I was fortunate enough to attend a conference hosted by Blackstone this week. Blackstone is the world’s largest alternative asset manager, with over $1 trillion in assets. Many of our clients own one of Blackstone’s flagship funds. This fund provides some non-correlated performance within our portfolios and isn’t subject to the daily ups and downs of the market.

 

The man on the right in front, Stephen Schwarzman, is the founder of Blackstone. He provided some incredible insight into the current tariffs and the Canada-US conflict. I hadn’t appreciated that he played a key role in negotiating the Free Trade agreement between Canada, US and Mexico that was ratified in the last Trump administration.

 

 

His take was that the previous negotiations “got into a really bad place, perhaps unknowingly” between the governments and that this has lingered ever since. The bottom line from his perspective is that once Canada has a government and they know who they are dealing with, things will get resolved, and that the tariffs are a negotiation tactic. He called them “transactional tariffs”.

 

The other take-away from the conference is the education provided in how these alternative asset classes have evolved. Historically this type of investing was only available to endowment funds and pension funds. Today some firms like Blackstone offer the same opportunities to individual investors that only the most sophisticated and largest institutions had for decades. It’s another step in the evolution of investing for retail investors. I will have more on these ideas in the days and weeks to come, and I’ve got some slides to share if interested.

 

We still have more than two weeks for tax requests. It has been a challenging year for this, as the CRA portal has been down, and tax-slips have not been up-loaded in a timely manner as a result. However, we are still able to manually fill in the blanks for those sources that are still missing for some of you. Please continue to reach out and we will respond to requests quickly.

 

This weekend is the Master’s: the first of the Major Golf tournaments, and for many a reminder that Spring is upon us. I’m cheering for the Canadian, Corey Conners to win the whole thing, and put on the green jacket on Sunday.

 

Have a great weekend.