Good Mornin’

Happy Father’s Day to every dad reading this.

I spent mine about as well as a day can be spent….at Cirque du Soleil with my family and my folks. Three generations in one row, necks craned, watching people do things with their bodies that shouldn’t be possible. Two hours, no phones, a lot of gasping. The kind of afternoon you know you’ll be replaying years from now, even while you’re still living it.

Funny thing about a night like that. You spend it certain you’ve never seen anything quite like it….. and then the lights come up, and the rest of the world goes back to running an old, familiar script.

Same Script, Different Actors

Markets spent the last several years climbing a wall of worry.

Inflation surged.  Rates rose.  Recession fears arrived.  Artificial intelligence captured imaginations.

One geopolitical flare gave way to the next. And summer arrives with the same two themes still holding the marquee: geopolitics and trade.

In the Gulf, there was a fragile calm last week. The U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and markets exhaled, equities rallied, bond yields slipped, oil retreated. Tankers that had sat idle for months began moving through the strait again. A constructive step, and a welcome one.

But the credits haven’t rolled. Over the weekend the deal was already being tested and the fighting flared again in Lebanon, Tehran renewed its threat to close the strait, and oil clawed back some of its drop.

This morning the straight is closed again, but the two sides are back at the table in Switzerland, mediators reporting progress, the hardest questions still open. The scope, the durability, the enforcement all remain unclear, and oil is likely to carry a risk premium for a while yet. The threat receded. It didn’t disappear.

Closer to home, the Bank of Canada held at 2.25% and chose patience over prediction — waiting on more data, as a good central banker does. And on July 1, CUSMA comes up for its first six-year review: another round of headlines, another negotiation most expect, in the end, to hold.

The headlines changed. The worries rotated. The cast evolved. But the story remained largely the same.

Which is a useful reminder. Markets are often presented as new stories when, most of the time, they are simply new versions of old ones.

Different actors. Same script.

We’ve seen this movie before. And that reminded me of something. Because, strangely enough, I was in a movie once.

An Unexpected Audition

In 2001, I was a student at Bishop’s University when I received a phone call from the prosthetics department. For readers who may not know, I was born missing my left arm below the elbow and have worn a prosthetic for most of my life. The call was simple: a television miniseries was filming nearby, they needed extras, and would I be interested? As opportunities go, it seemed too unusual to decline. So I said yes.

The production starred Colm Fiore and Natasha Richardson. I expected to spend a day somewhere in the background and collect a modest paycheque. Instead, my trailer ended up directly across from Natasha Richardson’s. One conversation became another…..one scene became several.

At one point, one of the actresses pulled me into a scene…..a classic wartime reunion. The wounded veteran steps off the boat. The crowd surges forward. An embrace. A kiss. The hero, home at last.

For a brief period, I was living inside a world that felt very far from university classrooms, investment markets, and small-town Ontario. I was twenty-one….. convinced it was all perfectly normal, as twenty-one-year-olds tend to be.

What I couldn’t have known is that the spotlight wasn’t the part that mattered.

It never is.

The Investment I Never Planned

The movie paid surprisingly well….at least for a university student. I could have spent the money, and most students probably would have. Instead, I invested it. I bought shares of Royal Bank.

There was no grand strategy behind the decision. I wasn’t predicting the future, wasn’t envisioning a career in wealth management, certainly wasn’t imagining that decades later I would walk through the doors of RBC each morning and spend my career helping families think about wealth, stewardship, and legacy. I simply bought shares of a great Canadian company. That was it.

Looking back now, it feels almost absurd. A random phone call. A random movie. A random investment. And yet none of it was random.

Life rarely reveals the significance of a moment while you’re living it. Only afterwards. Only looking backward. What strikes me today is how little my twenty-one-year-old self understood about where the road would lead……though perhaps that’s true for all of us.

How Many Scenes Remain

There is another part of the story that stays with me. Several years after filming, Natasha Richardson died following a skiing accident. She was only forty-five.

I remember hearing the news and feeling stunned. Not because we were close friends…we weren’t …..but because she had become one of those people who exist in a chapter of your life. A real person attached to a real memory. And suddenly she was gone.

When I first heard the news, forty-five sounded old. I was still young enough to believe that life unfolded in long, predictable chapters. Today, I am forty-six. Which means I have already been granted something Natasha Richardson never received.

One more year.

There is something sobering about realizing you have crossed beyond someone else’s finish line.

I suspect many of us reach a point where these moments begin to accumulate. A former classmate. A colleague. A mentor. A parent. A friend. People who once felt permanent reveal themselves to be anything but.

The market teaches impermanence. Life teaches it more aggressively. Everything changes. Everything.

The question is never whether the wave will arrive. The question is whether we notice it while it’s here.

What You’re Allowed to Keep

Sometimes I wonder what my twenty-one-year-old self would think if he could see me now. The student standing on a movie set. The kid who thought being noticed was the prize. The young investor who bought a few shares of Royal Bank with money earned pretending to be someone else.

He would probably focus on the obvious things. The career. The family. The titles. The balance sheet. What he would miss is what surprises me now.

At twenty-one, I thought wealth was something you accumulated. At forty-six, I increasingly think wealth is something you are allowed to keep.

More summers. More conversations. More dinners around the table. More mornings with people you love. More opportunities to call an old friend. More chances to say what should be said while there is still someone there to hear it.

Because eventually we learn that life is not measured by what we collect.

It is measured by what remains.

Reflections

Markets move. Headlines change. Stories repeat. We’ve seen this movie before.

But our lives are different. Every day is a first viewing. A random phone call can alter a trajectory. An unexpected investment can shape a career. A brief encounter can become a lifelong memory. And someone whose trailer sat across from yours twenty-five years ago can remind you that none of us know how many scenes remain.

The market will always give us another headline. Life doesn’t always give us another season.

Which is why the goal was never simply to build wealth. It was to recognize it while it was still here.

So as you cruise into the week, spend your attention on the parts that don’t come around twice….the faces, the light, the small unrepeatable hours. That’s the footage you’ll want back one day.

Ease into it. Watch the horizon. Enjoy the ride.

Lived forward.

Understood back.

Festina lente.

Henderson Family Wealth of RBC Dominion Securities