It was a strong Q2 for the Aventine strategies as equity markets continued to benefit from both accelerating growth and inflation as we marked the anniversary of the economic low point of the pandemic.

It was a strong start to the year as we continued to experience gains across all our strategies. The Aventine Canadian Equity Fund (“ACE Fund”) closed the first quarter up 15.8%. The portfolio’s positive correlation to the economic recovery, along with the realization of some stock-specific catalysts, helped drive a record quarter.

After such a tumultuous year, we are pleased to have such a strong finish to 2020.

Client portfolios performed well during the quarter. While it has been a volatile year, we have maintained our patience and it has been rewarded.

As we close out another year and look forward to 2020 many of the key themes that have been in place since early 2019 are still present; low interest rates, a sluggish global economy and accommodative central banks.

This quarterly letter marks our first combined commentary which will now touch on the developments within our wealth management platform. These commentaries will include a market overview, individual stock ideas, asset allocation ideas as well as other broad themes we are seeing play out in the ever-changing marketplace.

In case you missed it, Aventine Portfolio Manager, John Kim, made an appearance on BNN Bloomberg’s Market call on June 21st to share his market outlook. We thought you might enjoy this short clip.

The Aventinne Canadian Equity Fund (“ACE Fund”) finished the month of March at +1.6% and the quarter at +8.3%. We saw normalization in the equity markets to start 2019 as many companies returned to trading on fundamentals rather than fear.

To say 2018 was a tumultuous year in the markets would be an understatement, with the S&P 500 losing 13.5% in Q4, the biggest quarterly loss since the summer of 2011, when U.S. debt was downgraded from AAA and European Debt Crisis was peaking.

The ACE finished 2019 with a +1.1% return in December which compared quite favourably to the monthly return of -5.4% for the S&P/TSX Composite Total Return Index (“TSX”).