October 2022 Pricing Commentary

The North American equity markets after two months of negative returns finally posted positive performance for the month of October.

This recovery was not unexpected given the current oversold market conditions due to rising interest rates and geopolitics. This gloomy environment spawned high stock price volatility and significant negative investor sentiment, which could in fact, quickly reverse course with any positive shift in U.S. central bank monetary policy. Furthermore, we have now entered the habitual late year positive seasonality for common share prices.

Interestingly, with today’s 75 basis point increase of interest rates by the U.S. Federal Reserve, while not unexpected, this action reinforces the negative investor psychology overhanging global securities valuations. By extension, this excessive market sensitivity combined with expected future interest rate increases is penalizing positive company earnings results of many North American businesses. More importantly, this gloom compounds the overhanging financial pessimism and has diminished a positive stock price outlook. Looking ahead, the expectation of the worst outcome is a positive contrarian securities pricing development. In fact, this growing negativity is providing an even heavier discount to the current intrinsic common share valuations.

Among our Canadian common share outperformers during the month included Canadian National Railway, Pembina Pipeline, and TC Energy, and our main U.S. outperformers were Apple, Autodesk, Broadcom, Becton Dickinson, Boston Scientific, Home Depot, Mastercard, NVIDIA, Salesforce, S&P Global, and Visa.

As we approach year end we continue to believe that our ABC portfolio holdings are well positioned with diversified, high quality industry leaders with positive growth prospects in an extremely undervalued security centric marketplace. We expect these selections will outperform with an eventual central bank interest rate pivot.

Irwin A. Michael Signature

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

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