Art of Boring

Ching Chang has joined Mawer as lead manager of the Global Small Cap strategy. He describes how his focus on quality companies that can grow developed and what three full market cycles in China taught him. He also explains why the small cap premium has gone missing, where small caps still fit in a portfolio, how regional weights will be considered alongside bottom-up stock picking, and what he loo...

GLP-1 drugs and the peptide supply chain behind them have grown like no other drug class, reaching 44 million users within five years. Equity analyst Joshua Samuel looks past innovators Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to the contract manufacturers and consumables underneath them. He explains why oral GLP-1 pills can need up to 10 times more drug substance than an injection, walks through building a 39-...

Germany's 10-year government bond, negative 0.5% during the pandemic, now yields 3.46%, while the UK's has climbed to 5.5% and Japan's to about 3%. International equity portfolio manager David Ragan examines what the rise in global rates means for how the team values companies. He explains why higher discount rates change the math on future cash flows, how a bank in Ireland became attractively pri...

Q3 2026 market update: Canadian investment-grade bonds returned roughly negative 3% while stock markets in many parts of the world ended September near record highs. Institutional portfolio manager Kevin Minas and investment counsellor Stu Morrow review the quarter, from oil above $100 a barrel and a more hawkish Fed to bond yields at multi-year highs. They discuss why hyperscalers borrowing over...

Canada-U.S. tariffs are back, and Canadian investors are asking what they mean for their portfolios. Canadian equity portfolio manager Vijay Viswanathan and fixed income portfolio manager Crista Caughlin break down the tariff picture and last month's Canada Investment Summit across stocks and bonds. They cover why the equity portfolio carries little trade-exposed revenue once exempt commodities li...

Global credit is absorbing record corporate bond supply as the AI data centre build-out floods the market with debt, yet spreads remain at multi-decade tights. Global credit analysts Sandro Morassutti and Marty Lee revisit the risks the team flagged a year ago, AI-linked issuance, Fed credibility and independence, fiscal spending, and geopolitical risk, and explain why credit spreads have held whi...

Is AI compute demand durable? Emerging markets equity portfolio manager Wen Quan Cheong returns from a research trip across Taiwan and South Korea and examines AI chip demand, the semiconductor supply chain, and the companies with the strongest structural tailwinds. He breaks compute demand into training, alignment, and inference, explains why margins can widen further down the AI supply chain, an...

Global equity portfolio manager, Paul Moroz, speaks to a wide range of market topics, including what higher discount rates mean for equity valuations and the subtle shifts you might not see in the headlines but that absolutely matter. Stay tuned for the second half, where Paul discusses Millennium Prize math problems, humility, podcast proliferation, and entropy—for those seeking useful mental mod...

Private equity is opening up to individual investors, and the line between public and private markets is blurring. In this episode, private investments portfolio manager Peter Lieu and institutional portfolio manager Kevin Minas break down secondaries and continuation vehicles, the difference between IRR and distributions, and how Mawer built institutional-quality private equity access through fun...

AI CapEx is on track to reach roughly $700 billion at the four largest hyperscalers this year, and equity analyst Irena Petkovic breaks down where all that money is going and what has to be true for it to earn a return. She explains how data centers turned from cost centers into revenue-producing AI factories, the four ways hyperscalers monetize compute, and how the token economy actually works. S...

How do you value a memory semiconductor stock like SK Hynix when no one can predict DRAM prices? Equity analyst Shan Rui Yeo walks through the team's Monte Carlo valuation framework: a discounted cash flow run through thousands of scenarios that prices the business on a distribution of returns rather than a single forecast. He also explains how two-times leveraged single-stock ETFs have been ampli...

Memory has been one of the strongest corners of the semiconductor industry, and strong returns invite hard questions. In the second part of this series, equity analyst Shan Rui Yeo examines the main risks to the memory thesis: rising competition from China's CXMT and YMTC, the technologies that could reduce AI's appetite for memory, and the wave of capacity investment that could eventually tip the...

One of the defining market stories of the past 12 months has not been AI chips that compute, but the chips that remember. Equity analyst Shan Rui Yeo explains how memory works, from DRAM and NAND to high bandwidth memory, and how an industry that destroyed wealth for four decades became disciplined after consolidating to three players in 2013. He then walks through what changed: AI inference has m...

Canada has spent a generation underinvesting in the infrastructure and resources that underpin its economy, and that may be starting to change. Canadian small cap equity analyst Dominic Drzazga examines the Build Canada theme: what it actually means beyond the headlines, and what has shifted since the federal election. He walks through the legislative groundwork, from the Building Canada Act to a...

Canadian equities gained in the second quarter of 2026 even as the economy tripped the technical definition of a recession and an oil shock sent crude toward $120 before it fell back. Institutional portfolio manager Kevin Minas and investment counsellor Stu Morrow review the quarter, from the gap between the Canadian market and the Canadian economy to the case for holding commodity exposure as geo...

Investment teams increasingly build and rely on their own AI tools, but the payoff depends on how deliberately a team reinvests the time that AI frees up. Emerging markets portfolio manager Wen Quan Cheong walks through how his team puts believability-weighted decision making into daily practice, and where AI has genuinely enhanced the process. He closes with a tour of the emerging-market themes h...

AI portfolio construction in global equity markets (memory semiconductors, mega IPOs, and how to manage concentration risk) is the focus of this conversation with Mawer's global equity portfolio manager Paul Moroz. Drawing on Homer's Odyssey, he explains the discipline the team applies when navigating themes that are moving quickly: from trimming SK Hynix systematically as the position grew, to si...

Canada's stock market has set repeated record highs in 2026, even as the domestic economy feels soft. Canadian equity portfolio manager Mark Rutherford explains the gap between the two, and why a large weight in financials can represent more diversification rather than less. He walks through how the team rotated within the sector as the banks re-rated, and the discipline behind trimming a gold pos...

In this episode, portfolio manager Steven Visscher covers how Mawer's balanced portfolios navigated 2025 and how they are positioned in 2026. With a war-driven energy shock on one side and an AI investment boom on the other, the market is pulling in two directions at once. Steven walks through what that means for asset mix, where the team is seeing signs of investor complacency, and why cracks in...

In this episode, Jeff Mo, U.S. mid-cap portfolio manager, explores a fundamental shift in how economies may grow over the next decade. He makes the case that after 25 years of intangible, internet-driven expansion, growth may increasingly depend on building physical things again: data centers, electrical infrastructure, factories, defense systems, satellites. Jeff walks through the forces driving...

In this episode, Peter Lampert, international equity portfolio manager, examines the Middle East conflict and its implications for global markets. He walks through the portfolio's diversification strategy, explains the team's nearly 40-year history with Shell, and explores how a changing market backdrop has challenged traditional definitions of quality and why forward-looking analysis may matter m...

In this episode, Brian Carney, lead portfolio manager of the Mawer Global Credit Opportunities Strategy, examines a fixed income backdrop reshaped by geopolitical escalation, an energy shock, and sharply changing interest-rate expectations. He explains why higher benchmark yields and modestly wider spreads still leave many parts of credit looking expensive, where Mawer is finding more selective va...

In this episode, Institutional Portfolio Manager Kevin Minas and Investment Counsellor Stu Morrow examine the forces shaping markets in the first quarter of 2026. From the escalating conflict in the Middle East and its impact on oil, inflation, and growth to the broadening AI disruption across software and asset-light business models, they explore how investors can stay thoughtful in an increasing...

In this episode, global equity portfolio manager Paul Moroz examines how investors can navigate a market increasingly shaped by conflict, shifting narratives, and wider ranges of possible outcomes. He begins with the recent escalation in the Middle East and the market's relatively measured response, then considers the second-order effects that can matter just as much as the initial shock. The conv...

In this episode, U.S. equity portfolio manager Grayson Witcher explores what it means to invest exclusively in American businesses at a time when the U.S. is becoming more short‑term, more transactional, and more central to global change. He contrasts a shifting U.S. "extraction" mindset with China's longer-term industrial strategy and considers how that dynamic is reshaping globalization into a m...