As business restrictions ease and the Canadian economy restarts, corporate earnings are beginning to heat up and that's making one Bay Street portfolio manager expect that these favourable conditions for investors won't be fading anytime soon.

“It’s really hard to be bearish right now,” Barry Schwartz, chief investment officer and portfolio manager of Baskin Wealth Management, said in a broadcast interview.

“Even though we’ve had a huge move up in some stock prices, if you believe like we do that earnings are going to continue to climb higher, stocks are still priced very reasonably.”

In an interview that touched on energy, financials, industrials and retail stocks, Schwartz said everything is recovering more quickly than expected.

Energy stocks in particular seem to be a good buying opportunity, said Schwartz, even though Baskin Wealth Management does not directly own any oil and gas producers.

“Many of these energy stocks are well below where they were five to six years ago,” said Schwartz. “Even though energy prices are 50 to 60 per cent higher. So what’s going on here?”

“There’s strong demand [for energy products], and we still haven’t seen the full reopening yet. So, one would think, there’s some decent upside if prices stay where they are.”

West Texas Intermediate oil prices briefly traded above US$74 a barrel early Monday morning. The price for the oil benchmark has nearly doubled in the past year after hitting a low of US$16 a barrel at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. 

The S&P TSX Composite index, meantime, is up more than 15 per cent year to date, and cleared the 20,000 point mark for the first time ever in early June. Canada’s large oil-and-gas producers have been a big part of that advance.