Mr. Wickham: Wickham Investment Counsel is smallish. I guess you would say, investment advisory company based in Hamilton, Ontario; that's a city about 35 miles down the road west of Toronto in Ontario. We have eight portfolio managers. We tend to manage high net worth private individuals. We do a few charitable foundations and private trusts, but mostly it's private individuals. We all have certain differences to our style of operation, but my personal one is, as a lot of people like to say, similar to what Warren Buffett does. I like to look at companies that have value and growth potential and have significant reasons for being in the marketplace. It's a very simple style. I like to look at stocks that when I go to buy them, I can say to myself with some confidence that this is a good value company doing a good business and I like what they do. One of the things I like to be able to say at the front-end is I should be able to hold the stock for at least two years. Hopefully more than two years because they'll keep on doing what they do well and if things go wrong in between time or if I think that what I have expected to happen isn't happening, then I exit. But typically going in, I like to be able to think I can hold a stock for two years or more.
TWST: How has the Canadian market and the economy fared over the last 12 months?
Mr. Wickham: The Canadian market has been a lot like the US market. It went over the waterfall around the end of the year and hit a deep very overly depressed position at the bottom. The Canadian market bottom was March 9th. I'm not sure if the Dow bottomed then or not, but our bottom was March 9th and since then our index has recovered slightly more than 50%, which is very good. That's the overall market. We didn't have the same level of problems as the US and some other countries have had with their banking systems. Canada has essentially five major banks that are multi-regional and most of them have some kind of presence in the US or other foreign markets as well, but they keep a very high and strong level of capital and they have added to their capital through this weak period so that for anything that they had to write-off, they have been able to rebuild their capital to keep in very strong positions. Our bank stocks have recovered probably more than the market in general and they are looking very strong here. We still like them. The banks in Canada have been on a long-term basis one of the best and safest areas of investment that you can make for steady growth over the long term.
Tickers included in this excerpt: AGU, BCE, BMO, CNI, CVS, ENB, MOS, POT, SC, TAC, THI, TRP, WEN, WMT
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