Daily Commentary

MarketMinder’s View: Parts of this article are sensible, but we think it carries the thesis—that investors are adapting to unusual political and economic uncertainty—too far. Naturally, it dives into politics, so please note that we favor no party nor any politician, assessing developments solely for potential market effects. In that vein, the coverage here of tariff policy shifts stoking big market swings was spot on early last year. The negative surprise of broader and more bizarre tariffs than anyone thought likely was key to the correction last spring. And the fact some investors focused on non-US stocks as a result probably is, too. But investors have become more and more inured to this in time, as the pattern of threat-turned-deal or walk-back becomes clearer, as several quotes late in this piece illustrate. As one analyst notes, though, much of what this piece discusses (Venezuela, Freddie Mac buying mortgage bonds, etc.) is more noise than news for markets. It also goes too far in casting normal volatility or reactions to corporate announcements as unusual when that is all a regularity. The actual lesson from last year—with stocks up markedly and sitting near record highs now, despite the alleged surprises here—is that reacting rashly to headlines is wrong, wrong, wrong.

MarketMinder’s View: Well, the headline here casts the slowdown in Canada’s consumer price index (CPI) to 2.3% y/y—a rounding error from the Bank of Canada’s 2% target—as a function of falling gas prices. Those help, no doubt. But as the article shows, housing costs rose 1.7% y/y and are a huge chunk of CPI. Excluding food and energy, CPI was 2.4% y/y in the month, so you know the near-target rate isn’t all about gasoline. Furthermore, even this read is likely puffed up some by base effects—last year’s sales-tax cuts ran into February, which depressed prices paid then. So when you compare prices today to then, there is an artificial boost from this that won’t fall out until March. All this illustrates a basic point: The war on inflation is over and has been for a while. The rate of price rises now is historically normal.

MarketMinder’s View: This covers the latest Bank of America Global Fund Manager Survey, which showed respondents were increasingly concerned that Tech firms were overinvesting in AI-related things like data centers, were dialing back their exposure to Tech generally and claim that an “AI bubble” as the top threat to the bull market. While we are loath to rest on pure contrarianism, we think this is some evidence that, to whatever extent there was AI froth entering 2026, it seems to be ebbing now. The more folks grow concerned over Tech and rotate away from it, the more it illustrates lower sentiment—not a euphoric bubble. Now, this does mention a couple of individual stocks in the process, so please note we don’t make individual security recommendations. Our interest is the look at sentiment, which this suggests has cooled at least somewhat towards Tech.