BNN Bloomberg Sep 18, 2026
With Mike Philbrick, CEO of ReSolve Asset Management
Canadian investment-grade bonds yield about 4% and US aggregate bonds about 5%, Mike Philbrick, CEO of ReSolve Asset Management, said on Market Call. Five years ago the same Canadian bonds paid 1%.
For most of the past decade an equity investor had no competing yield to beat. Philbrick's point is not that bonds will now outperform stocks. It is that the return an equity has to clear has moved, and that a 60/40 portfolio nobody rebalanced has drifted to something closer to 75/25 without its owner deciding to take that risk.
"And that doesn't mean bonds beat stocks — it just means the hurdle rate has changed."
Philbrick runs ReSolve's systematic exchange-traded fund portfolios, and he spent the hour taking listener questions on ETFs, nineteen tickers in all, including a scoring of the three picks he made on the same program last September.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 18 calls that matter.
Key Takeaways
Bonds are competition for capital again: Canadian bonds near 4% against 1% five years ago, which has quietly turned many 60/40 portfolios into 75/25
The advertised yield on a covered-call ETF can include your own capital coming back, and he says to check the start and end of the year to find out
ENBK adds 25% leverage to Canada's 10 largest banks and insurers and writes calls on a third of the book, which is where the outsized monthly payout comes from
Two S&P 500 trackers, XUS and ZSP, both charge nine basis points and he treats them as substitutes
On Bitcoin and gold, the absence of cash flow is the feature rather than the flaw, because neither can be manufactured when the price rises
Silver is heading for a sixth straight annual supply deficit in 2026, but solar manufacturers are designing silver out of their cells because it has grown so expensive
The best portfolio for an 18-year-old is the one they will hold through a 35% decline, not the one with the highest expected return
Single-stock leveraged ETFs are trading tools with full company-specific risk, fees, leverage and a cap on the upside
His three new picks — ZAG, QVAL and CIF — are income, valuation discipline and scarce productive capacity, the three things he says a repriced cost of capital rewards
Infrastructure at 14 times earnings is his way of owning what every AI winner has to buy rather than the companies doing the spending
1. The 3C Framework
Asked which companies are financing the artificial-intelligence buildout, Philbrick started with the shape of every capital cycle rather than a ticker.
Capital comes before productivity
Well, every industrial revolution spends capital before it creates the productivity, and the AI industrial revolution is no different.
Mike Philbrick
His framework splits the question into three parts: capability, meaning what has been invented; capacity, meaning whether it can physically be built and deployed; and capital, meaning how it gets financed, at what price, and who ends up carrying the risk. That third leg is where he thinks the current argument about yields is being had badly. A high long-term rate, he said, has at least three different meanings, and they are not interchangeable — an economy full of good projects competing for money, an economy with more projects than it has capacity to build so that the rate rations the capital, or investors demanding more compensation for inflation, deficits and policy uncertainty.
The same number, three different messages
Same yield, very different signal.
Mike Philbrick
What makes it awkward now, he said, is that AI investment is bidding for capital at the same moment governments have very large financing needs of their own. He put the current levels on the record.
Where the two bond markets sit
So this has also significant portfolio implications, and we see in the bond market today, the Canadian bond market yielding around 4%, US aggregate bonds 5%.
Mike Philbrick
What a repriced hurdle rate rewards
And I think this puts a premium on three things: income, valuation discipline, and scarce productive capacity.
Mike Philbrick
Those three words come back at the end of the hour as his three new picks. Investors should be asking who gets paid to finance the buildout, whether they are paying a sensible price, and who owns the infrastructure everyone needs.
2. Who Pays for the Buildout
The host asked him to trace the financing: where it started a couple of years ago and where it has moved.
From cash piles to the credit markets
Well, some of it was funded internally, because the hyperscalers, for example, had huge cash reserves, but they've also tapped bond markets, private equity players, and that's coming at the same time we have these huge financing obligations from the government.
Mike Philbrick
The price of that financing is the ambiguous signal again: it could be pricing concern about fiscal and monetary policy, or it could be pricing a genuine queue of good projects that need funding. Either way it is being done across the whole stack — corporate credit, bank loans, private capital. He called it pervasive.
3. Two Energy Income ETFs
An emailer named John asked for an oil and gas ETF built around options, given how volatile the sector has been. Philbrick named two and drew the line between them geographically.
The Canadian one is nearly 40% written
Currently about 39% of the portfolio is written.
Mike Philbrick
That is ENCC, the Global X Canadian oil and gas equity covered call fund, which holds Canadian producers in equal weight with a dynamic call-writing overlay. The broader alternative he named is EMAX, the Hamilton Energy Yield Maximizer, which owns large North American energy companies and runs an actively managed covered-call program.
The trade-off is the same in both
So ENCC if you want Canadian energy, EMAX if you want North American energy — both monetize some of that volatility through options, but remember, there's a trade-off — you're giving a bit of the upside away whenever you write calls, for the income that you get.
Mike Philbrick
4. Inside ENBK's Yield
Bob, calling from Medicine Hat, had an arithmetic problem: ENBK holds banks and life insurers whose dividends run between two and a half and three and a half percent, the fund yields about 3%, and yet the monthly distributions are multiples of that. He wanted to know where the money comes from.
Two mechanisms, and one of them cuts both ways
ENBK is an equal weight portfolio of Canada's 10 largest banks and insurance companies. It also adds 25% leverage on top of that — so remember, leverage cuts both ways.
Mike Philbrick
On top of the leverage it writes calls on up to a third of the portfolio. Philbrick said he thinks writing a third rather than the whole book is the better design, and he was careful to point out that the underlying price return from Canadian banks and insurers has been strong, which flatters the record. Then came the warning that he repeats three more times during the hour. This is what Philbrick thinks about covered-call income: the advertised yield and the money you actually made are two different numbers.
How to find out whether the yield was income
You want to look at what you put in at the beginning of the year, what was there at the end of the year, and if you received more than your capital back, it wasn't all income — some of it was your capital back.
Mike Philbrick
5. XUS Against ZSP
Elliot in Hamilton, Ontario asked which of two S&P 500 trackers is cheaper and which performs better — BlackRock's core fund, XUS, or BMO's ZSP. The answer was short.
The fee is the same on both
Yeah, both of these are tracking the S&P — the management fee on both of them is nine basis points, so it's very cheap and cheerful on the core S&P index.
Mike Philbrick
So there is no preference to give
This is almost identical — I would use them much like substitutes, really.
Mike Philbrick
A short break in the broadcast followed a moment where the host thought the video feed had frozen. Philbrick said it had not.
6. Three Ways to Own Copper
Paul in Vancouver wanted a copper ETF, and asked whether to take market-cap or equal weighting. Philbrick took the question as being about owning the miners rather than the metal, and said the Canadian choice is thin.
The one with enough trading
So the one copper ETF I see out there that's probably got enough trading and things like that for you is COPP, the Global X Copper Producers Index.
Mike Philbrick
For a listener willing to buy in the United States he named COPX, which he described as the Global X copper miners fund and very similar in construction. He also flagged that a third option exists for anyone who wants the metal itself instead of the equities.
The metal has its own wrapper
But there is an actual COP ETF which actually tracks the underlying copper metal itself.
Mike Philbrick
Asked who runs the fund he had recommended, his answer did not match his own first description of it: he said COPX is Global X, and that "COPP is Sprott Copper Miners ETF." He did not return to the discrepancy, and he never answered the caller's question about weighting.
7. VFLO's Tracking Error
Dave in North Bay asked whether the VictoryShares free cash flow ETF is a long-term hold for a registered retirement savings plan, and whether Philbrick owns it.
What the screen actually does
So VFLO is a rules-based US equity ETF, and what they do is they select the 50 most profitable companies with high free cash flow yields and favorable growth prospects.
Mike Philbrick
There is no leverage and no options in it, he said, but it is concentrated in large and mid-cap names with a quality-value tilt, currently weighted toward technology, energy and healthcare — weightings he expects to change. He liked it for a factor investor and told the caller to stay on the line for one of his top picks, because the idea is similar. The caution was about behavior rather than construction. Market-cap-weighted indexes beat this kind of factor-selected portfolio for years, he said; this past year a lot of these portfolios have substantially outperformed US equities instead.
The risk is that you quit at the wrong time
But you want to make sure that tracking error doesn't throw you off, that when you're underperforming, you don't quit and realize the losses and never get the future return.
Mike Philbrick
8. The Solana Staking ETF
Rose in Cambridge, Ontario said she thought Philbrick had recommended the 3iQ Solana staking ETF as a top pick some time ago, quoted a price of $12.76, and asked whether to buy more. He explained the asset before answering.
Where he thinks payments are heading
Paul Atkins from the SEC said that within three years, all of securities transactions will be on the digital blockchain — they're referring to Ethereum there, but Solana has a lot of use cases as well.
Mike Philbrick
Solana is a smart-contract chain comparable to Ethereum, he said, a little cheaper and a little faster, and Wall Street has so far favored Ethereum while Solana picks up other uses including stablecoins. He added that South Korea has said it will put all its securities on chain, and that the reason in both cases is speed and cost, which raises the velocity of money and makes capital flows more efficient. The fund holds the token and stakes part of it to help process transactions, which is where the extra yield comes from.
Position sizing, not conviction, is the answer
So, crawl, walk, run — start with a position that's small, that you can defend.
Mike Philbrick
He called it an explore position rather than a core one, noted that the space has been volatile, better lately and difficult if you go back six months, and said to trim it back and rebalance once it grows into a large share of a portfolio.
9. Bitcoin's Missing Cash Flow
Kevin in Toronto asked for a Bitcoin ETF. Philbrick disclosed that one of ReSolve's own portfolios, RSSX, carries Bitcoin exposure, then answered on pure-play funds: IBIT, the iShares fund, at a management expense ratio of 33 basis points, which he called the most inexpensive and hard to beat.
The second option, two basis points dearer
Fidelity has one too, FBTC, that's at 35 basis points, but both of those give you pure play exposure to the actual Bitcoin digital asset itself.
Mike Philbrick
He then made the case for scarcity, and turned the standard objection on its head.
The objection is the argument
So some people will say gold is like Bitcoin — I don't understand either because they don't have cash flow, but that lack of cash flow is the feature, because they cannot be replicated, they cannot be printed out of thin air.
Mike Philbrick
Supply answers a higher price in oil, not in gold
If we need more oil and oil prices rise, those prices will rise and more wells will be drilled and we will create more oil — that can't be done with gold, and it can't be done with Bitcoin.
Mike Philbrick
Solana, he said, would be the more aggressive and more volatile version of the same trade.
10. Last Year's Three Picks
The show scored the three picks Philbrick made on 26 September of last year, using its own figures.
Silver miners are still cheap against the metal
Silver miners remain relatively inexpensive, partially because the metal itself has moved up, so those profits are accumulating, and silver is expected to record its sixth consecutive annual supply deficit in 2026.
Mike Philbrick
The show's own numbers put the Global X Silver Miners fund, SIL, at $70 when he picked it and $94.43 now, a 35% gain and 36% with distributions. Silver plays two roles at once for him, a monetary asset and an industrial input to AI and solar buildout. One part of the demand case has weakened.
Solar is designing silver out
However, the thing that's changed is solar manufacturers have been aggressively reducing the amount of silver they put in their photovoltaic cells — they're substituting, they're using other means, because silver's become so expensive.
Mike Philbrick
He would keep it, as an explore rather than a core position.
Nuclear fell and he is still constructive
We see global electricity consumption growing by 3.6% annually to 2030 — nuclear is going to be a big part of that, and it is part of the AI buildout, to get reliable electricity from more green sources.
Mike Philbrick
The VanEck Uranium and Nuclear Energy fund, NLR, went from $136.23 to $108.19 on the show's figures — down 21%, or 18% with distributions. Philbrick noted there had been a substantial run up in the middle of the period and wondered aloud whether a distribution was missing from the calculation. The power demand case, he said, has done nothing but strengthen, approvals for new plants have come through, and he remains constructive in spite of the performance.
Emerging markets worked, and got dearer
What's changed is they've become a little bit more expensive — it was a little cheaper to buy them last year, comparatively; they've become a little bit higher, value-wise, but that's okay — global diversification would be the main point, and you're getting part of the value chain for the AI and semiconductor cycle.
Mike Philbrick
Vanguard's FTSE Emerging Markets All Cap fund, VEE, went from $44.85 to $50.36 on the show's figures, 12% and 14% with distributions. The host noted holdings including Taiwan Semiconductor and Alibaba; Philbrick described the exposure as large, mid and small caps concentrated in Asia, China, Taiwan and India, and framed the whole position as diversification away from Canadian and US markets.
11. Single-Stock ETFs
Bella in Edmonton asked about NVH, the Harvest Nvidia Enhanced High Income Shares fund, which adds about 25% leverage to a single stock. Philbrick was the least encouraging he was all hour.
He does not treat these as investments
Yeah, my general view on them is they're more trading vehicles or income tools. This is not a diversified investment at all.
Mike Philbrick
Buying a single-stock ETF, he said, leaves the holder with full company-specific risk and then adds fees, leverage and derivatives that can cap the upside — the opposite of the diversification an ETF is supposed to provide.
The wrapper is the thing to understand
So, I'm really not sure — investors need to understand what the wrapper's actually doing, and a lot of times there's a lot of costs involved.
Mike Philbrick
And the returns are the bait
Now, sometimes they have eye-popping returns and eye-popping income, but I wouldn't be chasing those.
Mike Philbrick
These are tactical instruments that have to be watched closely, he said, and not how he looks at portfolios.
12. HMAX Against ZWB
A caller also named Mike, in Calgary, asked which of two Canadian financials income funds is better placed given that he believes the banks are overvalued — one writes in-the-money calls, the other out-of-the-money.
The two portfolios are not the same book
So ZWB is the BMO Covered Call Canadian Banks ETF — so that's the six big banks, 100% banks — while HMAX is a financials yield maximizer, so while it has the banks, they represent about 76%, 15% are insurance companies and 9% are asset management companies — that's the build-out on the bottom end.
Mike Philbrick
He then walked the audience through the mechanics, using a $10 stock: writing a call at $12 leaves some upside, writing at $10 caps it. If the caller genuinely believes the banks are overvalued, he said, then writing at the money is the better position, because the premium is larger and the upside being given up is upside the caller does not expect to get. He called it a good insight. His own practice is different.
He writes at the money less often
Typically, I'm less inclined to be writing a lot of at-the-money calls — it makes that annualized yield look really good, but often times you're getting a lot of your own capital back in that yield.
Mike Philbrick
13. FXI and China's AI
John, calling from Quebec, asked whether China's large industrials will have to hold AI companies for the FXI index to keep working, and whether Philbrick likes it.
What the fund actually holds
Well, FXI is a concentrated bet on the 50 largest companies that are Hong Kong-listed for China — so it does have banks and technology in the platform.
Mike Philbrick
Whether Chinese AI companies enter the index depends on whether they reach the market-capitalization weighting needed to qualify for that top 50, he said. The more useful point is that the exposure is already there indirectly: Tencent and Alibaba are using AI inside their existing businesses, so the theme bleeds through financials and consumer discretionary, which are FXI's large positions. He then declined to go further, with an American comparison.
The biggest names are not listed anywhere
But to be honest, I'm not sure — even today, when we look at US markets, and you look at ChatGPT and Anthropic, those are still private companies that are not listed within any of the exchanges here in the US.
Mike Philbrick
14. An 18-Year-Old's TFSA
An emailer named Chris is opening a tax-free savings account for an 18-year-old, thinks an all-equity fund such as ZEQT or XEQT suits the horizon, and worries that a large decline would put a new investor off. Philbrick answered the behavioral question first.
The right portfolio is the one they keep
Well, I think the best portfolio for an 18-year-old isn't necessarily the one that has the highest expected returns — it's the one they'll sit with and own during a 35% market decline.
Mike Philbrick
There is nothing wrong with starting at 80% equities and 20% bonds and adding equity as the investor gets experience of bear markets, he said. An 18-year-old is also contributing along the way, so a drawdown is a chance to buy equities cheaper. On the funds themselves, XEQT and ZEQT are both broad market-cap-weighted exposures across Canadian, US and global equities — simple and cheap. His alternative is a Fidelity fund built differently.
A factor portfolio with a slice of Bitcoin
So it's 97% equities, 3% Bitcoin, and within the equities, the core combines value, momentum, quality, and low volatility factors across Canada, US, and international markets, plus some global small caps.
Mike Philbrick
FEQT would give the account exposure to value, momentum, quality and low-volatility premiums, he said, and take it away from the large US weighting inside a market-cap index. He expects it to reduce volatility somewhat as well.
15. UMAX and Rate Risk
Amin in Ottawa owns HMAX and asked about UMAX, the Hamilton Utilities Yield Maximizer, noting both are down. Philbrick said it is the same covered-call playbook with a yield target, written closer to the money, applied to an interest-sensitive sector.
Long rates are doing the damage
So as we've had this bit of rising long-term interest rates, this is going to affect utilities, so they're going to be negatively correlated to that.
Mike Philbrick
The mechanism runs in reverse too: relief in yields brings the price back.
16. EUBANK's 36 Basis Points
Brian in Belleville, Ontario already owns JPMorgan and Citigroup and asked Philbrick to decide for him whether to hold the five big American banks through EUBANK instead. The answer was about what the fee buys.
The fee is a convenience charge
I mean, you are paying a 36 basis point MER to EUBANK in order to hold them for you.
Mike Philbrick
The question to ask, he said, is whether the holder wants to rebalance the positions himself as prices move. He compared the structure to ZWB in Canada, the big banks in one portfolio at roughly 15 to 18% each, and noticed on air that the fund is unhedged to the US dollar.
And it is a reasonable price for not thinking about it
I think it's fine to pay 36 basis points if you want that nice easy rebalancing going on and you don't have to worry about it.
Mike Philbrick
17. XETM's Critical Materials
The last email, from Alex, asked about the iShares S&P/TSX Energy Transition Materials fund. Philbrick tied it back to the framework he opened with, on the capacity side.
Own the bottlenecks instead of picking one
So XETM owns companies exposed to a long list of critical materials, including copper, uranium, silver, lithium, nickel, and other rare earth metals. So instead of trying to predict which metal wins, you own a basket of them, and a basket of the potential bottlenecks.
Mike Philbrick
These are the physical ingredients required to build the next economy, he said, which is why the theme makes sense to him. The caveat was about entry point.
The recent returns are the risk
I like the theme — I just hope the emailer is not chasing the recent returns, because they have been pretty good.
Mike Philbrick
18. Three New Top Picks
The three picks map onto the three things he said a repriced cost of capital rewards: income, valuation discipline, and scarce productive capacity.
Bonds are paying again, which changes your weights
That's correct — it has investment grade corporates in it as well, and capital is finally paying you again in the bond market.
Mike Philbrick
The first pick is ZAG, BMO's aggregate bond index fund, holding Canadian government bonds across levels plus investment-grade corporates. He was insistent about what the pick is not: not a forecast that bonds beat stocks, and not a call that rates are about to collapse. It is a portfolio-weights argument. Bonds have done close to nothing for five years while equities have done well, so a 60/40 portfolio may now be 70/30 or 75/25, which materially changes the risk its owner is carrying.
The yield you get is the forward one
And five years ago, bonds yielded 1% — they didn't yield almost 4% like they do today.
Mike Philbrick
The 4% is what a buyer earns going forward, he said, rather than the nothing the asset class delivered looking backward. Inflation remains the key risk to the position, and prices will move with duration.
When capital has a price, the price you pay matters
One of the lessons from previous capital investment booms is that the technology can ultimately succeed while investors who paid too much for those early winners can still earn disappointing returns.
Mike Philbrick
The second pick is QVAL, Alpha Architect's US quantitative value fund — a concentrated portfolio screening on measures such as operating profit against total enterprise value, looking for mispricings. He pointed the VFLO caller at it as a similar idea. The warning is the same one: the capitalization and sector weightings are nothing like the S&P 500, so the tracking error has to be tolerable. This year those returns have been very good.
Own what every winner has to buy
So let's look at the picks and shovels — this is global exposure to infrastructure businesses involved in such areas as electricity, transportation, water.
Mike Philbrick
The third pick is CIF, the iShares global infrastructure index fund, and the argument is that it owns the productive capacity the AI companies are spending into rather than the companies doing the spending.
The valuation on that capacity
And looking at valuations, 14 times earnings in the portfolio — that's pretty reasonable
Mike Philbrick
Getting to the AI outcome requires a great deal of physical investment: power generation, electricity infrastructure, engineering, construction, grid modernization and industrial reshoring. That, he said, is where CIF sits. It is not a pure AI play.
Bonus Insights
Two callers were lost to the phone lines during the hour, Rose in Cambridge and Adrian in Red Deer; Rose got back on and asked her Solana question later in the program.
Philbrick used the word explore rather than core for four of the positions discussed (silver miners, nuclear, the Solana fund and the critical-materials basket) as a way of saying how large a share of a portfolio each should be, without putting a number on it.
The host closed by trailing Monday's guest, John Stevenson, founder and oil and gas analyst at Granite Point Research, who will take questions on North American oil, gas and utility stocks.
Philbrick's bottom line is that the cost of capital has been repriced, that this matters more for how an investor's existing weights have drifted than for any forecast about which asset class wins next, and that the way to act on it is income, a price discipline on future cash flows, and ownership of the physical capacity the AI buildout has to pay for.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
ReSolve Asset Management (Philbrick's firm; he disclosed that one of its portfolios, RSSX, holds Bitcoin exposure)
Global X Investments Canada (ENCC, the equal-weight Canadian oil and gas covered-call fund with about 39% of the book written, and the copper funds COPX and, on his first description, COPP)
Hamilton ETFs (EMAX for North American energy, HMAX for Canadian financials at 76% banks, and UMAX for utilities, which he says is suffering from rising long rates)
ENBK (An equal-weight portfolio of Canada's 10 largest banks and insurers with 25% leverage and calls written on up to a third of it — the source of the outsized monthly payout)
BMO ETFs (ZSP at nine basis points, ZWB as the six-bank covered-call fund, ZAG as his bond pick, and ZEQT as an all-equity option)
BlackRock Canada (XUS, which he treats as a substitute for ZSP; XETM for critical materials; XEQT; and CIF, the global infrastructure fund he picked at 14 times earnings)
iShares (IBIT at a 33 basis point management expense ratio, which he called the most inexpensive pure-play Bitcoin fund)
Sprott (Named, when he was asked who runs COPP, as the manager of the Sprott Copper Miners ETF)
VictoryShares Free Cash Flow ETF, VFLO (Picks the 50 most profitable US companies on free-cash-flow yield; he likes it for a factor investor but warns about tracking error)
3iQ (Its Solana staking fund, which holds the token and stakes part of it; he calls it an explore position and says to start small)
Fidelity (FEQT at 97% equities and 3% Bitcoin, combining value, momentum, quality and low-volatility factors; and FBTC at 35 basis points on the Bitcoin side)
VanEck Uranium and Nuclear Energy ETF, NLR (Down 21% on the show's figures since he picked it, and he remains constructive on the back of 3.6% annual growth in global electricity consumption to 2030)
Vanguard Canada (VEE, up 12% on the show's figures, which he frames as diversification rather than a return call)
Harvest ETFs (NVH, the leveraged single-stock Nvidia income fund he declined to endorse as an investment)
Alpha Architect (QVAL, his value pick, screening operating profit against enterprise value)
Alibaba and Tencent (His argument that FXI already carries AI exposure indirectly, because both are using it inside existing businesses)
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