The Canadian Investor - 2025 Year in Review: TSX Strikes Back, AI Mania, and Liberation Day

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

The three amigos reunite for the 2025 year-in-review and break down the biggest market takeaways of the year. Dan explains how the TSX delivered rare outperformance versus U.S. markets, powered by financials and a major run in precious metals—while telecoms slid out of Canada’s top market-cap ranks. The crew then dives into AI’s public-market ripple effects: the data center CapEx boom, who’s winning across chips, infrastructure, and power, and why data center REITs may not be the pure-play many investors expect. Simon recaps “Liberation Day” and the tariff-driven selloff that rattled markets, before they close on gold and silver’s breakout, banks leaning on capital markets, Bitcoin’s volatility (and the MicroStrategy trade), and a quiet three-year stretch of weakness in Canadian railways. Tickers of Stocks discussed: BCE.TO , ZBK, AXP, CLS, EQIX, DLR, ORCL, NVDA, AVGO, ASML, TSM, SMH, WSP.TO , ADBE, CRM, NOW, CSU.TO, GOOG, MSTR, CP.TO, CNR.TO   Check out our portfolio by going to Jointci.com Our Website Our New Youtube Channel! Canadian Investor Podcast Network Twitter: @cdn_investing Simon’s twitter: @Fiat_Iceberg Braden’s twitter: @BradoCapital Dan’s Twitter: @stocktrades_ca Want to learn more about Real Estate Investing? Check out the Canadian Real Estate Investor Podcast! Apple Podcast - The Canadian Real Estate Investor  Spotify - The Canadian Real Estate Investor  Web player - The Canadian Real Estate Investor Asset Allocation ETFs | BMO Global Asset Management Sign up for Fiscal.ai for free to get easy access to global stock coverage and powerful AI investing tools. Register for EQ Bank, the seamless digital banking experience with better rates and no nonsense.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This has to be one of the biggest quarters I've seen from this company in quite some time. The Canadian Investor Podcast, welcome into the show. It is the end of the year of you, which means you've got three amigos here on the mic. I am Braden Dennis. As always, joined by Simon Belanger and Dan Kent. The best two episodes of the year, the year interview and the bold predictions for 26. So they're coming up back to back on your podcast player.

And the three of us are here. We all have some things that we think are highlights and takeaways for the year that was. And I am going to hand off the baton to Mr. Canada today talking about the TSX. give us the lowdown, Dan. Yeah, so 2025 was definitely the year of the TSX. We should close pretty close to 30% gains on the year, whereas the S&P is around 17 and the NASDAQ 21. So big outperformance from the TSX in relation to the U.S. markets.

The last time, so I was looking this up, the last time this happened on a green year was in 2016. So, you know, it happened in 2022. The TSX did better than the S&P, but they were both pretty, you know, big drawdowns. You know, during a green year, it's pretty rare for the TSX to actually outperform the S&P 500. I did over the last 15 years. It's only outperforming the SEP 500 four times.

So we're looking at this year, 2022, 2016, and 2010. And interestingly enough, the TSX has had more years outperforming the NASDAQ than the SEP 500. So it's outperformed the NASDAQ five times over the last. 15 years since 2010, but we're still pretty low here in terms of occurrences. U.S. equities have crushed Canadian over, you know, I want to say from the financial crisis, you know, this year it would be the banks that pulled a ton of weight, financials in general, but also materials. Like, I don't really think we're sitting here, you know, if gold isn't up a ton, if silver

isn't up a ton. I still say, even without the rise of materials, we probably still would have got the TSX outperforming the US markets, maybe not the NASDAQ, just because Materials is only around, I believe it's 12% of the TSX, but it was a huge year for gold, which is driving a ton of the performance right now. Yeah. Even financials in the U.S. got a strong year too. I mean, like ZBK, which is like BMO's U.S. Bank ETF was up 20%. American Express up 30%. So It was a strong year for financials across the board, as well as some of the private equity players, too. Yeah, and obviously we'll talk.

We'll talk about gold and precious metal a bit later, but clearly that was a big, big tail win. Like, we, spoiler alert, we're doing a top 30 or 30 largest Canadian companies ranked. That will be coming out soon or maybe just came out. It's hard to know with the schedule at this time of year as we record early, but there were six businesses, six Canadian. company or five or six that ended up in the top 30 that would not have been there at least a few would have been but not all of them would have been there if we'd done this just a year ago yeah and the the main difference there is no telecoms and a lot of gold producers now in the top three yeah exactly no telecoms in the top 30 huh no no no and they were all i believe i looked

it up in 2020 they were all like by market cap no telecoms in the top 30 yeah yeah yeah And they were a good $5, $10 billion out. It's not like they just missed the cut either because they've been a bit in a pulldown, some going sideways, lack of growth, and then obviously you have gold just ripping this year and also Celestica making it sneaking into the top 30 there. But speaking of Celestica and AI, I think this is a good segue to the year that was for AI in public market. So Brayden, you're pretty well connected in that space.

fiscal.AI. Obviously, we'll talk a bit more about public markets, but let's go over what happened because that was one of the, if not the biggest story this year. Before we do that, we have to talk about AI. It's a, you know, every year in review since the Chad GPT moment, we're going to talk about AI. But I want to, because I'm looking on my other screen here, I was intrigued by that telecom stat. Bell, BCE. Does anyone want to take a guess at what their peak market cap was, and I'll tell you, it was in 2022. 45 billion, probably?

I'd say closer to 58. Are you think they were close to 60? Both too low. Both too. Oh, really? So I win. Price is right rules. Yeah.

66.5 billion in the spring of 2022. This is in CAD on the TSX and BC's market cap today is just under 29 billion. It's pretty crazy. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much, like the cutoff to make that list was around $44 billion, just to give you an idea. So it wasn't just that it missed it. They're well off. But who knows, maybe Rogers, if the Blue Jays keep making the World Series, I'll climb up there.

Well, and the crazy, one of the crazy things is, like, the last two companies on that list in 2022 were pretty much small caps. And now they're in the top 32 Canadian companies. There was what was there, Kinross Gold. Celesteca. We're like two billion, three billion dollar companies and now they're like 45 plus. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, crazy year for gold. That's probably worth discussing here for. We will discuss after this one here. Okay, let's talk AI. You know, obviously running fiscal AI, I figure out, take the lead on AI. But I'm going to make it specifically about public markets and not some tech review show because there's three things among others that are big takeaways for me in public markets when it comes to AI. And those three categories are, one, the data center and this

huge KAPX, two, traditional SaaS being left for dead, these public companies, and three, what I'll call the model wars. So number one, and I'm sure you guys have lots of thoughts on data center. and CAPEX, but we kind of have this new frontier of magical intelligence in the sky. And to make it like a little bit more approachable and an example of like my business, and you can see how you can see this magical intelligence in the sky and why it's so valuable is our competitors basically run manual data aggregation factories of tens of thousands of people. kind of manually doing this paperwork and now there's this huge technological window open or technological change open where you have magical intelligence instead of it being

floors of people doing paperwork it's floors of servers right and this magical intelligence in sky distributed across all of these different data centers not to mention the hyper-scaler growth in cloud computing, you basically just have this ridiculous CAP-X build-out of data centers for those two categories. The AI cloud and just the traditional hyperscalar cloud. And they are filled with expensive hardware, intense electrical engineering. They suck up a ton of power, which has been a hotly controversial, heated debate around some small towns in America, for example, of where these things are being built. And because people are calling them AI factories, which is a reasonable thing to call them. And all of the

vendors in the ecosystem around them are riding some of these tailwinds. So the winners here riding that wave are the hypers, especially Google with a full stack AI infrastructure. They have their own chips and TPUs. They have their own data center infrastructure. And they have their own models, and they have their own application layer. More on Google later, but there's a reason the stock is on an absolute tear. B, the infrastructure, which is, you know, chips, hardware companies, Nvidia, Broadcom, but also further down the stack, ASML, which by the way, is up 65% since pounding the drum on that this summer, join TCI.com, cough, cough, and TSM, right? There's a tons of players here and just go look at

like semiconductor ETF from Vanek like SMH or something to get a list or ask an LLM for a list here but that's the kind of second bucket and then the third bucket which and then I want to hear what you guys think but asking AI for the list of AI exactly exactly

and see the basket of power generation that's downstream suppliers electrical engineering hardware engineering services obviously the power generation companies themselves, the materials that need to make it, you know, a lot of nuclear upstarts, uranium's in the mix there. So that's a huge piece there. I remember you brought up Quanta services back

in the day. WSP, the Canadian engineering firm, just made another massive acquisition in power engineering. So this stuff's in huge, huge demand to build these AI cloud computing factories everywhere we can. Yeah. Yeah. And I think one of the, I wouldn't say biggest loser of all of this, but the one space that's probably being hyped a bit too much is the actual data center operations. Because the more I look back, you're looking here at some of the REITs that are doing at Equinix and DLR. They're not great businesses. They're literally not that great in terms of businesses. Owning the data center is not all that great. I know there was news about Oracle last week or a couple of weeks ago about a partnership.

Oracle is now shifting a bit more to leasing these data center over building them themselves. But what they're doing is they're working with oftentimes private equity companies that will finance the building of these data centers. But now you're seeing a private equity firm. I can't remember the blue owl, I think it was, the name, that said that they weren't interested in financing one of the $10 billion data center that they had originally I've been talking about doing with Oracle

and then Oracle would have leased it long term for them and I think you're seeing now these actual data centers and companies realizing that those are not great in terms of businesses because they're costing tens of billions of dollars to build and then if you decide to sell it 5, 10 years down the line the problem is you'll have zero comps, almost zero comps to go on so how do you price it?

And those are the things to keep in mind And I think a lot of people are playing these data centers as a play on AI. But I think it's more of, see it more as what it is, like a play on real estate than actually AI. The biggest threat and the reason that I started to actually, well, the reason I sold Equinex, for instance, is I push back a little bit on them being not good businesses. I actually think that, you know, in terms of for what they are, which is real estate investment trusts, they are pretty good businesses. and they do have interconnection modes that are definitely worth discussing. The problem is,

is their largest traditional customers are now their largest competition in the hyperscalers themselves. That's the problem with these stocks, in my opinion. Yeah, that's kind of what I was going to say, like at what point do the hypers build them out to where there's not demand on that side? Well, that's happening.

It hadn't happened. And you have something like AWS fabric where you can interconnect virtually. So you don't actually need to interconnect on bare metal in an equinex facility, right? So that's the problem with these companies, in my opinion. But I can see the hyper scale is slowing down on that part to invest more in other areas of AI, though, just because it's not, if you look at this from someone on the outside,

I just don't know it's the best way to spend their money. It's probably best for them to rely on someone to build it and then spend on those GPUs or whatever they're spending on in the business versus the actual kind of building and infrastructure. The steel man is logic's thrown out the window and you have 100 billion you want to deploy and you want to own the world. No, that's true.

That's true. And I guess the last thing, too, about these data centers and something that could be an issue going forward for the buildout or maybe not an issue but slow it down is you have those nimbies, right? People not wanting these data centers in their backyards. What happens if regular people, that's in the U.S., but also Canada, are starting to see their power bills go up because there is so much demand for power in these data center are driving the power bills on? You could really have a lot of angry people that are pressuring politicians. And I could see that being a way to slow down the buildout.

I don't think it will not happen. I think it's going to happen, but it may not happen as quickly as we might think. And we're even seeing stories now of data centers, like being a center. potentially complete, but sitting idle because they don't have anything to power it right now. Yeah, imagine, you know, oh, sorry, you have to share the power with your house with this data center. You know, you got to, the lights can only go on for two hours this week because, you know, AWS is this data center down the street. Yeah, it's not a good look. Yeah, and they got a lot of, they're targeting a lot of, I guess you could say, tinier like Alberta towns as well.

Like they just put one, I don't know, listeners here from Olds, Alberta, but it's kind of like a middle of nowhere town off the highway. They're building data centers there. Like Bonnie Brook would be another one. Like they're targeting like low population areas like probably where land is cheap, I would guess, and building these out. I mean, it's the spending is crazy, which is why we talked about Celestica, which is was a $2 billion company like three years ago. And they literally make that like I said in that 30. top stocks or whatever. They literally had AI kind of just fall into their lap. Like they make networking equipment. They make like GPU racks cooling for GP. Like there couldn't have been

a better situation for this company. And yeah, they've gone from $2 billion to $40.00. It's crazy. Someone kind of dystopian around the data center build out. So you ever seen those videos where it's like it looks very dystopian where you have this Amazon industrial massive warehouse right beside this very third world village that all the people live in. I haven't seen it, but I can picture it. This happens in, you know, kind of remote third world places. But the other side of the argument is like, look, this is just given them all work. It's like actually lifting the amount of poverty.

Like, there's a lot of positives to this, actually. It creates a ton of economic stimulation. But imagine that situation where it's a data center and no one works there except for robots that live in this guy, right? So that's a little bit dystopian. And the technicians that go in once in a while to repair stuff for it. Exactly. Yeah, they did.

They talked about the one that's going in in Olds. And it's like a town of, I think, 12,000 people. It's going to create 70 jobs. 70 permanent jobs. But think of how many AI girlfriends it might create. And they're going to like, what are they plan to put them in space in four years anyway. Yeah, well, that actually makes sense. to do so, by the way.

I think it does, but the timeline, I mean, they can barely get a shovel in the ground on major projects for like multiple years. I don't see them going to space. There's a lot of advantages to running AI data centers in this space. Having cash on hand is essential for any business. Traditional business accounts hit you with high fees

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there. Okay, two, the traditional SaaS bucket is getting pumped. I just made a little bucket here and check the performance of them. Adobe, year-to-date, down 20%, CRM, 22%, service now, 27%, Constellation Software, 24%. Atlassian, 33%, HubSpot, 43%, Figma, 65%. It has been tough, tough sledding for these traditional software companies that AI could be right in the crosshairs for, or and or they'll get like vibe coded internally and you won't need to you know use these platforms anymore i have a lot of conflicting thoughts and i'm sure a lot of us do and we've talked about this

but i want to i want to move on to the model wars google is a clear talking point this year a truly impressive full a i stack their models were the laughing stock of a i remember barred before they rebranded it to yeah like they were in a weird place yeah i remember and their images were like doing some weird weird like you know you asked for like it like wouldn't recreate famous figures if they were white it would like actually make them like a completely different skin color yeah yeah exactly stuff like that yeah but no the model wars is is pretty interesting didn't they have like some presentation and it gave completely wrong information like barred and then the stock fell by like a hundred billion yeah yeah that's right yeah

Yeah, one of the early ones, maybe a year and a half, two years ago. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. Crazy. So they were kind of a laughing stock, honestly. And, you know, everyone's saying, like, you know, get all the management out, clean house, bring Sergey back. And, you know, it's funny because he is actually back, which is interesting. But they were definitely not a hot stock. I mean, the stock was on a pretty significant. significant drawdown. And now, you know, Gemini is a top tier model. We're actually building products that people want to use, like nano banana, not banana. And the market is really saying this is Google's to lose when it comes to AI. They have all the right building box with infrastructure. They have a top tier model. They have application layer products touching billions of people. And everyone wants their kind of like full cycle AI to do stuff. But it's going to happen

in the products that people are probably using, like the juice suite. So they have, it's theirs to lose, I feel like. Stock fell 30% in the beginning of the year. Let's not forget. And Google searched also right in the crosshairs of prompt style info gathering, which still is, by the way. It's the ultimate innovator's dilemma. But they've leaned right into it. And they've shipped at an impressive price. And the stock has more than doubled to 3.7 trillion in market. account. To me, that is a huge story of 2025 that Google fell 30% and then proceeded to double. It feels like the meta stock of 2022. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just showing here. Obviously, what we'll be talking about next liberation, they probably didn't help, which is right around the time it was

at the lows. But the model wars are fascinating because I don't know, six months ago, if you ask people in terms of LLM model, they probably would have been Open AI is the lead horse and it's theirs to lose. Now it's Google. But I wouldn't be surprised if in six months it's going to be one of the other models. Like it's evolving so quickly. And I know for some it is becoming a little bit like they'll use a model.

They almost like become attached to it or they like and model gets to know them. But I constantly use two. or three different ones. Because I want the model to be impartial. I want the model to give me straight facts as much as possible, but obviously you always double check that. I don't want the model to try and please me. And that actually annoys me when it does that. I know not everyone's like that, but to me, I think there's a case to be made where these will become more and more commodities. Like I don't think they're as sticky as people say. Yeah. Well, they're fairly consumer, fairly sticky consumer applications, but when it comes to the API business and like

the intelligence in the sky, yeah, the model really matters. And Anthropic is the clear winner when it comes to software engineering. Like that has become a massive business with software engineering and they're powering cursor, which is a huge business now in itself too. So yeah, what do you think, Dan? Yeah, I mean, I, I use Gemini exclusively and I was some who used to use GPT a lot. I mean, they could come out with a single update

that, you know, I could go back to GPT, but being like a publisher in the space and seeing like what Google did like traditional search wise, I mean, they pretty much absolutely killed our, you know,

organic traffic visibility because you don't need to click through anymore. They just feed you what you want on the front page. And I think there was a lot of issues as to how they would monetize this. But I mean, they're starting to. They're starting to put ads in those AI overviews. I can't imagine it has the same impact as like traditional ads because most of them are like at the bottom or you got to click like a source link to go through. I mean, click through rates will ultimately tank, but they just keep generating more money through search.

I mean, YouTube is huge now. And I think one of the one of the main reasons for it is like how much of a pain video advertising used to be. Like, you used to have to get cameras, production, like actors, like things like that. Now, I mean, you can just create AI videos. I mean, you could get something of me and actually create an AI ad. And I see them all the time now on YouTube, which I think significantly lowers the barrier to entry for a lot of people who want to invest or sorry, advertise, like video advertise. So, yeah, that's, that's helping as well. YouTube is such a beast.

Yeah. All right. Well, let's go back. Not so long ago feels like. ages ago when Trump held that sign. Yeah, the one you have on the screen, right? Oh, yeah, that sign. So, yeah, let's go back to April.

And for those who are on Joint TCI, you'll see this marvelous billboard that was supposed to be reciprocal tariffs. And if we remember correctly, I can't remember the exact formula they used, but it was nothing reciprocal. It was a calculation between the surplus, the trade surplus, I think. Trade surplus or import, import, divided by two or whatever it was. It has nothing to do with actual reciprocality of tariffs. But back on April 2nd, they rolled out the much-inticipated tariffs.

It was a 10% baseline tariffs on all countries, but they also had a country-by-country reciprocal rate that was supposed to kicking a few days later. One big surprise from Canada was that Canada was not on the list, not to say that Canada was spared of tariffs, the U.S., clearly with that, we saw it with aluminum steel, and there's been some tariffs that were implemented, but at least with the free trade agreement, there's a lot of goods and services that were able to get an exemption of tariffs. So it wasn't as big as an impact. I think the baseline tariff for Canada was like 20, 25%. I lose track, but because there's so many that were exempted, I wasn't felt as much. The issue wasn't that it wasn't, the issue was

that the market was thinking about reciprocal, actual reciprocal tariffs, and that's not what the Trump administration presented with that infamous sign. Now, the higher reciprocal rates were paused for many partners, but not China up because markets really reacted poorly to this really badly. If we remember, and it's probably hard to remember a little bit now because we've had a really good year, but the SMP 500 fell over 11%, the NASDAQ fell over 13%. the NASDAQ fell over 13%. And depending on the time you were using,

and this is probably the most important part for the U.S. administration is the U.S. 10-year bond, U.S. treasuries, rose between 35 and 50 basis point in just a few days. And that's massive because that actually increases the borum cost for the U.S. government as they issue new longer term debt. It makes their interest payments and their already large debt even less sustainable. So clearly that was one of the big impacts, and that's a key point because normally you expect the markets to flight into safety, but instead you saw the exact opposite. And I think for a lot of investors, it was a loss of confidence in the U.S., which was reflected by a sharp sell-off in the U.S. Treasury market.

Obviously, like I said, not great, but the big story, too, was with China. If we remember, they didn't pause the China tariffs, and there was some back and forth, so it was almost tit for tat. The U.S. would raise the tariffs. China would raise the tariffs, and then the U.S. would raise again. And obviously Trump, with his bombastic style, would say, oh, we'll raise it as high as it can be. Ultimately, the market started recovering from the sharp declines from Liberation Day. And since the lows of April 8, the SMP 500 is up more than 37. And the NASDAQ up more than 53%. I just have a quick comment.

This was a really easy market opportunity to take advantage of. Yeah. You know, when things are selling off and you're like, oh, you know, there's bear case X, bear case Y, bear case, whatever. This one was like, oh, a bunch of stuff's on 25% off sale. Like this is the way I felt. What, I mean, he told you the one time. Yeah.

Remember, he said it was a great day to buy stocks? Yeah, I did. Yeah, there was obviously some of Trump's tweets or truths, whatever you want to call them, that were a head scratcher. I mean, for me, it was kind of hard this point around to pull the trigger on a lot of stuff. I did buy a few things, but it was just a level of uncertainty that the U.S. really put there because tariffs, I mean, it did create a whole lot of uncertainty. But in hindsight, of course, I probably should have deployed more capital than in now. But you learn? Yeah, there was like a cycle there where he would announce tariffs, stocks would drop.

Yeah. You'd buy the stocks and then he would pause the tariffs. And I remember he made that one truth or whatever. I can't remember when it was. But didn't he tweet like, today's a good day to buy stocks or something? And then two hours later, he paused tariffs for 90 days and the markets just went. Yes, yes. Yeah.

That might as soon as that happened. And I'm like, which one of his buddies just backed the truck up and knew he was about to, yeah, yeah. What in the corruption is happening here? Yeah. Nothing surprising, but anything to else to add there before we move on to gold or precious metal space and the TSX? How about this, you know, in your opinion, like, what do you think the, this is kind of like the what happened? What's the current status of Trump, Trump 2.0 tariffs? and where we think or where they've had, you know, said that they're going to go.

Because this was the market dominating headline for, I would say, half of the year. Yeah. And now I don't hear anything about it. Well, I think for the most part, clearly the tariffs ended up not being as bad as anticipated, especially after Liberation Day. I think they ended up doing some deals with different countries, some big. baseline tariffs, but not as bad. So markets definitely adjusted to that. I think there's also perception from the U.S. side, and we saw them lift tariffs on coffee, that inflation is remaining fairly sticky. Obviously, prices are elevated. And even if you have the rate of

increase, that it's 2.5, 3% in the U.S., I mean, Trump can tell the population as much as he wants that the economy is doing well, like Biden was doing, and the Democrats were doing before the last election, but when people are not feeling good about the economy, telling them it's going well when their reality is different, is not good if you're looking to get reelected or you have a midterm coming. So I think they're actually, I wouldn't be surprised if you see the Trump administration rolling back some tariffs because they're getting, they're seeing pressure and the polls are not in their favor with the midterms coming up at the end of next year. Yeah, fair point. Has anyone seen reviews of, do you know,

MKH, what's this, MK, Marquis Brownlee, whatever his YouTube channel is. He does the tech reviews. And he did a full review. And he does very honest reviews of like cars, gadgets, all this stuff. And he did one of the new ex, I don't know to say, Xomi, the, Xiaomi. The Chinese electronics company, they produced a brand new electric vehicle that like

kicks the ass of like every single. U.S. EV company right now, and it's for like 60% of the cost. I think I saw in my promoted videos, but I didn't watch it. Yeah. It's worth looking at because it really makes you realize that the tariffs and the kind of artificial unit economics that are going to be put towards these types of products coming out of China hold the balance of the life and death of some of these EV makers, for example. So you just watch that video and you're like, wow, they have to continue to artificially completely manipulate the market.

No, I'll watch it. I'm not surprised. I've heard that apparently the cars are quite impressive. Having cash on hand is essential for any business. Traditional business accounts hit you with high fees while paying little to no interest on the cash you need for day-to-day operations. That was our experience, too, until we switched to the. new EQ bank business account. Now, every dollar earns high interest with no monthly fees and

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You can search up Blossom Social in the app store and join the community today. I'm on there. I encourage you go on there and follow me, search me up, some of the YouTubers and influencers and podcasters that you might know. I bet you they're already on there. People are just on there talking, sharing their investment ideas and using the analytics tools. So go ahead, blossom social in the app store and I'll see you there. Let's move on to Precious Metal before we go on for too long here. Like Dan alluded to, Precious Metal just led the TSX higher. Not the only thing. Financials obviously had a big part into that, but it's even more remarkable when you look at the 10-year returns up until 2024. You were looking during that time frame, gold being up around 105%, silver, 24%. The SNP 500 had total returns of 289% while the TSX was up 150% in total returns from 2014 to 2024. Now, 2025 happen. Now, 2025 happened. And then the table's turn, gold was up around 62%. this year. Who knows it's up even more today. Silver 124% probably more than that because I did that

before market open today compared to around 18% for the SNP 500 and 31% for the TSX. So it's been really a remarkable year for precious metal and of course miners who really benefited for that. Usually it's just a leverage play on those precious metal. They tend to perform better than the metal in the bull market. And if you'd like to do a bit of a dig deep, deep, deeper into it. Make sure you go back to the interview I did that was released on us Monday, December 22nd with Bipin Rye from BMO. So we talked a bit more about gold and the macro environment there. 124% for silver. Really? Yeah. I think it's even more today.

I don't follow it at all. I wouldn't even have been able to come up with the number, but that is astounding. Yeah, it started the year around 2950 and now it's at 68. Say almost $69. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, gold is, I mean, it's kind of a, it's a flat, like a, you know, a nice round timeline, but it's kind of cherry picking a bit because we're going back to 2000, but gold's actually crushed the markets since 2000, just because of that huge run-up we've got over the last

while. And you have that mega drawdown of 2000, 2001. That's what I mean. Like a lot of people use like a 25-year timeline and, you know, it just so happened. to be at probably the best point ever because even if you go to like the peaks and like beginning of the sell off of tech stocks yeah because even if you go to 2005 let's say the s&Ps outperform gold but i mean it had like a dead decade and just nobody wanted to own it and it ended up it ended up being you know one of the better assets i mean precious metals in general like silver's done

unreal too simon you did freaking well with this one man yeah i know you're the you are the gold bug in the last 24 months. Not too shabby, but Dan, what about capital markets saving the big banks? And I know Bipin Rye, who I had the interview, that was one thing you mentioned as well, that big banks being diversified definitely helped them this year. Yeah. So an equal weighted portfolio of Canadian banks has actually outperformed the SP 500 for the second straight year.

In 2024, it was really close. Like the banks kind of like razor thin over and above. But this year, they kind of, they crushed it. And it does seem odd because, you know, the majority of the banks lending-wise were not really all that strong. Like, provisions are easing, but they're still pretty high. And, you know, many of them are warning about issues in the GTA real estate-wise. But capital markets kind of saved the day. I mean, it was just a crazy year for pretty much every bank on that front.

Quick overview. So Royal Capital Market. And I'm thinking talking capital market and wealth management because wealth management did very well as well. Royal profits were up 45%. Scotia 50% CIBC, 62%. I think national was like 40%. Whereas like something like Scotia,

on the Canadian side of the business, I think loans were only up 2%. And I think deposits were like pretty close to flat. So I think the K-shaped recovery, I mean, is in full motion here, like the upper portion of the K being, you know, the wealthy you have money to invest, kind of drove, you know, huge increases in the markets

at the banks. however, you know, kind of that lower portion, probably larger portion are prone to probably borrowing credit cards, loans, et cetera, are pulling back like in a big way. And I mean, again, as I mentioned, you've seen the two banks that did particularly well on the lending front were Royal and CIBC. And you see Royal and CIBC from a pricing perspective over the last two, three years, I've just crushed it. I think Royal was still growing, it's like lending, like Canadian lending earnings by like 20 plus

percent. It's crazy. It's not, it wasn't a lending year that you would figure the banks would be up 35 plus percent. But the one thing is, is capital markets, obviously that revenue is like notoriously volatile. It's kind of difficult to imagine another massive year for the banks in that regard in 2026 unless, you know, they need lending activity to pick up because I highly doubt you're going to see 50 plus percent growth in the capital markets again. But it seems what the market is pricing in for, what the market is pricing in right now, it's kind of a recovery in lending kind of provisions to ease and, you know, that capital markets to kind of stay steady. Yeah, I mean, I don't have too much ad there. It was definitely good for the banks that were

well diversified, obviously. We talked about it recently, especially with the bank earnings and TD being one of the banks that did very well despite the cap that they saw in the U.S., but yeah, the other ones that had a lot of capital markets exposure. And I think that was a big tail win for them. I'm curious how investment banking is going to perform next year. There's been whispers of monster mega IPOs that have been talked about happening for years and years now. And like the conversation seemed to be more serious than ever with some of these blockbuster names. So I'm curious overall, not only just these big blockbuster names, but if we can just start having more companies use to public markets.

I think that's a net good for society. Yeah, I mean, IPOs had gotten kind of killed over the last while. Like nobody was, even I wasn't paying a lot of attention. I mean, you look at, we talked about this on an earnings episode,

but that group dynamite company. Yeah. I didn't even know. 2024. Yeah. I didn't even know they went public and they're up like 400% since. Like same store sales growth of like 30 plus percent.

It's crazy. The fashion enigma. There you go. Yeah. K shape again, I think, like, yeah, it's, if people have money, they're spending it. And if they don't, they're cutting back a lot. Yep. Yeah.

Next up here. What about the Goldic magic beans, Simone? Yeah, yeah. So a volatile year here for Bitcoin, definitely true to its reputation. Obviously, I've had, I've owned been coin for quite some time now. But I think it's just a reminder that it's an asset that you should hold. Well, if it's an asset you want to hold, you should remember that it's very volatile. Even though this year it started the year strong,

a lot of people thought there'd be a lot of tailwind, including a favorable Trump administration for regulation towards Bitcoin and the broader crypto space as being more favorable and from a regulatory perspective. Some shenanigans going on with Trump family and crypto as well, but that's to be expected. Not all that surprising. And of course, it saw a sharp drop during Liberation Day,

but it actually got a nice rally and reached all-time high in early October of this year. But since then, it pulled back around 35% at the peaks here. And even today we're looking at it, it's down about 28% from the peaks. So I think it's just a really good reminder for people that it is volatile. I think that I still believe in the asset that hasn't changed much better year than 21 and 22. I must admit, those were pretty brutal. But I guess the last thing on the Bitcoin front were these Bitcoin treasury companies, so micro strategy. You saw is probably the poster child for this.

So you saw a company do what they do as they'll sell debt, convertible debt, or even equity, and use the proceeds to buy Bitcoin. We saw a lot of hype around this summer for that. You had these companies that were doing this and they were just trading at crazy valuation. I think they used that. I can't remember the exact metric. use, but I think it's the price to the nav in terms of Bitcoin or something like that. And they were trading at huge premiums now. I think it's come down at a more reasonable level. But even despite that, I mean, micro strategy was up more than 50% in the summer for the year. And now

it's down 45% for the year. So think about that swing right there. And micro strategy is like the blue chip and error quote of Bitcoin treasury company. And so what, so what is Bitcoin on the year today? Down like 3% I think, yeah. Okay, so down single digit percent. So that's, that's interesting, right? Because there's been three other years in its history that it's had a negative return since, since inception. And those drawdowns by year were like total return for that calendar year in 2014 minus 58%.

And 2018, minus 73%, and in 2022, was nasty as well, down 65%. So this is pretty much the only year that Bitcoin has operated like this in terms of price performance, where like in terms of a calendar year, where it's like going to finish mostly flat. It's astonishing for the asset of Bitcoin. There's still nine days left, so we'll see. Yeah, there's still. Squads that can happen in the Bitcoin world.

Dan, anything to add before we move on to the next, the last one here? No, it's just whenever I think of MSTR, I think of that leveraged. Yeah, covered call ETAF that they have. Oh, God. I think that one's down like 77% from highs. And it's capping it's upside. It's always, it's always good. Yeah.

Yeah, 100% of the drawdown and yeah, not 100% of the upside. But I mean, I bought Bitcoin in 2021 and I quickly faced a 60 plus percent. I ended up buying a bunch more, though. I mean, I don't really know all that much about crypto. I rely on Simone to. Yeah, it's not for the faint of our, but I guess the anti or the opposite of crypto here, so more stable Canadian companies. You want to talk about the railways and some key takeaways for this year before we wrap this up?

Yeah, so it's mostly just the performance over the last three years here. So this is the third straight year market underperformance. for, I just took like an equal weighted portfolio of CP and CN. So they've underperformed the market for three straight years. Even if you were to own each of these railways, they underperformed the TSX for those three years. And I could not find another time that they've done this. Like I found a few times where they've underperformed for two years, but never three. I actually look, so I took that equal weight portfolio and I kind of looked from 2009 to 2022.

the equal weighted railway position would have outperformed the TSX in 11 of those years or like just under 80% of the time. So from a valuation basis, you kind of believe you aren't getting any sort of a discount here. Like they're trading in the high teens in terms of price to earnings ratio. But there's there's kind of a few things to consider here. For one, you know, CN has traded anywhere from 20 to 21x earnings over the last decade. CNR's, you know, they're sitting right now at 18x and CP is just under 20. I think they've had a lot of potential earnings impacts from, I mean, you could argue the worst freight environment we've been in in a very, very long time where, you know, the pandemic pulled forward, I don't even know how many years of growth. I mean, you look to another company like TFI, which just realized crazy amounts of growth.

And now they're going through a bit of a rough situation here. But I mean, at some point, you'd think we'd break out of that. And these railways have historically grown earnings double digits year after year for the most part. you know, when the market starts to price that in, I think, you know, the price to earnings ratios for the railways might start to look a bit high, but it's more of that cyclical situation where, you know, the markets are probably going to price in a lot of forward growth here. But yeah, I just, it's crazy, you know, I think I'd looked back to like 2005 or something. And yeah, they, these railways have never underperformed the markets for three straight years dating, you know, over the last 20, 25 years. Yeah, that's, that's pretty crazy. I mean, uh, usually that can eat. Indian railways are just kind of steady as she goes, right? Yeah, it's like it's nothing too volatile up or down, but, you know, it's generally up

and to the right and, you know, over the last three years here, they've, they've really struggled. Like, I think C-CN might actually be in the red over the last three years here. It's got to be pretty close. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot over the last five years. It's actually in the red. Pretty crazy. CP is exactly flat. It's for a difference of four cents on a three-year trailing.

so yeah that's interesting as of just timing today but that that that shows you it is kind of a lost couple years yeah in terms of performance yeah it's been a rough it's been a rough go but i mean i mean they kind of did the same back when oil tanked in what would that be like 2014 2015 like they were flat for three two years i want to say three years maybe um and then they just kind of went on a run so i mean you need a change in the in the freight environment But, I mean, they're very popular stocks, probably heavily owned by a lot of people. And yeah, they've just had a rough goal. It looks like CP.

I'm just looking at have CP up. They really accelerated a buyback September ending quarter. Yeah. So now that they... 18 million shares they bought offline. So CN kind of went the opposite way. And we've talked about this quite a bit. Like during the pandemic when like peak freight environment, peak valuation, like CNRail bought back.

I can't even remember what it was. Probably $10 billion were the shares, whereas CP just cut it. They didn't buy back any. And now CPs kind of ramping that up now that we're sitting at, you know, three years flat. Whereas CN. It's still doing some, but not as much as it could. I mean, it took on debt to buy back, basically. Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, CN probably wishes they would have saved that $10 billion for right now rather than, you know, in 2021, 2022.

But I'll have a bold prediction on that. So make sure you tune in for that. Yeah. Anything else we missed? sorry, I think we'll wrap this one up and get ready for our bold predictions. No, let's do it. Thanks for listening, guys. Appreciate it. Another good year. It's good to have these kind of episodes where the three of us get together. And, you know, we've, we continue to do them quarterly or more often. I know we just did another interview

together, Simone. So yeah, yeah, I'll be around. And yeah, it's good to, it's good to chat with you guys. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you haven't given it five stars and rated it this year. That would be much, much appreciated. And the show goes on. Take care. Thanks, everyone. The Canadian Investor podcast should not be construed as investment or financial advice. The host and guests featured may own securities or assets discussed on this podcast. Always do your own due diligence or consult with a financial professional before making any financial or investment decisions.