Getting A Different Opinion Of Things South Of The Border
On July 30th we took the opportunity to join Edyta Bujak, our associate with TD Asset Management at a face to face breakfast hosted by her with Keiron Recagno, VP for T. Rowe Price. TD Asset Management is the only access to T.Rowe Price management expertise for the Canadian market. T. Rowe Price has had a long-standing partnership with TD Asset Management since 1993 and manage six mandates for TD Asset Management. They manage over $1.445 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide and have a very large team of over 600 investment professionals. The team at T. Rowe Price are active managers with a performance driven and collaborative approach. They develop insights into their investments by meeting directly with people like Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
T. Rowe Price and their mandates hold many investments including the FAANG stocks – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. They are bottom up investors which means they are focused on earnings growth and company/business specific information that their teams of analysts’ research daily. Keiron commented that “there is a current disconnect in the market” and “the markets don’t generally behave as they are supposed to.” Several themes were discussed such as what the Federal Reserve in the U.S. is going to do in the near future – perhaps two separate 25 -basis point drops in interest rates by the end of 2019, the Chinese growth factor as well as the pending trade wars throughout the world.
The consensus at T. Rowe Price is “cautiously optimistic” for the U.S. market. Innovation in the marketplace is widespread through various sectors such as the internet and cloud functions, health care, media, security & defense and automation. Proper asset allocation continues to be very important in everyone’s investment portfolios.
As we have often said, taking the long-term approach to investing and understanding your own personal goals and timelines are the key to a successful investment and planning approach. We continue to gather information from many different sources in an effort to help our clients make the most informed decisions possible for their future.