Highlights from the First Quarter Edition
A resource for both advisors and investors, the Ivy Quarterly gives perspective on the portfolios, investment philosophy and holdings in a comprehensive format. The Ivy Team discusses world markets and where they are finding value today.
Central banks have attempted to keep short-term GDP growth moving forward via a massive transfer of wealth. This has resulted in record income and wealth disparity.
The Ivy Canadian Equity Fund increased roughly in line with the TSX, which underperformed relative to global markets in the first quarter, but continued an upward climb. With rising valuations, the expected returns within our investable universe have continued to decline. This resulted in us trimming our bank and insurance exposure, as well as our foreign holdings.
Our future portfolio returns will be influenced by a number of external factors including the actions of the central bank and the Chinese Communist Party. A more positive influence is the ongoing evolution of computing architectures. A number of our top US holdings are relatively more impacted by this evolution.
The first quarter was very strong for European stocks, a continuation of the trend that started last fall. The rally was quite broad-based, with most sectors performing well. In such a strong environment, Ivy’s European stocks generally did not keep pace.
Most global markets were strong in Q1, led by the Far East. Ivy’s Far East holdings performed reasonably well as a whole, but did not keep up with the broader Asian markets. This was expected given the market environment. We remain underweight Japan relative to most benchmarks, as we believe valuations for most high quality businesses are expensive. We have relatively high exposure to Hong Kong and hold a number of cyclical Far East stocks.