industry.

That problem is twofold. First and foremost, many of the assets in the domestic U.S. or wider North America are owned and operated solely for a company’s internal workloads. A great example of this is the legacy node manufacturers upmarket from the auto industry, like ST Microelectronics, ON Semi, and NXPI. While competitors to the above, like Infineon, have gone asset-light into the cyclical downturn of legacy nodes, those aforementioned companies have not, and leave their foundries under-utilized. They service a painfully low amount of downstream demand while their order books collapse, and they are left continually cutting guidance. Skywater is of the opinion that some of those assets will be sold—similar to their acquisition of the Infineon Fab in Austin—most likely below replacement cost at this point in the cycle.

The second problem for U.S.-based semi fabs is the lack of capacity for certain steps in the manufacturing chain. Concurrently, almost half of the chips coming out of TSMC Arizona need to go back to SE Asia to be packaged, and then they are shipped back to the U.S. Skywater is well positioned with their own advanced packaging capabilities, which is one of the limiting factors of true vertically integrated U.S. production. Their new fab in Florida, built specifically for this purpose, will allow customers to avoid the issues plaguing TSMC’s U.S. fabs. This is critical for Aerospace and Defense customers, like the DoD, who are adamant that all the products they buy need a U.S. manufacturer’s stamp of approval, and more importantly, should not have to go to Asia at any point in the manufacturing process. All in all, Skywater aims to partner with non-vertically integrated Aerospace and Defense, Quantum, and Fabless Semi Design companies to provide them with TSMC-like foundry services in the domestic United States for legacy node chips, where the leading edge foundries do not have capacity to make while they service smaller nanometer markets. We feel Skywater are well positioned to roll many of their R&D partners into volume manufacturing, and service them with under-utilized assets that were once solely used for internal manufacturing by companies on the wrong side of the cycle. 

During the second quarter, Voyager benefited from two takeovers in its portfolio.  Both Devon and I follow closely the internet security industry, since cyber-attacks are an ever-increasing risk factor for businesses, consumers, and governments. It is hard to think of a product where most buyers are less likely to cut back on spending. Fortunately, Devon’s Python coding skills and his AI research framework on second derivative winners resulted in our investment in an identity-authentication security company from Israel called, CyberArk. During the summer, CyberArk received a takeover offer from Palo Alto, which did not have CyberArk’s capability for this growing requirement that will take off with agentic AI being adopted across more and more of Palo Alto’s customers.

MARKET IS RIPE FOR TAKEOVERS WITH RATES FALLING AND SMALLER COMPANIES CHEAPER

Our second takeover occurred as we were building a position in Step Energy Services from Calgary. Canada’s largest private equity energy firm, ARC, shared our thesis and caused the shares to trade 27% higher on the shares we did manage to accumulate.  As many of you know, we are very bullish longer-term for the world’s growing need for the transition fuel of natural gas. As the start-up this summer of LNG Canada opens up Western Canadian natural gas exports to Asia, we anticipate higher gas prices in Alberta. LNG Canada is going to drain 1.8 BCF from Western Canada in the coming months. This will lead to some serious upside volatility in natural gas prices, if and when a cold spells hits this winter. This will lead to improved demand for Step Energy services in hydraulic fracking, chemicals, and fluid pumping. Higher prices will allow their customers to look to expand their budgets to increase supply.  

Luckily, as you can see from our meeting list, we met management and own shares in some of Step’s customers and suppliers that will benefit from the same improving demand trends. We echo our comments on Bloomberg TV in February, before Canada’s federal election: “It is hard to imagine a scenario where Ottawa will be as harmful to Alberta growth in the next 10 years as they were over the last 10 years.” Based on our dialogues with companies interfacing with Ottawa, this prediction seems to be coming true. Now we have to see if Ottawa can execute on the flurry of more business-friendly appointments and announcements. Fingers crossed.

If we shift our attention south of the border, you can see that oil-rig drilling is declining. This is bullish for natural gas because when an oil well is drilled, it produces associated gas. So, less oil drilling means price support for natural gas. As well, we were quite impressed, at a recent oil and gas conference, with the financial discipline of Alberta-based energy companies. This has not always been the case during my career. For example, Voyager holding NuVista (NVA) told us, when we met the CEO and CFO in early September, that since oil and gas prices were down in 2025, they would be reducing their CapEx budget so as to maintain their buyback program. NVA’s management and analysis of their financial report from Q2 2025 stated: “Since the inception of its NCIB programs in 2022, NuVista has repurchased and cancelled 44,078,261 of its outstanding common shares at a weighted average price of $12.26 per common share for a total cost of $540.4 million representing a decrease of approximately 19% in its outstanding common share balance over this same period.”  As an investor who has met with oil and gas companies for three decades, the focus on growing production is nearly always prioritized over buybacks. It was awesome to hear this discipline of limiting supply during a period of lower prices.

U.S. FRAC CREWS AND OIL-DIRECTED RIGS DECLINING – BULLISH FOR GAS

In an interesting twist, this past month a few of our investment themes collided when the outgoing CEO of Industrial Real Estate powerhouse ProLogis said in a Bloomberg interview: “Location, location, location” should now be “location, location, energy.” … “Certainly, AI and data centers are a big user of energy. That’s the one everybody talks about. But we’re at a 4% unemployment economy, and we’re talking about onshoring manufacturing. We can’t onshore manufacturing in the traditional way. We’ve got to do really highly automated manufacturing. Well, automation takes power, so that’s the second thing that’s a big user of power. And the third thing is electrification of
the fleet, because everybody needs to plug in their vans and, ultimately, long range trucks.” There are many companies in our portfolio that are benefiting from the increased demand for energy, automation, electrification and onshoring.  It was interesting to note in the interview that the CEO moved to Nevada to benefit from lower taxes. This supports why we have invested in Swiss private bank EFG, that helps wealthy clients manage their wealth as they try to minimize and diversify tax exposures.

LONG INVESTMENT: EFG INTERNATIONAL (EFGN)

Investors should find it interesting to note that the management of Rockpoint, a gas storage company owned by Brookfield, said that they have received demand for 5-year+ gas contracts from a California utility.  Perhaps the idea that we will all be driving rechargeable cars by 2030, fuelled by renewable energy, was a little premature. This is very bullish for Western Canada and indicative of the increased volatility coming in the form of natural gas, which will benefit those producers and power suppliers that we own in the portfolio. Another natural gas company we like from Alberta is, Peyto Exploration. We completely understand that as we move more and more towards an intangible economy with digitization, cryptocurrency, tokenization, stablecoins, etc., that investors are forgetting about certain physical assets that enable all these bits and bytes to transit across the world. Thus, we read with interest what the CEO of Peyto wrote in his monthly report to investors: “Over the years, Peyto has built (or acquired) 17 gas processing plants, with an estimated replacement value of $1.2 billion, that we operate with combined processing capacity of 1.5 Bcf/d, which is only 56% utilized. The remaining spare capacity gives us room to grow production without spending money building new gas plants and allows us to allocate capital to drilling new wells and to optimizing facilities to improve production efficiencies and reduce operating costs.” As always, we like to own companies that have growth not already discounted in the stock. Peyto trades at less than 10X earnings, with a 6.98% dividend yield and very positive outlook for production growth into an end market that will experience secular demand growth, with LNG Canada coming online over the summer. Owning companies trading well below replacement value will matter more and more as we ramp the recurring power demands of Artificial Intelligence. Remember when you build a data centre, you only pour the cement once, but every time you run a query on ChatGPT you need to power that search. And that’s before AI inference goes mainstream.

We have a strong opinion that, with central banks from many jurisdictions around the world cutting interest rates, we are in the midst of a major mergers-and-acquisitions cycle. This sentiment was echoed when the President of Goldman Sachs said at a Financial Times conference in September: “Global M&A momentum continues accelerating next year, we expect cross-regional dealmaking to continue growing in both depth and breadth.” And in the same article published by Reuters, they wrote that “Global M&A deals totaled $2.6 trillion in the first seven months of the year, the highest for the period since the 2021 pandemic-era.”  Another reason why I believe M&A accelerates around the world is that so many companies are telling us that they need to adjust their business footprint because of the new tariff war(s) unfolding. In addition, we have seen rate cuts in 2025 from the central banks of United States, China, the European Union, UK, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, Mexico, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, South Africa, Egypt, Turkey, Kenya, Poland, Czech Republic, the Philippines, Pakistan and Canada. The number of central banks cutting versus raising, like Japan, is overwhelming. We are essentially in a global easing cycle with easier monetary conditions. This is bullish for small- and medium-sized companies like Voyager owns.

HIKING CYCLES NORMALLY HURT SMALL CAPS, EASING CYCLES NORMALLY HELP THEM

As evidenced in the chart below, one reason why central banks are able to cut rates is that inflation has come back a long way from the Covid-related spike on the back of huge government spending and too-low interest rates. Based on our dialogues with companies, we believe that Chair Powell and other central bankers who have been scared about a massive spike in inflation caused by tariffs are wrong. In the future, we do believe that there will just be pockets of inflation versus wholesale inflation because of tariffs. There will also be pockets of deflation caused by AI automation as we march towards the end of the decade.  For example, when I toured a very impressive Hyundai car plant in Korea, they told me that they would not be passing through the tariffs to consumers, but instead absorbing them over time through increased efficiencies. Many may not know that Hyundai bought a robot company called Boston Dynamics, in 2021. Similar to Tesla, they have vertically integrated themselves in robot automation capabilities. When I toured this plant, they were 70% automated. That is not inflationary! This will be disruptive for many auto OEM’s that do not have the tech stack and balance sheets to pivot.

INFLATION HAS ALREADY RETURNED CLOSE TO TARGET ACROSS DEVELOPED MARKETS

I believe that disruption to many businesses is coming like we have never seen before, if all this AI investment is going to generate return on investment. Again and again, we are hearing stories from companies that they are using AI tools to improve their businesses outside of the Hyperscalers. I saw a similar cycle play out while I was growing up as an analyst and young Portfolio Manager in the 1990s and into the NASDAQ bubble burst of 2000. There came a point when the non-traditional tech companies used the newfound internet to grow their businesses. I believe that a similar phenomenon is happening in that businesses across pretty much every sector will use AI to enhance their competitiveness in unforeseen ways. The CFO of Voyager holding Kinaxis told me “if you don’t know how to work with AI you will be replaced.”

Yes, AI is overhyped and there will be stories of wasteful investment just like we have seen in every tech adoption wave in history. However, we are seeing very real use cases. While in Korea last month Shinhan Bank showed me a branch being completely run by AI agents with tablets as the interface for customers. Another example is when I visited Quebecor in Montreal in September and they were telling me how they have reduced wait times on their customer service help line from over 30 minutes to 13 minutes by using AI chatbots. I also met management from Cogeco Cable in Montreal, who told me they have reduced truck rolls for equipment outages by 27% year-over-year by using an AI application to predict which pieces of hardware are likely to break down based on key performance measures.  

When I asked for an AI example during the recent IPO roadshow of Klarna from Stockholm, they told me they had used AI agents and Anthropic to build themselves a custom Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software application to replace their legacy CRM from Salesforce. This last example shows how a smaller $15 billion market cap company is disrupting a $225 billion Nasdaq 100 company. And this is why I am calling Devon, “EVP of Disruption Risk” at Wealhouse. When Devon built out his second derivative AI framework a couple of years ago, he identified Salesforce as an eventual short. Good call.

There will be many winners and losers from AI, as there were winners and losers with the rollout of the internet. Some of these will be large caps and some will be small caps. Certain ones will come from the U.S. and others from outside the U.S., just as some will be private companies and others will be public and liquid companies. Based on what we are seeing, the AI disruption will happen far faster than the dislocations that occurred from the internet. This is why Wealhouse is very, very focused on liquidity as the number one thing on our checklist, so that we can pivot faster than our competition. I feel it will be a disadvantage for many who run too much money in a world where more and more money is run by larger and larger investment managers. In addition to this the fact that more money is allocated to passive, exchange-traded funds versus when the Nasdaq bubble burst in 2000. It seems as though many have forgotten that Nortel was the largest weight of the index at precisely the worst time for those who owned index funds. There can come a point when a good company doesn’t make a good investment.

HYPERSCALER’S ANNUAL CAPEX

We feel that in the short term in Canada, growing our resource industries will be crucial, since Canada faces the same problem as many others around the world in terms of having spent more money than revenue during Covid and the decades before. For example, the U.S. and Canada’s debt-to-GDP are over 100% while debt-to-GDP in Ireland is just over 40%. This is why Ireland is in a better place to deal with the housing affordability crisis than Canada and the U.S., and supports in-part why Voyager owns an Irish homebuilder like Glenveagh, mentioned above. Many governments around the world with a debt-to-GDP above a 100% are being told by a steepening yield curve in the bond market to improve their fiscal deficits or expect to be punished with a higher cost of debt.

One risk longer-term for the financial system is that we wake up one morning and hear about a failed bond auction somewhere. While I was travelling in France for a lovely wedding this summer, the French Government called a no-confidence vote over a debate on lowering spending. As I write these comments, the U.S. government is in shutdown mode over the fiscal backdrop in the U.S. It is not lost on me that Fitch downgraded France, and Moody’s downgraded U.S. government debt this year. In anticipation of there being too much debt in the world, Wealhouse started the long/short credit strategy called Amplus. We have been happy to see investors and colleagues at Wealhouse compound in the double digits over the last 5 years, since it can profit from the serious decline in the quality of government debt versus better prospects for corporate credits. This allows for us to immunize interest rate risk—unlike more traditional balance funds sold when investors enter a traditional bank branch or mutual fund company. Amplus has proven itself to be a vastly superior strategy and part of our Modern Balanced Fund asset mix capabilities at Wealhouse.

I will always remember sitting with teammate Justin Anis, who leads Lions Bay, in my living room in 2016, when we mapped out our desired Wealhouse product strategy of having both long/short capabilities in credit and equity. The goal was to create strategies for investors that could better balance the range of risks versus opportunities that were going to unfold because of the vast sums of debt piling up on government balance sheets and the geopolitical tensions that were percolating between the U.S. and China, as the number 1 and number 2 economies in the world intensified their rivalry. Lions Bay has proven itself in periods of drawdowns in the capital markets and enables us to stay the course in our long-biased Voyager strategy during severe market pull backs like earlier this year around tariffs.

Three years ago, we began to explore expanding internationally when we heard from globally-capable investors that they wished to invest in strategies run outside of Canada based on advice they were getting from advisors. Vishal Hingorani, after working alongside the team at Wealhouse Capital came to me in early 2024 and expressed his desire to relocate on his own and establish an international investment manager.  Vishal has now established our counterpart, Wealhouse International SEZC in Cayman where Vishal and his colleague Nick Mirjalali have launched a strategy called the Vektorium Master Fund. We are confident Nick and Vishal can deliver with the same principals and approach that we undertake here in Canada for investors who wish to invest in offshore strategies, with Vishal as President and CIO. Again, our goal at Wealhouse Capital Management, and undoubtedly our counterpart in Cayman, is to be a very profitable “modern day balanced fund” that can navigate both risks and opportunities. I am looking forward to my 3^rd annual January visit to the Cayman Islands. Others are welcome to visit anytime!

Another reason why we are bullish on small- and mid-caps is that companies we talk to keep telling us that they are seeing more and more acquisition opportunities. One of the main drivers of these opportunities is that many General Partners (GPs) from the private equity world are struggling with too much debt on their past investments, taking markdowns and/or not convincing Limited Partners (LPs) to invest more capital with them. Towards the end of the quarter, we read with interest in the Investment Executive, a story about Nicola Wealth, Trez Capital and Centurion, “warning investors about changes to their real estate funds, which range from limited redemptions to reduced monthly distributions.”  I have often shaken my head when I heard many sales pitches from Private Equity GPs at conferences over the years, where private GPs would argue on behalf of allocating money to private vehicles so that the volatility of public markets could be avoided. The truth is that there is volatility in both private and public markets. The public markets win hands down in terms of liquidity.  The bottom line is that real estate fundamentals have deteriorated in many sub-sectors and jurisdictions around the world, and many GPs have not sold enough assets to meet redemption requests. This will mean that public companies with clean balance sheets have a tremendous opportunity to buy from struggling GPs getting yelled at by their LPs to give them liquidity.

At Wealhouse, we are proud that we have never gated investors from taking their money back, and we believe this negative customer experience has justifiably led to there being less trust amongst investors who have too easily funded many GPs who were able to crowd out public real estate companies. We are increasingly hearing from many LPs that they are rebalancing their asset mixes back towards public markets, where there is better liquidity. As well, public companies who were crowded from making accretive acquisitions for over a decade will be able to add back a chapter on acquisitions to their business plan, while many private equity GPs are forced to sell or at the very least not have the backing to compete and bid assets in the private market, in order to collect their acquisition, disposition, refinancing, management fees. I have invested in both public and private assets over my career and there are times when private assets can outperform public assets and vice versa. We are in a time where many public assets will outperform private assets. Most everything goes in cycles.

Source: Centurion, Nicola Wealth latest to announce real estate fund changes amid surge in redemption requests | Investment Executive

We believe that the sale of Burgundy Asset Management to Bank of Montreal, and that of Guardian Capital to Desjardins, will have an important impact on our opportunity set. As we keep saying, more and more money is being run by fewer and fewer firms. This has led to less and less competition for Wealhouse, as it gives us better access to corporations for research meetings and investment management talent.

As we wrote last year, we believe that being diversified is a prudent approach to risk management. A new tariff paradigm is taking shape, there are War(s) in the Middle East and parts of Europe, rising tensions between the number 1 and number 2 economies, political strife in many countries over whether to increase taxes on the wealthy or cut government spending, etc. This year Voyager has benefited from diversification in its portfolio holdings in Asia, Europe and North America. For the first time in many years, the U.S. is not the best performing region, and we believe this outperformance outside of the U.S. likely has just begun. Hence, you will see Voyager balanced across different jurisdictions, different industries and different individual companies. Every day we wake up and try to ensure that the portfolio is anchored in companies that will grow their earnings and free cash flow at above-market levels into the end of this decade and beyond. Below you will find some points that we would be happy to expand, regarding why we believe that the opportunity outside the mega caps is very strong for Voyager moving forward. Thank you as always for your trust in our process and investment team.

OPPORTUNITIES VERSUS RISKS OUTSIDE MEGA AND LARGE CAP EQUITIES

WE BELIEVE NARROW MARKET LEADERSHIP PEAKED IN 2024

AMERICA’S WEIGHTING IN MSCI AC WORLD INDEX

Disclaimer:
This Commentary expresses the views of the author as of the date indicated and such views are subject to change without notice. Wealhouse has no duty or obligation to update the information contained herein. This Commentary is being made available for educational purposes only and should not be used for any other purpose. The information contained herein does not constitute and should not be construed as an offering of advisory services or an offer to sell or solicitation to buy any securities or related financial instruments in any jurisdiction. Certain information contained herein concerning economic trends and performance is based on or derived from information provided by independent third-party sources. Wealhouse believes that the sources from which such information has been obtained are reliable; however, it cannot guarantee the accuracy of such information and has not independently verified the accuracy or completeness of such information or the assumptions on which such information is based.