The Wealthy Barber Podcast - #47 — Amber Kanwar: Investing and the Active vs. Passive Debate

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Our guest this episode is Amber Kanwar, host of the “In the Money” Podcast and former BNN Bloomberg anchor who has spent over a decade covering financial markets and interviewing hundreds of portfolio managers, CEOs, political leaders and major newsmakers across North America. In this episode, Dave and Amber explore the world of investing and the ongoing debate between active and passive strategies. They discuss whether active managers can truly beat the market, whether retail investors should pay attention to the daily moves of the stock market and whether strategies like private equity are right for everyday Canadians.They also discuss why women remain underrepresented in finance, the differences in investing behaviour between men and women, and what lessons investors can learn from their mistakes. It’s a wide-ranging conversation filled with thoughtful insights on investing, markets and the future of the economy.   Show Notes (00:00) Intro & Disclaimer (00:55) Intro to Amber Kanwar (04:08) How Amber’s First-Ever Article Become Front Page News at The Globe and Mail (08:38) Leaving BNN Bloomberg to Start a Media Company (13:45) The Debate: Active vs. Passive Investing (19:38) Hard-Hitting Interviews and Past Performance Metrics (21:05) Is Private Equity a Good Investment for Retail Investors? (25:39) Learning From Investing Mistakes (27:30) Why Are Women Underrepresented in Finance? (28:30) Investing Differences Between Men and Women (on Average) (32:38) The Difficulty of Investing Based on Macro Forecasts (37:56) Outperformance in Small- and Mid-Cap Companies (40:46) AI and the Impending Loss of Entry-Level Jobs (43:04) Real Estate Trends (45:14) Regulation and Business Formation in Canada (48:14) Talent Retention Challenges for Canadian Businesses  (50:00) Could Passive Investing Break the Market? (54:58) Conclusion

Hey, it's Dave Chilton, the wealthy barber and former Dragon on Dragon Stand. Welcome to the Wealthy Barber podcast. Well, we'll be hosting some of the top minds in the world of personal finance. Yes, that's to balance me out. The podcast is about making the subject not just easy to understand, but dare I say, even fun, honest. Whether you're trying to fund your retirement, figure out how to build a down payment, save for your kids' education, manage debts, whatever, will be here to help you. do it. Before we jump in, a quick but important note, nothing we discuss here should be taken as

investment advice. We don't know you and your personal financial situation, so we're not here to tell you we're specifically to put your investment dollars. We're here to educate, get you thinking, and we hope entertain. But please do your own research and or consult with your financial advisor before taking any action. Hey, it's Dave Chilton, the wealthy barber with the Wealthy Barber podcast. Again, thanks for tuning in. I say this every week, but we are three thrilled with the feedback to the podcast. In fact, to be honest with you, we're a little surprised. Canadian-only financial planning content. We were a little shaky on how many listeners we would get, and it's gone spectacularly well. And the number of you who've reached out to talk about questions

you want to answer, guests you want on, it's been very helpful. And we listen. We really do. We've tried to go out and get those people. And that leads me to today's guest, Amber Canwar, a very familiar face for almost all of you, a BNN Bloomberg star for years. I'm going to give you a little bit her background to try to really build her up because it's honestly quite fascinating. She got her BA from Western. As a lot of, you know, Westerns are very fine school. It's where people go when they can't get into Wilford Laurier. And I think it's excellent. It really is. And I think what did you take there? Organizational design. Organizational studies, HR, because I didn't want anything to do with business. Okay. Go to my next degree and you'll see what I was going to do. And then she went to

Ryerson, a name change since then, but one of my favorite schools, I used to love speaking there. They, I think, were on the forefront of having more practical teachings, things that could actually be applied in real life, and got her master's, and her thesis was on the fertility industry in Canada. And what's fascinating is that thesis got picked up widely. In fact, it was turned into a front page article in the Globe Mail, and it led to the industry being very closely scrutinized. And frankly, even a little bit of a scandal. I don't think that's too strong a word. So we'll ask her about that in a few moments. Then she went to BNN, and that's where a lot of you came to know her. She became one of the most popular on-air stars there. She rose through the ranks,

covering stocks and trends in the equity markets, et cetera, extremely well-spoken. I dealt with Amber years ago. She was the host, the MC at an event for CFAs, and I was the speaker. I was extremely impressed with how good she was at at using humor relating to the audience, etc. So she has this wonderful career, booming career. Everybody knows her. Everybody respects her. She had a show called The Disruptors with Bruce Croxon. And if you can pull off a show with Bruce Croxon, that you are talented for sure.

And she leaves. She kind of shocks the Canadian marketplace. I still remember what I found out. I was like, what? She leads BNN Bloomberg to go out on her own, to create her own media company. She has podcasts that drop every Tuesday and Thursday morning. And really what she's trying to do, and she may correct me on this, but it looks to me like she's trying to bring institutional level advice and thinking to the retail investor. They don't have access to that normally.

And that's what she is doing. She's providing that access. And then she also has a daily lose letter that goes out. And those two things, are they the primary components of the media company? Yeah, pretty much. And then I do some speaking as well. but the primary thing is the podcast in the money with Amber Canwar. So after you listen to this, you can go subscribe.

No, it's very good. Yeah. No, it is. And Amber, like, I mean, I'm building up here, but she's really talented. And I'm loving it, by the way. You can keep going. And exceptionally well spoken. You will find that she has great command of the English language.

So before we get rolling on what you do now and on investment themes that I think our audience will lead up, I have to ask you a little bit about the thesis. Like, how did that come to be? And were you shocked what it led to? Okay, so the fertility one, the story. So as I said, I took the easy path in business at Western. I was not going to do Ivy. Nobody look at my biz 20 score. It was not good. I could not balance that table. And I said, this is not for me. I'm going to change the world. So I'll just get this business degree to satisfy my Indian parents. And then I'm going to go do journalism. And I did that. And as part of the

master's program, you have to have a thesis that comes out of it. And I didn't really know what to And at that time, it was when IVF was not covered. And you remember like the Octo mom, right? And so people, because they were paying so much out of pocket, they wanted to be inseminated with like four or five embryos just for the hope of having one child. And so people were having multiple. So I thought that's kind of interesting. And so you know what I did, David, as I was kind of trolling Facebook pages.

Canada, fertility, Facebook pages, because there was this campaign to get it publicly funded. and I happened upon a woman named Trudy Moore who called me and told me this story. We talked for about half an hour about how she struggled with fertility. So what she ended up doing was using her sister as an egg donor and a surrogate with her own husbands, Trudy's husband's,

you know, sperm, to create a baby. And so that was that. And I thought, okay, well, you know, maybe that could be the story, the lengths people go to. Then half an hour into that conversation, she reveals that when the baby was born, the father was not her husband, and the father was not her sister's husband,

and her sister hadn't been doing anything, right? And it turns out that the doctor had inseminated her with the wrong spur. Oh, my gosh. Now, she tells me that this is all off the record. So I am 20 years old, and I just get this bomb, you know, dropped in my lap, and through a year, I worked with her. I flew to Ottawa many times.

I looked up documents. I found out this doctor has settled with other families in the past. Now, the difference is that he had done it with, you know, single mothers. So instead of sperm A, they got sperm B. And it's like, well, you know, okay, I still got a baby. And so there was a settlement. Or gay and lesbian couples. And he was a real trailblazer, right?

He was really well loved at the community because he wanted to give people families. families. You know, but this was an example. You know, you wanted a specific father. You wanted the husband. Anyway, what I uncovered over the course of the year is that the college knew about this, the physician in question had the order of Canada. Like, he wasn't somebody in his basement. He was a very decorated person who had a history of making mistakes. Now, when I was doing the reporting, the children, because I found others, were not related to each other. subsequent to that years and years later after I'd left the story, the children are related. Some of the children are related. And it turns out that it was, let's call it Dr. Barwin's contribution. Right? Oh, my. Yeah. So it turns out he was, you know, donating to use a, to use a word. And so I wasn't part of that. I was part of the, you know, this doctor kind of making these mistakes. And yes, I'd come out of journalism school. And I was actually working at BNN at the same time. And so my very first article in a newspaper was a front page story of the Gobin Mail at the same time that I was interning at BNN, like getting people coffee.

So this kind of like living, living two kind of worlds. And I love the investigative piece. But then, and we'll talk about this, it turns out I really caught a bug for finance news, investing news that I decided, okay, I think I'm going to pursue this. I think this is going to be my passion. Yeah, I mean, you peaked early. I mean, you come out. I mean, with your teeth, you're like me. We both peaked early.

And you get this in the front page of the Globe Mail. I didn't write another article for like 15 years. I just, now I have a weekly column in the Globe and Mail, which is just like five things to know in the market. It's a real step down from that. No, that's not true. I enjoy your articles. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I do.

I think you're very good at what you do. Like, I really do. In fact, before we move on to you and I bouncing back and forth about investment themes, et cetera. I brought the box and gloves. Yeah, you're ready. But one of the big things. I want to ask you is, in leaving BN, like that was a big move. You're quite famous there and respected. And it gave you that platform and led to, I'm sure, a lot of the speaking engagements. But you just

looked at the landscape out there and thought, now's the time for a media company. Walk me through that decision. So it's a convergence of a bunch of things. Five years ago, would I have left BNN to start a YouTube channel? Like, ew, no. That would have been very, I would have viewed that as a step down. But, you know, it's kind of, you learn so much. lessons through your children. And there was one time that our Wi-Fi went down. And so I had to put on the Disney channel. And they were like, okay, we want to watch Bluey or whatever it was. I'm like, oh, no, you don't, like, you don't get to decide. Like this, you have to absorb whatever is there. And they just lost it. And I realized, oh, my God, their whole life, they'd never even known what

cable is. And I always got the feedback. You know, I watch you in my office, but you're always in mute. At the same time, like, basically podcast decided the U.S. election, right? Yes, I agree. It's all this thing that we're doing that we didn't really appreciate. So I thought, okay, it's really viable. I'm not early to it by any means. Everybody has a podcast. So I, and at the same time, cable, and this isn't just a BNN story, it's everywhere. It's happening to CNBC. It's happening to Bloomberg. It's happening to CNN. It's just in a challenged situation, right, as all legacy media is.

And they have a tough time pivoting because it means killing their golden goose. So I'm seeing that constraint and a lot of things. You know, I pitched a podcast years ago and it's just like new ideas were not sort of the vibe at that time. But then the other reason is personal. Like I have, I have three children, they're young children and it's weird as they get older. It's actually a little bit harder. You know, as babies, it's easier to kind of lead them and have your shift or whatever. But they're older now and I want to be there for their pickups or their drop-offs.

I don't want to take a day off if I want to go to pizza day. You know, so a little bit was personal just to have control of my time. And if I am sacrificing time away from them, it's for something really meaningful that I've built myself. But just to have people kind of out of my way and no one's saying no to me. And if I have an idea, I can just see it through. It's really great. And at the end of the day, I felt like it's not a content problem. How can we live in a world where content, the demand for content is,

never been so high, but all these content creators, legacy ones, are struggling. And for me, it was just a distribution problem. People are going on YouTube. One in five, I think it's actually higher than that, start their investing journey on social media. Absolutely. Which I think is amazing and terrifying, and we'll talk about that, David, because who are you getting on social media? What are their credentials? Like, all of that stuff. But you can't fight what's happening. And so it feels very liberating to be on my own. And I feel like I'm swimming with the, and I feel like I'm swimming with the current, not against it. Now, when you made this decision, were you fearful at all about how do you build the initial audience? I mean, you can monetize an audience, but you have to

have it first. And obviously, you had some brand power, but how did you get the word out to everybody what you're up to? So part of it is, I understood, after 15 years there, the meat of what people are looking for. You know, they do want actionable insights. I can talk macro. I can talk about the economy, but at the end of the day, they want to know about their Royal Bank of Canada, their CIBC. And I like talking about that. I think there are great stories around companies. It's part of why I got so hooked on financial journalism is the optimism around it. Seeing somebody strike out and build something from nothing and having a situation where people get to participate in that is really nice. And then the worst thing that can happen is you lose

money, which is bad. But, you know, I was next to CP 24 and you should see this to talk about on a regular basis. So part of it is I know what people like. The other part is I have these contacts in the industry now. I can call up any money manager and I can sit with them and they know I'm going to have a thoughtful, informed conversation with them. So part of it was picking people, some of my first guests, that were very popular. So I kind of knew, I kind of knew that. But the other part is just being there. The distribution is so important. Being on Apple, being on Spotify, by having those social media clips. And then, yeah, I think it helped that people knew me

and knew I was a known quantity and what they were going to get from me. And just knowing at the end of the day, and I think you and I share this, is we are looking out. I'm trying to be a conduit, give my access as a conduit to the everyday person. I think about my grandmother.

I think about my mother. And making sure that they understand. They're aware of the risks. They've fully stress tested, whatever the investment idea is. No, I think you've done a very good job on that. And you're right, we do share that in that we are trying to help the everyday person understand all these and be able to think them through and not have all the information

go above most people's heads, et cetera. So we do. Now, we don't share something else. So let me bring that up. I tend to believe that for the vast majority of Canadians, they are better just to use broad-based index funds, basically take the entire market and pay no attention. In fact, I think they pay a price for paying attention. They often get too emotionally involved or they think.

think they can outperform. They get pulled in by narratives and make investments that usually don't turn out too too well. I think the best investor I know is my father who pays zero attention whatsoever. In fact, he has dementia. And that's made him even better because now he can't pay attention very effectively. And so you, on the other hand, tend to think that people may be able to outperform if you get the right information about specific stocks, et cetera. Walk me through why you believe that and why you think I'm off. So I don't think you're off. I think there's, let's start with, you know, it's very Canadian.

Let's start with what we agree on. I agree with you. I think that, and I see it in my own podcast, like one of the most popular episodes that we've ever done was with this U.S. fund manager who says, you know, that the market, these tech stocks are going to implode 50 percent. And then episode went viral. And I track all of my managers. And I say, you know, this guy did not outperform.

And I wasn't there to kind of give him a platform. if you listen to that episode, like I stress test these ideas. And then I want people to form their own opinion about it and to hear counter facts because those people are very loud and they don't necessarily have the viewers or the listeners best interest at heart. I think one of the worst things we do as financial journalists is lionize the people who came out of the financial crisis. We're always looking for the next, you know, Paulson or Kyle Bass. You know, who's that person? And like if you never found that person and you just stay invested, so I'm a big proponent, but I'm young, right?

So I can say that. I'm going to stay invested. My mantra is I try never to sell. I talk often about how I get scared out of stocks. So I'm very candid about my investing mistakes. Like I sold Google, huge mistake, right? Because I succumb to a narrative. So it's almost like you're joining me on a learning process, right?

Like I'm also learning about the market. And to your point, I think, yes, generally. index investing, a big chunk of it. That's kind of the right way. Warren Buffett says it's the right way. The math says it's the right way. But I don't agree with you in the sense that you should remain ignorant on what is going on in the markets. I like it. And I think you're using ignorance as a form of discipline, right? If you just don't know, then that's your discipline. I think you can be disciplined and informed, right? And the reason I think information is very important is because, because you know that there are a lot of people in this industry who aren't, you know,

savory characters and will put you in things that you might not understand. And so even right now, something as simple as, you know, just to invest in the S&P 500, it's done really well for the last 15 years. Well, the S&P 500 today is different than what it was 15 years ago. 30% of that index is seven stocks, right? You need to understand that the exposure that you're getting there is, really concentrated on one idea that's AI and that those seven companies are the ones that are going to do well, right? And what's happening in fact over the last year and when we've had guests

talking about this over the past year is that the U.S. is losing its dominance. So for the last 15, 20 years, it's been the safe bet even as a Canadian. You should have most of your money in the U.S. because that's been the market that has outperformed. Something is changing, David, right? Like as the U.S. pursues these tariffs, almost every market around the world is outperforming the U.S. So I think it is important to remain invested, but understand that things are changing and know that today when you're buying the U.S. market, you're not buying the same U.S. market of even a couple of years ago. And that might be fine with you. You might be okay and say, well, my time horizon is 30 years. I think it's all going to shake out over that time. I think that's totally fine.

I liken it to kind of eating versus nutrition. I think financial planning is like eating. We all have to do it, right? And then you can decide if you want to know a little bit about what you're eating, if you want to know the nutritional value and kind of bone up on that. And that's kind of what the investing piece is. And not to say we don't have fun, there's a slice of my portfolio that I reserve for like potential 10 beggars. And I've made huge mistakes.

and we can talk about meme trading and all of that. I'm very open about it. But I think it's also important to make those mistakes with a little mid amount of money early in your career so that when you get to retirement age or our big capital spending requirement, you're ready. You know where I push back on that a little bit is that we are seeing a lot of young male investors in particular.

And again, I don't mean to be sexist against men, but all the data supports this, 85, 95%. Even my viewership. I'm trying to get the women in, but yeah, yeah, it's mostly men. It's the meme stock traders. The gamblification of the market has been dominated by males under 38, I think, is the figure they use. And that group, the problem is that they're losing more than a little bit in many cases. These aren't small losses.

Many have blown up their entire TFSAs. And by the way, that's during a time of relatively strong market returns. They've still managed through option trading and all kinds of silliness to go dramatically backward. The thing is, the opportunity cost of doing that, because it may seem like a relatively small amount of money, but had that money been left alone to compound at reasonable returns over the next 25 and 35 years, oh my gosh, it ends up being a tremendous amount. So I'm probably be pretty aggressive against doing that kind of trading even as the learning experience. I want to give you credit on something, by the way, before I ask you another question,

anybody who's listened to you on TV, on your podcast, knows that you do not give your guests a free ride. And you really don't. In fact, you can be quite hard hitting and push back about past performance or the logic of an argument, et cetera, et cetera. You're not there just providing them a platform and turning the podcast or turning your former interviews on BNN into a commercial for their products,

their funds, their beliefs. That's never been your style. And so I do give you a lot of credit for that. When I look at a lot of the guests I see on CNBC, BNN Bloomberg, anywhere, when you look at their past track records, I'm always just marvel at the fact they're still getting platforms.

Because most of them have dramatically underperforms, underperform the markets, but not just over the last few years over the ruling five and 10 and 15 and 20 year periods, yet they're doing exceptionally well. One of the, I think the best performing fund managers over the past year in Canada, I think is up 20%. And like, that's, that's the best, right? And to your point, that you could do that with an ETF in the past year and you can do that with a lower fee. I totally kind of agree with you. I think people use some of these funds and these asset managers, though, as a vehicle for other things. As you know, these funds offer, in addition to that, they offer tax planning, financial planning. Like, they can be more than just the pure kind of investing in stocks. But I'm not here to defend the fund manager industry.

But your style of investing really supports, you know, kind of large-cap businesses that are already out there. You also have to think about the ecosystem of capital markets, right? You need dollars who are willing to bet on speculative stories. Like you and I, you know, you at Dragon's Den, you understand that startups need capital. If everybody's doing what you're doing, there is no capital for, you know, Shopify and it's series A, it's series B, right? For Shopify to be in the index, it needs capital. It needs those funds to exist.

Our capital markets actually does depend on that. I agree with the average Canadian investor is not going to be investing in startups or in private equity. nor should they because they don't have a good understanding of it. Potentially it can get involved in a private equity pool. But again, their overall track record is quite unimpressive, truthfully, relative even to the broad market averages. So I agree that market needs to be served, but I don't think it should be served by the retail investors dollar.

Most these people are fire people, they're teachers, they're going to work all day. They don't have the ability to do proper due diligence on those types of opportunities. Again, I agree with you. I disagree that starving people of the information is necessarily the right approach. It's a, it's a, it's a strategy, right? You can definitely as a strategy say, I'm just not going to pay attention and trust in like 30, 40 years. It's not going to do anything. My discipline is I do this day in and day out. I'm looking for kind of unique

ideas out there and my mantra is never sell. If I have a good company and I know why I own it, never sell or look for opportunities to kind of to add, you know, where it's selective. But you're, You know, we're aligned on timing never works. It is all about sort of time in the market. And I want to pick up on your point on private equity because guess what? That's coming for retail investors. All these beautiful products are going to be coming to retail investors. And I don't think that a lack of information is the best way to deal with that because

they're advisors or whoever. It's all going to be coming through the channels, right? It's going to be a new thing to sell. And I think people need to understand. It's like to what's going on in the public. markets. That's why all these private investments are rolling into retail hands. Yeah, I mean, I think they're rolling into retail hands because they're moneymakers for the people selling them. And I think 95% of what I see in the world of product creation is about how do we

extract money from retail investors, not how do we add value to their lives. And I mean, that's one of the sad comments in the industry, but I don't get much pushback. And that even industry participants go, yeah, you're kind of right. In fact, it's interesting when you look at ETS. When the banking industry south of the border and North too gets involved in specific ETS you know could be private equity it's almost always the time to get out of that particular space they tend to come in late when it's got momentum it's getting a lot of attention and it's an easy sell therefore to these investors who often aren't particularly well informed I mean you do this all day every day as do your guests but again the average person listening to us and the average Canadian is a teacher

a nurse, a whatever. They're not studying this all day every day. They don't have any background. They don't have the Canadian securities course. They don't have any of that. And so getting some of this information, harnessing that knowledge productively is exceptionally difficult. That's my argument for the vast majority of people.

Now, you have, again, a distant listening group. As you said, you don't need that, right? You don't need that. You don't need tenders. You don't really need that. So it's just a matter of interest, right? Like, I think. That's, I agree with that.

It's very interesting. It's very interest. Especially for people like you and me, like we love all this stuff. And I listen to all of the money managers, your podcast, all of it. I love it. I don't necessarily act that much on it. You know, it's bizarre. If you think about Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player ever,

and then you say, okay, Dave Chilton or Bob Chilton's going to go out and play 101 against Michael Jordan. We all fall on the floor laughing. But then you look at my father, he has beaten 99%. of the top managers in the world of performance. How bizarre is that? There's no other field in the world that can say something like that.

This guy watches Detroit Tagger baseball and plays bridge and just buys index funds and he beats 99% of the famous people you have on the show. It's nutty. That's an argument for the do nothing camp, right? Yes, for sure it is. And kind of do nothing.

I mean, my Google example is so perfect. It's like just one of the most painful lessons. I've owned Google for years. I was up on it huge. And then, you know, Chachypoutique came out. They had a bunch of these flops. And I thought, oh, this is it. Their market share slipped from 92% to 91%.

Like, this is it. I'm going to lock in my gain. And I just, I left, I don't know, maybe a double on the table. And again, even though I know these lessons, I do think it's important for me to learn it and share it publicly. So maybe nobody else will make those mistakes. But, you know, just to circle back to those young people, You say you don't want them to even make this mistake in the first place.

I suffer from toxic positivity. So I always got to see the bright side to everything. I think it's really beautiful that there's a whole new generation of investors that have been minted. I think it's a really good thing. And I think they've all made their mistakes and they got crushed on whenever they got crushed on. Those kind of experiences, you know, hardship forms success down the road. it's important for people to learn those lessons. And now when, oh, you know, maybe I will just own Royal Bank.

Oh, just, you know, this has a nice dividend. You know, it's boring. It's whatever. But they need to learn those lessons in order to understand. And some people need to learn by, like, facing those mistakes. Hopefully people learn just by listening to me and you. Right. You can just invest and don't make those mistakes.

Don't let people scare you out of the market, scare you out of profits. That's how people do you need to learn those. hard way and I think it's better that they learn when they're yet. Yeah, again, I go back and forth net. I do think the opportunity cost is huge and I would rather they just learn about investing in general and the odds favor this approach being better than this one, et cetera. I think some of the excessive trading we're seeing now. Again, the whole industry is gamblified, not just gamified, but gamblified investing. And I would argue what you're seeing a lot of the young male investing is it's not investing. It's just crazy gambling with, by the way, very poor odds of

working out, low expected values for sure. We see this. And if your argument's true, why do you think it's almost all males doing this and very few females? I think there's so many layers to that. And it just starts with like very, very young. This is not a field that has ever thought of to be four women. You know, girls get that very, very young. It starts with like who's in math, who, you know, who succeeds that way. It's in universities, you know, the investment banking, streams, the portfolio management streams, like, it all skews towards men. It's the current culture around finance. It's all like finance bro and whatever. So society nudges the women out. The other reason is, you know, two, if you want to look at women's investing style, like we typically

don't invest like that, right? We're not necessarily, the gamblers were generally more risk-averse, and our performance tends to be better because of it. So we're all doing what you want us to do. But it's very true. I mean, I've found for years and years and years that the stereotypes of women being more risk-abursed, but prudently so, I mean that it's a compliment is accurate and also much more patient, less likely to try to time the market. You look at holding periods of ETFs and mutual funds, women almost always on average exceed men's often dramatically. I mean, a lot of what you're saying there ties back to the argument. A lot of the American psychologists have made about investing in that it ties into testosterone, that a lot of the testosterone is driving the aggressive behavior

and the trading by the men. Now, the rationale being thrown at us constantly now is it's so tough out there. Housing is so expensive. Everything's so expensive. I have to take excessive risks. If I have any chance to actually get where I need to go, I don't buy into that, by the way. And I think that's, again, an excuse for some of the crazy trading behavior that you now see in crypto. I mean, did you see the percentage of the earnings and revenue that Robin Hood drives from options trading? Yeah. It's nuts. Yeah.

Well, anybody who understands option trading knows it's a loser's game over the long term. But see, that's like such a slice of the market. And just to get on my soapbox one more time, like that's why we need more women investing. Because like there can be that group that does that and like bless them. Go ahead and do that. But that doesn't mean that everyone else should ignore what's going on. I don't think information. is what's, you know, the CNBC is my podcast, whatever, is like, it's feeding that, right?

They were going to find that either way. If they were not going to find it in the market, they were going to find it in sports, or they're going to find it on Kalshi on, like, the betting markets. They're going to find that thrill either way. So, like, the stock market maybe has become a conduit for that, but that doesn't necessarily means so then everybody needs to not have that information. And part of the reason that women aren't in this is because they're deprived of information, right? Like, where are the investing?

groups for women in a bigger way that make them feel like they're part of this conversation. A lot of the language is intimidating. We use acronyms or whatever, and we just think, oh, it's not really for me. It's inaccessible. We also make less money. So we have less to throw away, right? So there's like systemic issues that are going on. And by the way, when we become mothers, we have like extra people to take care of on less of a salary. And there's no education. There's no education about how it takes a village, but the village isn't free. And so women, particularly young women, need to think not about buying a house, but about, and not about retirement. You have to fund for motherhood in this country, right? And maternity leaves are great and top ups are great. But

if you still want to be an executive, if you want to be a CEO, you need a village. All of that costs money. And investing can help you think and plan around that. Right? So just because a certain segment of the population is like misusing that information, they were going to do that anyway. But I think those nurses, those teachers, if they want to become principals or head of their division, like, you have to think about that. And where are you going to get that money from? It needs to start early. And so fine, if you make those mistakes, make them early. But there's not enough of a conversation, an open and inclusive conversation about investing being for everyone, not just 38-year-old men. Yeah. I mean, I think it's getting better. I mean, I do see a lot of female investment clubs now. And I do think the information is becoming more accessible. People like you with your podcast, again, bringing it at a level that everybody can

understand the concepts, et cetera. So I think it's improving. One of the characters in the wealthy barber actually says the reason the women don't make these mistakes is they're smarter. And I think there may be, yes, obviously. I think there may be a lot of truth to that too. So, no, no question. Okay, let's move to the markets.

Do you pay a lot of attention to macro indicators? So are you trying to watch the big picture things like where are interest rates going, inflation, what it's going to do, where's the economy headed? Or do you tend to be with your own monies more bottom up? You're more about the individual securities than focusing long term. My bias is bottom up because I just think that's more interesting. I feel like you're more in control. I also think you can get everything right about the macro and the market does not be in.

the way you thought it was going to be. So if you thought that the world's largest superpower is going to tariff the living daylights out of everybody and there's going to be rampant inflation and, you know, all these unchecked wars are going to break out, what would you do? You would sell. And then what did the markets do? They made all time high after all time high because a couple of things happened. Profits continue to grow. And at the end of the day, the market is a discounting mechanism on profits growing. So if profits grow, so do the market. So profits continue to grow. Why did they continue to grow? Well, actually, this gets kind of nuanced, but a lot of companies, they're receiving, so fine, you know, some are really devastated by it. But say like 40% of the cost of your goods went up.

But then you implement a price increase on 100% of your... I say this all the time. Yeah. I say, honestly, I do. I say this all the time that a lot of the companies, ended up making more money than they were before because of all of this. Exactly. So profit grew. The other thing, again, pay attention to the AI spending. Any dent that came from subdued activity due to tariffs was poured over with, you know, gasoline and fire from the trillions, right?

The trillions that are being spented by AI. AI is now a bigger driver of growth, not in absolute terms, but in percentage terms is driving growth in the U.S. more than the consumer, more than consumer growth. Like, just sit with that for a moment. How much is being poured into this is papering over a lot of that. So again, for me, I like a company that's kind of in its own hands, destiny in its own hands, and like, what are they going to do about the environment that is in front of it? Can it continue interest rates up, interest rates down? Like, does it just have a good business? Does it have a good foundation? Is it going into the right markets. And then at the heart of it is the story about people. You learn about

the CEO. You learn about the customers. So I think that's a lot more interesting. You know, would you believe that a company like John Deere, right, tractors, all-time high? So in an environment where we're worried about the consumer and this war is breaking out and supply chain disruption, why is John Deere kind of trading an all-time high? Well, guess what? Even with AI, everyone's going to still need to eat. We don't know where we're going to work. Right. We're going to need to eat. So we'll need farm equipment and the market is looking for these undisruptible areas of the market. So I think it's really interesting kind of what's going on. And AI has become this thing that was lifting the whole market. And now it's kind of

the reason that the U.S. is underperforming, right? Because now we're worried about Microsoft and we're worried about all these software companies. I can just do it with a chatbot. I don't need to pay work day or whatever, all these money is to manage things. So I think it's interesting to watch the shifts that are going on. And I prefer to do that with individual companies. Yeah, I'm with you. I mean, if you're not going to buy an index fund and you're looking at individual companies, most of the successful investors I've crossed paths with, and I'll talk more about this in a moment, but they've been bottom up. I love the top down. I love macro. I read all the macro books. I listen to all the macro experts. I listen to the macro podcasts. But I can never harness it.

No, I can, I know. It's so many economists. I agree. GDP is this. You know, first of all, no, but we've been calling for a U.S. recession for how many years, right? And it's just they keep just like nudging it down, nudging it down. Next U.S., okay, fine, next quarter, next quarter. Just nobody has got it right on macro because it's really hard.

I agree. The too many moving parts and too many unexpected things come into play and nobody can do it well. And even when they do do it well, it's very short term. and it's not the same person doing it well. And I agree with all. A funny story, by the way, I was co-hosting Lang and O'Leary all those years ago. And we had one of the bank economists on giving his GDP forecast for the U.S. And I didn't know this as a rude, but I went back and looked at his track record from the previous five, six, seven years.

And I said right on air, like, I'm going to be blunt here. You haven't been very good at this over the past several. You should see the look at it. Like, I still won't think he likes me all these years later. Now, I've always polite and positive. But I think that's a pretty reasonable question is that should we be putting stock in your forecast when your forecasts haven't been but take it early good? Like, it's just too many moving parts. That's what I mean.

And like even if they did nail it, did the outcome happen, right? Macro is just like, you can nail the macro, but then the trade, the trade is all wrong because of something that that was kind of percolating at the bottom. You know, I'm going to surprise you here, give you some good news. You're going to like this. I have met a few people, you know, I wouldn't say dozens, but certainly some people I know very well who have indeed outperformed the market quite dramatically. And they've been able to do it over rolling 10-year periods for the entire 30, 40 years. I've known them.

What's interesting to me is there's a common denominator. They have invested primarily in Canada, which surprises a lot of people. And they've gone small and mid-cap stocks uncovered. don't tend to make their way into the media a lot, don't make their way into the analyst reports, they know their field. It could be, for example, oil and gas, it could be mining, whatever.

They stick to their knitting. They buy the small and midcaps. They know when to get in, when to get out, and they have done spectacularly well. Now, again, most my listeners have full-time jobs. They don't have the backgrounds to be pulling this off. But it's proven to me that for the right people, taking the proper approach, it is, in fact, doable.

Well, because those stocks are not showing up in your index funds. Right. That's right. So what happens is they're orphaned, and they can be these incredible companies that are trading at tremendous valuation, like valuation discounts for the growth that's in front of them. But you're like, you're so right, you have to be careful because these beautiful businesses that are publicly traded when the vibe shifts, there's not enough capital to catch it. And they can fall 50%. So you have to be able to withstand that volatility. And I assume your fund managers, you know, the ones that have outperformed, know that's a risk.

But then you get maybe a 10-9. These aren't fun managers. These are more people just managing their own money. Managing their own money. Which is nice because they're not beholden to, you know, the reports coming out all the time or people potentially withdrawing money, et cetera. They're just managing their own monies and have done it exceptionally well throughout the years. I mean, look at the number of people in Canada who just in the oil and gas industry

have put up almost crazy numbers because they haven't left their knitting. They know that space very well. They're properly connected. They understand the field. and to your point, they often find undervalued situations are unable to step in. That's another great example. So, you know, you were talking about macro.

Oil, gosh, what a terrible market and supply glut and all these issues. And then guess what? The Canadian energy sector, a lot of these stocks are at record highs. So you call macro, right, you get the trade wrong. Right? Because at the end of the day, it is a story about people, entrepreneurs that start a start.

with somebody scouting out a piece of land and, you know, with a hope and dream and saying, this is what I'm going to do, this is what I think is on the ground, and I'm going to get it to market and all of that. These are really exciting entrepreneurial stories that I don't think are celebrated enough in this country. No, I agree with you. We don't celebrate entrepreneurship enough. And we need to draw more attention to some of those things. Okay, let's go back to AI for a moment, a couple things. I mean, this last two weeks, we've seen many of the world's sharpest people come out with the same prediction, that we're going to lose 20 to 50% of entry jobs in white collar spots over the next 12 to 24 months.

They're not talking about 5 and 10 year forecast. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe they're right. If they're right, though, the ripple impact of this will be huge. Government revenues will decline precipitously. I would argue real estate would have to take a big step down because of the unemployment rate. Firing up, we'll have to look at things like UBI, etc. Do you think governments are on top of this potential calamity?

and are thinking about policy shifts, et cetera? That you have to expect that it is a calamity, right? And so, yes, I don't see, if you're graduating today, I think about this a lot. My children are graduating, you know, they're very young, but they're going to graduate in 15, 20 years, like what are the jobs that are going to be available? Data entry.

You know, when I started out in this business, it was transcripts. It would take me two, three hours. I'd get $10 an hour to type out these transcripts. And now I can do it like in seconds with Chachy Petit. And it sucks because I needed to do that job to have this job. Right. So we're taking out a key function of people like getting it, getting into the workforce.

But it's also never been easier to start a business, right? To young people are just sort of creative, right? Maybe they become creators. Maybe they become their own brands. Maybe they start something. So maybe we'll see like a boon of entrepreneurship. and just so happens in Canada, we're sitting on what is going to be

the biggest generational wealth transfer from the boomers to this generation, right? They're helping them buy homes. There's a lot that's happening, right? Like, not to say that it's not a problem. It is. I think we'll see youth unemployment be a problem, but then out of the problem, something will happen, right?

And if you choose to be optimistic about it, maybe it will be more entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, maybe it'll be more gig work. I don't know. That's not like super, super stable. And then the generational wealth transfer, like that provides a cushion to some people and a cushion to kind of the markets overall. Again, we've been waiting for this shoe to drop for a long time in real estate. And it just, like outside of condos, like it really hasn't in a major way. Yeah. I mean, certainly in the last couple years, you've seen even the detached home market, at least from that peak in 21-ish, that it's pulled back a little bit.

I wonder where the trends are going. Do you have any thoughts on that? Obviously, it varies dramatically from region to region. But as you talk to experts, macro experts in brackets or in part of me in quotes, what are their thinking on real estate going forward in the next year to two? Anybody giving you any interesting insights? That is a diligence job. That is a young industrious people.

You are going to be replaced by AI in banking or whatever. That's not going to happen in real estate. real estate is a footwork job. You've got to get out there. You've got to see the property. What's happening in this small pocket of Toronto is different from what's happening. Kind of in another pocket in like Brandon, Manitoba. So it's very different.

There's no one real estate market. I also think, like, we don't talk about housing is cultural. It's culturally Canadian. Homeownership is culturally Canadian the way in France it is not. I don't think we're all going to see as people like get into household formations and stuff. People are going to reach for it. And they are reaching for it.

That's kind of why our debt levels are so high. And as you mentioned, it's not as crazy as 2021. So maybe you can get a little bit of a deal. But I don't know anybody outside of condos that is bleeding in a home. Yeah. I mean, I think there's people who are pressed. I think bleeding you're right is strong because you've got obviously a lot of renewals of mortgages at higher rates coming this year if they haven't already taken place.

And I think that's pressing people for sure. And I see it in the savings rate of a lot of the young people that send me their finances is they're able to make the mortgage payment. They're not going to lose their home. But you add the car payments in and everything else and doing the wealthy barber save 10 to 15 percent becomes extremely difficult. And I think it's coming to play in weird ways. For example, more and more young people I meet are only going to have one child. And they're saying kids are just too expensive with what we're trying to achieve. Yeah. And so they're only going to have one. We don't support families. We don't support families. We don't support entrepreneurship. Right. And it is too

cumbersome to do anything. Imagine if I want to do what I'm doing, but I wanted to start a business channel, just say I wanted to start another BNN. There's only one license, one other business license in this country. I can't just do it. Right. Then I would need to hire lawyers. I need to do all kinds of things, jump through all kinds of regulatory hoops just to do this. Meanwhile, with the internet, right? Thankfully, right now, this is a deregulated space. So I can just get up and running. I'm I have four employees. I'm paying taxes. Such a great example. Right? Like we're, we're so regulated. We have real problems. You should get out of the way. And, you know, right now there's a political will to do that, but we haven't actually seen much action. You know what? A lot of talk. Like, these are major things.

I really don't think UBI is it. I really don't. We already had that through COVID. And where did it go? Went into the stock market. It went into Roar. You know. Roar, you know. Roe. Marine Kitty, like, did it advanced society? Was it the kind of society that we want? I don't think so. I think we need basic needs for people, healthcare education. No, I agree with you. I'm worried about business formation, by the way.

I've been speaking about this for years, even as the wealthy barber sitting in Kitchen and Waterloo, Marine and I, we know how many people normally come to us, young people saying, I'm starting a business, can you help me out, can you fund me, can you advise me? That number has been going down significantly over the last 10 to 15 years. That worries me.

It's a very good proxy for the way a lot of young people are thinking. And they're not thinking about starting a business. And to your point, there's so much regulation now that it's quite crazy. And you mentioned something interesting there when you talked about having to get lawyers, having to get accountants involved, et cetera. The cost of dealing with lawyers and accountants has gone through the roof over the last 10 years. And you know where I see it in a very strange spot? Someone goes to sell a relatively small business, demographics, their baby boomers.

They're selling a business, let's say, makes 400,500,000 a year. You know, one of the reasons they're tough to sell? The buyer has to do so much legal work and so much legal due diligence that it's going to cost them a couple hundred grand. And they have to add that into the cost of all of this. Like everything is so darn expensive now. Everything is too expensive.

I mean, that's why, you know, you talked about the young people, but like lawyers, those billable hours, like that's the first thing that's going to go, you know, with AI. I think, you know, the legal profession is going to have to find a whole new way to add value because I don't really need a lawyer to know the law. Like my my LLM knows the law. So I think creativity, authentic, you know, relationship-based type of work is is going to be more important. But yeah, all of these fees add up. And if I can't make a return in this country because of whatever reason, you know, that the demand isn't there or whatever, you either don't start that business or you leave. And I'd be curious, like, are you, the people you're in touch with,

Are they leaving or are they just choosing not to start? And are they starting elsewhere? Definitely fewer are starting. There's no question about that. But we are seeing some leave, the Waterloo tech scene. We've seen a few depart to the states. One of the things it's most interesting is it's not really, they're at least at lunches they're saying it's not about regulation.

They love Canada. They're very pro-Canada. Their problem is talent acquisition. Because a lot of the high-end talent has such great offers from U.S. firms or would prefer to be in the U.S., Weather. Weather actually makes a difference to some of them. Can't do much about that. But also, the housing prices in certain areas are dramatically lower. You start adding all these things together. They're not leaving because they don't like Canada. They're leaving because they can't get the

talent they need. I mean, I was just in Phoenix, Arizona. And I asked, what's the cost of an average home? $300,000. And what's the cost of a high-end home? Like if you wanted to be in like a Forest Hill or whatever equivalent, you know, maybe 800,000 to 1.2 million. Like, you know, it would be exceptional to spend four or five million on a home. And like, that's for a really nice home in Toronto. Like, you're probably spending four, four or five million. And it's just like, that's insane. It's so easy to have a lot. I'm not moving to Phoenix. But like, Pleasant's Award. But I was like, wow, it's so easy to have a life here. You know, if you can deal with a few other things or turn a blind eye to some other things. But, but the.

affordability is like that that is a major crisis. So, you know, it's less about to go back to your question about like, is the government prepared to deal with it? It's more about just creating the conditions so people can deal with it themselves. Yes, that's well said. No, I like that. Okay, I've got one more question. We've gone over, but I want to ask you one more. You did a podcast recently about could the number of people using index funds now and pensions and everybody else, could it swing over and Mike Greens brought a lot of attention to this and could it break the market in some way, shape, or form? You're going to find this interesting. I honestly can say I talked about this in the 90s.

Like I did because. You're telling us all to do it. No, I was back in the States that I was doing a lot of work with a 401 case because they were mandated by law to do so much education. So they used the wealthy barber. And you could see more and more we're going the index fund route. And I would say on stage, I wonder if this keeps going. and we start getting up to 50 and 60 and 70% of the 401K money going into index funds. What does that do to price discovery?

Does it break the traditional approach to the market? Mike, again, obviously, is taking away past where I was. What are your thoughts on that? So if you didn't listen to that episode, he basically took it to an extreme conclusion where, you know, he doesn't have an exact catalyst, but basically everyone is passive. There's a crunch in the markets. and instead of a typical sell-off, because there are no more active managers, the S&P goes to zero. And then the government has to step in and buy.

I was like, what are you saying? I thought that was so extreme. But he talks with like, he's very clear-eyed about kind of seeing that. What I wish I said is like, you know, those 38-year-old traitors, they see meta or whatever is down 80% in a day. I bet we're going to get a lot of active investors back in the market real quick, you know? I think the pendulum will swing the other way overnight. No, you're completely right on that. Like, I think Mike is taking that too far.

In fact, he has argued that it's really added 100 to 150 basis points to overall performance because of momentum and index. I don't see it collapsing to zero. But I think some of his points are certainly interesting. One of the arguments he's made is that because of demographics, we're going to see a lot of this 401K money slowly exit the market. And when you've got a net exit coming up, maybe in the next five to ten, years, what will that do? Now, interestingly, by the way, as you know, things have shifted from

20 and 30 years ago, more older people are keeping money in the markets than they used to. In fact, I would argue in some people's cases, they probably have too much exposure to equities, especially with prices being relatively high. But anyway, Mike's, that point, I think, is an interesting one to die. Is that who you had on that podcast? Was it Mike Green? Yeah, it was Mike Green to simplify, simplify asset management. Some of the things, I think, are risks. Like when there is that robotic buying, what price are we buying at, right? So one of the big complaints in the U.S. is how expensive the market has gotten.

And now you have people talking about, well, maybe this is the new normal. Maybe this is just how things are supposed to cost. And either though the markets are sitting near record highs, we don't see a lot of IPOs, right? Very few and far behind. A market with this robust or with such record highs, you should be getting IPOs.

And it's because there's not enough active capital to deploy there. I am the belief that there's plenty of money, though, that could find a home and active, because look at what's going on in private. You know, like these private equity players, like, they're awash. They're really not having that tough time raising money. They're having a tough time deploying it more than they are raising it. And their stocks are under pressure. But in terms of fund raising, they're a wash. There's a lot of money around.

We're not in any crunch. It's just like it's choosing to find a home in private right now. But if things were to pull back, I mean, how much is Warren Buffett sitting on? Like, he can just save the market like that if things go down because there's too many passive investors out there. No, I think you're banging on with a lot of this. I mean, if the markets have a dramatic pullback, capital will flow in, they'll see value. And even now, it's just going to go straight up and be hyper high priced at all times.

Why we had such a big pullback among the software stocks? It's because people have thought through what they think, I may or may not do, and they've started reflecting that in their bids. Other people have sold because they see that the worst case scenarios could result. So, no, I think we still have strong price discovery, but if the trends continue this strongly for another 10 to 15 years, it'll be interesting to see if Mike ends up being right with a lot of the fears that he's advanced. And he's very articulate about this and incredibly well researched.

I mean, he's obviously a very sharp guy, no question. Absolutely. But, you know, as he said, your father does less research. And outperforms Mike Green probably. And outperforms Mike Green because, you know, the mantra should be just staying invested and stay interested. You know, you don't have to do anything whether you hear Dave or I talk about it on the podcast. You don't have to do anything.

But stay interested. Stay informed because that, you know, it should be a core part of your life. However you choose to express it, but investing should be a core part of your life. Okay. Give us the name of the podcast and of the newsletter again. In The Money with Amber Canwar is the podcast. You can find it anywhere. And my newsletter, just go to my website in the money pod, p.od.com.

And you'll see the newsletter and you can subscribe. Every day I write a markets newsletter, what's happening in the markets that day. And then those three high conviction ideas that David doesn't think you should pay attention to. Yeah, exactly. Put an asterisk on those saying the wealthy barber is not keen on this. Not approved by the wealthy barber. You know, I cut my own hair. So I wonder if that gives me some points.

Yeah, that does for sure because it's, yeah. No, you are. You are. Anyway, it's a really nice seeing you again. You did a great job. I knew you would. You're very well-informed and you have strong opinions and good opinions on a lot of subject matter. I enjoy the podcast, by the way, and I wish you nothing but the best. Thank you, Dave. I appreciate having me on. It was a lot of fun. It was. Thank you.