00:00 Speaker A
your bullish energy and materials. Is that is that mostly an inflation hedge?
00:05 Leslie
So, we think that it’s really important for investors to consider the commodity space, um, for a couple of reasons. You know, obviously that crosses both cyclical and non-cyclical commodities. If you think of about gold, for example, being more of a financially oriented commodity. Other commodities like base metals being more oriented towards economic growth. And then you have the energy complex, which would be also geared to economic growth, but also the geopolitical backdrop, which also impacts gold. So there’s a whole bunch of things that are bringing together uh several cross currents that we think are bullish for hard assets and especially commodities. So you have the financial buyers in gold, you have people concerned about the um the debt levels uh here in in the US. We think the geopolitical risk, even if there is a resolution or an agreement that opens up the straight of hormuz, of course, that’s going to pull energy prices back, but we don’t think energy prices go back to the levels before this conflict, and that this idea of energy as a part of national security is going to continue to help the energy sector. And then finally, in the base metal space, I mean, base metals are an imperative to building out uh data centers or any infrastructure uh construction that we are planning to do in this country. So, I think there’s a strong story. Um these are more volatile investments than your typical equities, but I think the fundamental story is certainly higher over a long period of time.
02:00 Speaker A
So you’re overweight energy materials, what’s a sector you want to avoid, Leslie?
02:04 Leslie
Well, I think the consumer is is still really tricky and I think we we look at the information that we’re seeing around consumer sentiment. Um both today’s uh information as well as the University of Michigan that we saw last week. We look at the um stratification of the economy and the concentration of wealth fueling the economy. And so the consumer sector both, um stables and discretionary, I think are are challenged on the demand side, and frankly, they may be a little bit challenged on the cost side due to higher commodity prices.