March 2015 Performance Commentary

The month of March has been quite volatile for both common stocks, oil and currencies. Over the past four weeks we continued to reduce our Canadian resource exposure and restocked our portfolios with free cash flowing, dividend paying Canadian and U.S. non resource common stocks. A few recent purchases include Uni-Select Inc., Bed Bath & Beyond, Las Vegas Sands Corp., Express Scripts Holding Company, The Gap Inc. and Parker-Hannifin Corporation. To mitigate our U.S. currency exposure we initiated a Canadian/U.S. dollar currency contract with the Royal Bank of Canada and will continue to hedge as long as our ABC Funds hold significant American dollar assets.

Currently, our five ABC portfolios have between $25 and $30 million of cash reserves. Having identified a number of attractive Canadian and American purchase candidates we will be opportunistically adding several of them. More importantly, after repositioning our portfolios over the past six months we are quite comfortable with our present relatively liquid, strong list of common stock holdings and look forward to the next nine months of 2015.

Irwin A. Michael, President
I.A. Michael Investment Counsel Ltd.