Episode 1.3 with Ben Felix

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Text transcript

Kevin Press: 

Welcome to the Canadian Advisor.cast, a podcast dedicated to financial advisors and the people that work with them. My name’s Kevin Press. I’m Editorial Director of Advisor.ca. My guest today is Ben Felix, Chief Investment Officer and Portfolio Manager at PWL Capital. Of course, Ben hosts the Common Sense Investing YouTube channel, co-hosts the Rational Reminder podcast with Dan Bortolotti and Cameron Passmore. Ben is a CFA charterholder, a CFP professional, and a CIM charterholder. He earned his MBA at Carleton University, and he holds the Institute of Financial Planning Financial Planner designation. Welcome to the podcast, Ben. 

Ben Felix: 

Thanks so much for having me. 

Kevin Press:  

I’d like to spend our time together looking back at 2025. In April, we described the days that followed U.S. President Donald Trump’s global tariffs as the “week from heck” for advisors. In some ways, 2025 turned out to be the year from heck, but not entirely. I mean, it took just a month for the S&P 500 and S&P/TSX Composite to bounce right back. How has your year been? 

Ben Felix:  

So, I’m going to take a bit of a personal angle to this question. I’ve dealt with all of the things that you just mentioned and we at PWL have as well, and that’s been a big part of my year. But I was actually diagnosed with testicular cancer in January, had to have a testicle removed, and that was like a pretty crazy start to the year. And then I’ve had all of my follow-up check-ins every three months since then, and I’m all clear. So, that, for me, you know, it’s been a crazy year, for sure, but I was dealing with that, which has made it all that much crazier. So I don’t know if I’d call it a highlight, but what stood out for me this year was definitely that. It was a bit of a reminder that our health is important and fragile. 

Kevin Press:  

My goodness, Ben. I’m so sorry to hear that. You’re doing well, though? 

Ben Felix:  

All good. All clear, so far. Yeah. 

Kevin Press:  

How do you balance that with all of the craziness that was going on with work? Like, did work help you? Did it help you through that? 

Ben Felix:  

Yeah, I would say that it was a good outlet to focus my energy instead of sitting there worrying about how sick I was and how if things were going to get worse. It ended up being that it was kind of the best-case scenario given that I had cancer. It was resolved quickly. It was caught super early. I didn’t have to do any of the nasty treatments like radiation or chemo. So that was all good. And as I was dealing with the uncertainty, not knowing that the outcome was going to be as good as it was, being able to lean into work and focus on all the other crazy stuff that’s happening in the world, I would say it was helpful. I didn’t find work to be a stressor, by any means, as I was going through the health stuff. 

Kevin Press:  

We certainly wish you the best on that. 

Ben Felix:  

Thanks. 

Kevin Press:  

In terms of leaning in, what story do you think got too little attention over the course of the year? 

Ben Felix:  

Well, you know, I think the returns of Canadian stocks are something that, I’m not seeing a whole lot of headlines about how strong they’ve been. If we look back to the beginning of the year-you mentioned this, Kevin-that, you know, it was looking pretty dark for Canadian equities, and I think even last year coming into to 2025, nobody was looking at Canadian stocks being like, “Yeah, this is the place I want to invest this year.” We were definitely having client conversations about dropping their Canadian equity allocation to increase their exposure to U.S. stocks. And we, of course, moderated those requests and explained to clients why we didn’t think that made sense, which, in hindsight, was the right thing to do. The Canadian market has returned 25% year to date as of-we’re recording on November 12th, so that would be yesterday’s data-almost 25% for the year. And that’s like nearly double the return of U.S. stocks. I don’t think anybody saw that coming, and I don’t think anyone’s really talking about it. And the other thing that’s crazy in the Canadian market this year is the Canadian small caps are up about 38%, year to date. And, again, I’m not seeing anybody talking about that. It’s been an incredible year for Canadian equities. So that’s one. The other one that I think is really interesting and really not getting enough attention is the rise of what I would call, or what I do call, ETFs slop. There are just a ton of ETFs being launched in Canada. They’re being launched and they’re being marketed like crazy to advisors and retail investors. And a lot of these ETFs are, I would say, not great for investors, but probably highly profitable for the ETF issuers. We’ve seen a ton of covered call ETFs, single-stock covered call ETFs, single-stock leveraged ETFs, like, stuff that is, frankly, junk, in my opinion. It’s getting issued like crazy. It’s getting marketed like crazy. And, again, that’s not a story that I’m seeing a ton of people talking about. 

Kevin Press:  

We’ll come back to that in a second. Is there a story that you think got too much attention over the course of the year? 

Ben Felix:  

It’s tough to say, tough to make that judgment that something got too much attention. We’re obviously hearing a ton about AI. Maybe AI is as transformational as it’s supposed to be, and we should be hearing a lot about it. I’ve heard enough about it. I think we kind of get what’s happening. And then likewise with Trump and the tariffs, again, it’s hard to make the judgment that that’s getting too much attention because it’s clearly an important story. But, we’re hearing about it a lot. So, I don’t know if I’m in the position to make the judgment we’re hearing about those things too much. But I will say that we’re hearing about them a lot. 

Kevin Press:  

Let’s talk about AI. From a purely tech perspective, are you an optimist, a pessimist, or maybe a realist? 

Ben Felix:  

Yeah. I try to base my views in reality rather than optimism or pessimism. So I would go with realist if I had to choose one of those. I do use large language models daily for help with research, but I also find them to be consistently prone to error. So I’m really, really cautious with how I use the information that I get from LLMs. I find that when you talk to someone with subject matter expertise in something, so for myself that would be in finance. I have friends who work in software, same kind of thing; economics, same kind of thing. They will regularly find inaccuracies in responses from LLMs that need to be corrected. And I think the problem here is that people without subject matter expertise are going to be less likely to catch those inaccuracies because they come across as very, very confident, they’re often sourced, but sometimes the statement doesn’t necessarily match up with what the source says. So I think that’s a real challenge right now where, if you’re me and you have expertise in finance and in financial planning, you can use the LLM to surface information and ask questions and bounce ideas around, but you have to be able to catch the errors that it will inevitably make. And if you don’t have that expertise and you’re just trying to get information, I think there’s a lot of risk there. I think, like with any new technology, optimists will say that those problems that I’m talking about will be solved later and the tools become more and more useful. And that may be true, but I think the current reality is problematic, at least for the type of things that I’m using AI for. 

Kevin Press:  

Do you have any thoughts on how AI is going to impact the investment management business? And what I mean specifically is the execution of trades. If bots are on both sides of trades at some point in the future, what does that look like? 

Ben Felix:  

I don’t think it looks a whole lot different from now. I mean, we have traders with massive amounts of information and machine learning tools and AI tools now, even, who are using those resources to do their trading. I think if one side of a trade has more information than the other, so if we had one trader that had access to the best LLM and the best machine learning and all that kind of stuff, and they’re trading against everybody else who doesn’t have that, we might expect that trader to win, to outperform, to produce alpha. When everybody has it, the market remains competitive, everyone is skilled, and the outcome of trades- there’s this idea called the paradox of skill, when market participants are increasingly skilled-the outcome, the winners are increasingly determined by luck rather than skill. So to the extent that AI is going to make traders more skilled, make portfolio managers more skilled, I don’t think that the outcome on, for example, active management performance is going to be very interesting. If anything, it might make outcomes more so determined by luck rather than skill. 

Kevin Press:  

Because if I’m understanding it correctly, there is a scenario, again, sometime down the road, where both sides of the trades have perfect information, right, and I don’t know how that works in a free market. 

Ben Felix:  

Yeah. Nobody ever has perfect information. It’s not possible for anyone to have all available information, but the market aggregates the information that everybody has. So the market in aggregate, I think, even now, is a pretty good reflection of all available information. And if AI is a way for more information to get into prices, then we would expect markets to become even more efficient over time. But you look at some cases, like Jim Simons with the Medallion Fund; he was able to have tools or create tools that nobody else had for a period of time. And, on that basis, he was able to outperform. So that’s a case where maybe he had a version of AI before everybody else did, and hey, he made great returns for himself and for his partners. And that’s cool, but right now with AI, everybody has access to the same tools. So I don’t see it having a huge, huge impact on investment management. I think from the perspective of investment returns, which is another thing that people are quite worried about right now, there’s a superlong history of innovation. Like AI is an innovation. It’s very cool. I’s potentially really impactful. It’s not the first innovation that has had those characteristics. We had, you know, going back even to the 1700s-canals at the time were a massive innovation; railways; automobiles in the 1920s leading up to the 1929 Crash; biotech, dot-com in more modern times; clean energy in more recent history. Like we’ve seen these things happen. And the pattern is super consistent where we see asset prices shoot up, as we’ve seen recently with AI-related stocks, and then they eventually normalize, come back down. And so investment returns in technological revolutions tend to be quite poor unless you get in before anybody knows that the thing is revolutionary and hold for the rise and maybe sell at the perfect time. And I don’t think anybody can pull that trade off. So, I wouldn’t say that I worry about that, but I think that the pattern of historical technological revolutions and stock returns is something that people definitely need to be aware of. 

Kevin Press:  

Stick with the dot-com analogy for us because that is perhaps the most obvious one. What year are we in relative to the dot-com bubble in terms of what might be an AI bubble? 

Ben Felix:  

Yeah. I don’t know. You know, in some ways what we see right now is that there are similarities. Asset prices are high in aggregate, maybe as high as they were then, or not quite, but we’re getting there. There’s big investments being made by companies in AI and data centres and all that stuff. There’s a ton of excitement about AI, companies mentioning AI or adding AI to their names or boosting their valuations, which is another thing that we saw in the dot-com era. So that’s all similar, but I think there are other important ways that it’s a little bit different. Many of the publicly listed companies that are getting the AI-related boost in valuations are actually profitable businesses that are making investments in AI. I think that’s different from what we saw in 2000 where there were a ton of IPOs, a ton of companies making no money, companies raising a ton of money just on an idea. So I think that’s a difference. So I wouldn’t predict, you know, that we’re in, whatever, 1999 and things are going to crash. I don’t know. There’s a lot of different ways that high valuations can be resolved. There can be a crash, like we saw in the dot-com era. There can be a prolonged period of low returns where valuations eventually normalize. Or, there can be big earnings surprises where earnings end up, hey, maybe these investments work out, earnings are way higher than anybody expected, and valuations get resolved that way. I mean, we could have been talking about high valuations five years ago, and valuations were high, and what happened? Well, returns were incredible because earnings just kept going up and up, more than the market had expected. 

Kevin Press:  

Yeah, and to your point, at the beginning of this year, there was a lot of talk about valuations, in particular the Magnificent 7. How are you feeling about where they are now? 

Ben Felix:  

I mean, my general view on asset prices-and I alluded to this earlier in public markets specifically-is that asset prices are generally the best representations of a company’s actual value. So what do I think about Mag 7’s valuations? I just think that they are what they are. I think that’s how the market is pricing those securities. So that’s kind of how I think about that. The current prices reflect some combination of high-earnings expectations and low discount rates on those expected earnings. Now, that might suggest low expected returns, but it doesn’t suggest that there’s a coming crash. I’m not saying there’s not a coming crash. I don’t know. I’m just saying that prices reflect available information, and that’s really all we can say. 

Kevin Press:  

Do you have a sense of what equity markets would look like if we weren’t seeing this upswing in AI investing? 

Ben Felix:  

Yeah, so there was actually a report that I read awhile ago. It was September 25th, I think, the report came out from JP Morgan. And that report suggested that AI-related stocks have accounted for 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth, and 90% of capital spending growth since ChatGPT launched in November 2022. So, you know, it’s been pretty important. 

Kevin Press:  

But I guess to your point, it is what it is. That’s what people are investing in. The valuations are based on available information. So, accept it, I guess, as an investor. 

Ben Felix:  

It just is. Yeah, I agree with that. 

Kevin Press:  

Let’s talk about tariffs. Of course, the other big story this year, and certainly my vote for the most overly reported. What we saw in April was amazing. Why did markets bounce back so quickly after that Liberation Day announcement? 

Ben Felix:  

Well, again, I think markets are always pricing expectations about the future. And they’re pricing expectations through two main channels. If we just take like the highest level of abstraction, what are markets pricing? They’re pricing expected future cash flows, expected future earnings, and discount rates. Expected future earnings discounted at some rate to get today’s value for stock prices. When we had the initial tariff announcement, that created a whole bunch of uncertainty about expected future cash flows, and it probably raised discount rates reflecting heightened risk because all of a sudden, whoa, there’s this whole new piece of uncertainty that the market has to figure out. And then as we got more information-which happened pretty quickly, about what the tariffs were actually going to look like, about how economies around the world were going to respond to the tariffs, and how cash flow expectations were going to adjust, and what the effect on discount rates or on risk was going to be-all that information started to come to light pretty quickly. And so we saw asset prices normalize. So I don’t think that there was a… I have trouble saying there was an overreaction. There was a reaction to new information. And as the market digested and understood what that new information meant, we saw asset prices get reflected. We saw that get reflected in asset prices where they started to look a little bit more normal. 

Kevin Press:  

What do you make of the arguments being put forward to the Supreme Court now and the potential scenario where these tariffs have to be unwound? 

Ben Felix:  

Yeah, so, I mean, when you believe market prices contain all the information you need to make investment decisions, you don’t tend to watch the news too much. Not that I ignore the news. I think it is important to be informed, but it’s not something I follow super, super closely. And that’s, really just comes back to our investment philosophy. We don’t think at PWL that we can beat the market through things like tactical asset allocation or security selection or maintaining consistent strategic asset allocations for our clients using low-cost total market funds. And that’s not going to change based on something like the Supreme Court decision. So we don’t tend to focus on it too much. I think markets will certainly react, as they always do, when new information becomes real. So if we get a Supreme Court decision about the legality of tariffs, that’s a new piece of information. Market prices will adjust based on that. But markets are also pricing in expectations about what that outcome might look like now. So it’s possible that markets are pricing in an outcome. If we get that outcome, that specific outcome that markets are currently expecting, you wouldn’t expect a big effect on prices. If markets get surprised to the positive or negative, then we would expect prices to change. 

Kevin Press:  

I’d love for you to talk more about that PWL philosophy. I think this has been a year in which it’s really been put to the test. You know, as a passive investor, what’s your take on the year, and what investors who maybe aren’t really convinced one way or the other, active versus passive, what should their takeaways be? 

Ben Felix:  

Well, I think, like we talked about earlier, this year has been a great year in markets, which is not something that I think people expected if you talked to them back in April or even earlier. And that speaks to one of the challenges with being an active investor more generally, where your views about what’s going to happen in the market don’t necessarily, and don’t tend to, reflect what’s actually going to happen. The future’s always uncertain. Markets are always pricing in expectations about the future, but what actually happens in the future is always uncertain. So our approach to investing, just maintaining consistent exposure to an asset allocation that our clients can stick with, that’s appropriate for our clients, I think that’s definitely worked out really well this year. But I also think in past years, where, you know, even during COVID when markets dropped quickly, that also was not a problem for us because our clients were in risk-appropriate portfolios. So we’re not having conversations about, you know, we think we should reduce our exposure to equities, or we think we should reduce our exposure to Canadian stocks. We think we’ve designed portfolios that are appropriate for our clients in all market conditions. And I think when that’s your philosophy and that’s your approach, and it’s a philosophy that you believe in and you as an advisor can stick with, and you have clients who have come to you for that philosophy-which is the case with PWL-it makes client conversations really easy. You’re never apologizing for your advice. It’s always, we’re doing what makes sense for your situation, and that’s going to be true regardless of the external circumstances. 

Kevin Press:  

Let’s pivot to the economy more broadly. Canada’s real GDP is projected to grow just above 1% annually, both this year and next. Should that dampen our expectations for stock and bond markets? 

Ben Felix:  

It’s a great question. I would say that the stock market is not the economy, that the stock market, again, it’s pricing in expectations about the future. So when we say something like Canada’s GDP is expected to grow just above 1% annually for the next couple of years, the market is also expecting those outcomes. Now what’s going to drive future stock returns is differences between current expectations and future realized outcomes. So if economic growth ends up being higher than expected-hey, maybe it’s 2% instead of 1%-we we would probably see some lift to asset prices, all else equal. If it’s lower, if we get a 0.5% GDP growth, then we might see some downward pressure on asset prices. But it’s really that relationship between current expectations and realized outcomes more so than current expectations that should form our expectations about future stock returns. Because that relationship is based on the difference between expected and realized outcomes, it’s really important. Expected, so they’re current expectations, and if those get realized, then we would expect stocks to earn a return commensurate with the risk that you’re taking by investing in stocks. If realized outcomes are different than current expectations, that’s where you start to get moving asset prices. Now, of course, the future is always a little bit different from expectations, which is why stock returns are volatile. But, the relationship between realized economic growth and stock returns, because it’s that difference between expected and realized outcomes, has historically been pretty much nonexistent. There is not a historical relationship between economic growth and stock returns all around the world. There are a couple papers that look at this. I find that fascinating. But if you think about it, like low expected growth is priced in today. So the expected effect on stock and bond markets of that, of low expected growth actually happening should be minimal. And that’s exactly what we see in the data. 

Kevin Press:  

And lots of room for upside. 

Ben Felix:  

Sure. You could take that view, too. Absolutely. And it’s actually true. Countries with higher economic growth-if there is any relationship, it’s statistically insignificant, but if there is any relationship- countries with higher economic growth may have lower realized returns because expectations are high to begin with. 

Kevin Press:  

Yeah. Do you worry about inflation at all? We saw an uptick in September to 2.4% on an annualized basis. 

Ben Felix:  

Ah, I mean, I worry about everything, really. We try and address it through asset allocation and long-term planning, but yeah, inflation’s always, it’s always a concern, but I do think that other than maintaining an appropriate asset allocation that’s designed to deliver long-term returns in excessive inflation, I don’t really think there’s a whole lot to be done. I do think inflation is like one of the biggest risks to long-term investors. It’s one of the reasons that holding cash, for example, is actually really risky for a long-term investor, which is something that people tend to think, Well, cash is safe. Cash is guaranteed. In nominal terms, that is true. In real inflation-adjusted terms, that is not true. Cash is actually pretty risky. You’re much more likely to lose purchasing power in cash than in stocks over the long term. And likewise for bonds. I think inflation’s a real risk for nominal bonds. So those are all things that investors need to be aware of, need to be worried about. But, similar to my other remarks earlier, it’s not something that we’re going to do anything tactical about. 

Kevin Press:  

Yeah. I mean, it seems to me that central banks have got a real tough set of decisions to make. That last 50 basis points, trying to get to the 2% inflation target, it’s a lot different than getting from 3.5 to 3, right? And given that growth is as slow as it is, maybe you just live with two and a half percent inflation or something close to it. Do you worry at all about stagflation? 

Ben Felix:  

Similar to inflation, I think there are so many things that an investor can worry about. I don’t have a ton of thoughts on stagflation specifically and whether that’s the environment that we’re in or should be expecting. But I would come back to the core principles that we tend to follow that markets reflect all available information. You got to make long-term decisions regardless of the external circumstances. 

Kevin Press:  

We’ve talked about what’s happening on markets. We’ve talked about what’s happening in the economy. Let’s talk about clients. And, you know, this has been a year in which advisor-client conversations have been so much more complicated and so much more challenging. I think anytime you introduce politics into those conversations, it becomes difficult for a lot of advisors. Tell us about the conversations that you’ve had with clients this year and how they’ve gone. 

Ben Felix:  

Yeah, so our message is super consistent. Markets work; stock and bond prices reflect all available information, including expectations about the future. Trying to outguess the market is a losing game, especially when you account for things like fees and costs and taxes. The data on active manager performance consistently show that to be a pretty reasonable position to take. Long-term returns have been positive through all kinds of difficult market conditions and unprecedented times. I mean, how many times did we hear unprecedented over the last five years? But there have been unprecedented things happening throughout all of history. That’s part of the fun, I guess, of living through time as it passes. So we do find that consistently reinforcing that message helps clients to stay invested and make good long-term decisions. I think if we were always apologizing for things like our active bets, you know-“Oh we shouldn’t have underweighted Canada last year; we’re really sorry about that”-I think that makes it a lot harder to have good client relationships and give good advice that helps clients make better long-term decisions. So I’m glad that we take the approach that we do. It’s definitely an approach where, well, like I mentioned, you’re never apologizing for the advice that you gave. You’re never explaining why you were wrong and why maybe we should have done something differently. And I think another big piece of that is that our, I have a YouTube channel that a lot of our clients watch and find us through. We’ve also got a podcast, as you mentioned in the introduction, that a lot of our clients have found us through, and we’re consistently reinforcing these messages through those platforms. And a lot of our clients, because they’ve come to us through those platforms, they know exactly how we think. So it’s funny, like sometimes we’ll get client emails where they say, “I already know what you’re going to say,” because they’re asking about, you know, should we reduce our whatever exposure to this or should we make this change or should we take less risk or whatever. So they’ll always start with, “I already know what you’re going to say, but I want to hear you say it,” which is a funny thing to happen. But I think… 

Kevin Press:  

I think it’s a great point. Sorry to interrupt. You have been so visible and do such a good job with the podcast and with your YouTube channel. I think a lot of advisors could take some notes from you, again, particularly this year. What a valuable thing to have that kind of platform to, you know, make the points that you’re making, reemphasize the stay-the-course approach to times when CNN and CBC make it sound like the sky’s falling. 

Ben Felix:  

Yeah. Yeah, we hear that often. We hear from people, both clients and not, saying that our podcast is so nonsensational and so fact-driven and data-based that it is a really, really useful counterbalance to the media more generally, which tends to have a negative bias, which tends to cover sensational stories. It tends to look for things that are interesting and exciting, often with a negative bias. So, yeah, I agree. I think having a belief system, having a consistent message and communicating it consistently in a way that’s, you know, enjoyable for clients to listen to, I think, has been a big part of our firm’s success. 

Kevin Press:  

I want to circle back to your comments up top about ETFs and this huge flood of new products that we’ve seen the last couple of years in particular. Again, in the context of advisors and the conversations they have with clients, how do you talk about a trend that has such a force behind it like we’re seeing with ETFs? 

Ben Felix:  

So, I mean, ETFs are a wrapper. You can put anything you want in an ETF, and I think that ETF issuers have been making products that are profitable, which is fair enough. If you’re an ETF issuer, that’s what you should be trying to do. I think one of the challenges is that profitable things for an issuer for an ETF company are often not great for end clients. They tend to have higher fees; they tend to be more complex. And higher-fee, more-complex products don’t tend to be great for investors. So, ETFs as a wrapper, I think, are great. I think they’ve brought a ton of innovation to the Canadian marketplace and the U.S. marketplace. They help the concept of index funds grow in Canada outside of the mutual fund wrapper. They make investment products in some cases easier for people to access, because you can trade the ETF without any restrictions. Sometimes mutual funds will have certain restrictions on who can trade them. So those are all really positive. But, I think like any innovation in finance, you have to be really careful about who the innovation is actually benefitting. So the low-cost index funds, massive win for retail investors, but I think we’ve now kind of come full circle where we’re seeing a lot of innovation that looks more like the traditional high-fee actively managed products that low-cost index funds and ETFs sort of replaced. Well, they didn’t replace. Canada’s still way overweight, high-fee, actively managed products. But, yeah, now we’re seeing that come into the ETF wrapper. And, I think they’re often products that are created that really cater to investor biases. Like covered calls is such a good example where they cater to the mental accounting bias. They create these big income distributions that a lot of people like, but when you’d look under the hood and see what’s actually happening and what you’re paying in fees, in my opinion, they’re not great products for most investors. I’ve done a bunch of YouTube videos kind of digging into explaining why that is. So, for advisors, I think the big thing is that you have to have an investment philosophy that you can stick with. Personally, hopefully, it’s the same as what you’re doing for your clients. I know that’s important to me and our clients. So you’d have an investment philosophy that you can stick with, that you can get your clients to stick with, and that allows you to focus on the things that you can control. So much of the stuff that we talked about today focuses on things that advisors can’t control and clients can’t control-like tariffs, inflation, the economy-but we can control things like minimizing fees, minimizing costs and taxes for our clients, and delivering high-quality financial planning advice that adds value regardless of market conditions. 

Kevin Press:  

It’s such a powerful message, isn’t it, to have a perspective, to stand for something and to have that sort of consistent narrative in all of these conversations that you’re having with clients. You’ve done a wonderful job of that in your career. Do you ever wonder where you’d be, Ben, if you hadn’t launched a podcast or a YouTube channel? 

Ben Felix:  

That’s a great question. I mean, I launched my YouTube channel because PWL had supported the idea of doing video content about 10 years ago. They said, “Anyone that wants to do content, we’ll support the production and all that stuff.” And so I started a YouTube channel, and that ended up working way better than I expected it to, than I think anybody else expected to at our firm. And it definitely propelled my career and advanced my role more quickly than it would have otherwise. The podcast has done a similar thing. It’s also grown PWL’s reputation in Canada and globally way beyond our, you know, actual size. Like, we manage about six billion in assets, but I think a lot more people in Canada and globally know who we are than our AUM would suggest. We’re not tiny, but I think we punch above our weight class in terms of our communications reach. So, yeah, the YouTube channel and the podcast has, for me, personally, been a huge part of my career trajectory. If I’d never started it, where would I be? I don’t know. I’d probably still be at PWL. I like working here, but I would maybe be in a different role. 

Kevin Press:  

Fair enough. It’s been such a pleasure, Ben. Thanks for this. 

Ben Felix:  

Thanks so much. I appreciate the invitation. 

Kevin Press:  

And we wish you the best. My guest has Ben Felix, Chief Investment Officer and Portfolio Manager at PWL Capital. Visit PWLCapital.com for more. Canadian Advisor.cast is a production of Newcom Media. It is produced by Alisha Hiyate. Noushin Ziafati is our associate producer. My name’s Kevin Press. Thanks for being with us.