A Comment -- General Comments From an Expert (A Commentary)

Cloud storage companies? Different ways of playing this. There are companies that have the service model such as Google (GOOG-Q) that offers backup cloud storage. There are companies that provide the hardware. Analytics that understand this are getting more and more sophisticated and there are companies that are about to go public that are very interesting such as Splunk and Horton. All this data has to be stored on hardware, which is EMC (EMC-N), Netapp (NTAP-Q) and has to be analyzed by companies like Microstrategy (MSTR-Q), Teradata (TDC-N) and others.

High Yield Bond ETFs. Fed will hold interest rates low for another 2 years. There is still a huge fascination with sovereign debt and it is concentrated in the US. He would prefer to own the debt of the top 100 global corporations. He is not sure there is a lot of capital appreciation, but the yield is there.

No issue with what kind of ETF you buy, but you have to be careful about how they are taxed. There is a popular sector (MLPs) that are like an income trust. It can be disadvantageous to own it because of how it is taxed. CIBC buys them in notes and they are taxed differently.

Markets. Seeing great leadership in the names that you want to see leadership in. Technology had a lot of earnings tonight after the bell that are quite good so tech is definitely breaking out. Has now been 10-11 years since the NASDAQ peaked and if you follow the peak to where it is now, it is very similar in financials, especially US, and yet we are only 6 years in. He is bullish, but only until about the middle of the year. We would suggest raising your Stops and letting the stocks run a little bit.

China. They are going to throw anything they can act any decline in the market. The Shanghai market still needs to go up 10% to get back to its moving averages. Has a lot of work cut out for it.

Strategy for Facebook. There is a company GSV Capital (GSVC-Q) that has a weighting of about 8% on Facebook, but more interesting is that they have quite a big weighting in Twitter. This might be back way door to play Facebook.

US ETF’s? Into RRSP’s? From an investment viewpoint, there is really no issue with what kind of ETF’s you buy. Whether it goes into your RRSP or not, is not that important. But you do have to be careful how their holdings are taxed. MLPs are very popular and you can buy an MLP ETF with a yield of about 7% but there is a disadvantage on the way this is taxed. Suggests you should talk to an accountant on this.

Canadian junior miners? Very exciting sector right now. His preferred way to play it is through the BMO Junior Gold Index ETF (ZJG-T) and B2Gold (BTO-T).

Markets: Bonds give you negative real returns. Traditional stocks will be quite volatile for some time to come.

Portfolio allocation for alternative investments: Get comfortable with them and then increase. 10-20% to start and then after 5-6 years, 100%. That is a means to really reduce volatility and increase consistency.

Hedge Funds: Are they riskier than mutual funds? No. Not if you use conservative strategies. You have to understand what you are getting into. You need to put up $25,000 per strategy.

Performance Expectation of Hedge Funds: 2011 was a difficult stretch of time. The hedge fund world is a broad world. Some strategies don’t put capital protection foremost. Look at 2008 and 2011 and that gives you an idea what to expect in the future. In both cases you are either at 0 or close to it, while stocks dropped.

Alternative Investment Information: There are more and more resources available in Canada. Canada Hedge Watch periodical.

Ratings of Who Had the Best Returns: Canada Hedge Watch periodical.

Man GLG Emerging Markets Income Fund: Seeing opportunity in the bond market in this strategy. The developing world is paying a nice yield on their sovereign debt. Don’t go whole-heartedly into it.