In short: Still a position, but the bulk of his aggressive post-pandemic grocer trimming was Loblaw after the big rerate — now only a modest weight. No thesis break; simply valuation discipline after the group re-rated.
Loblaw is Canada's biggest grocer. Aitken bought into grocers before and around the pandemic, then trimmed the group "pretty aggressively" once the market re-rated them higher — and "a lot of that's been Loblaw." Only a modest position remains.
Nothing is broken in his view; this is valuation discipline. He also dismisses the old "food inflation is good for grocers" trade: it has become such a political football that the companies now go out of their way to show their food sales grew slower than official inflation, to avoid government intervention.
31:26We've also got a position in Loblaw. We were adding and more aggressive and more interested in grocers and we were maybe just a little bit lucky with this as well, but probably pre-pandemic and around the pandemic, and then we saw a big rerate up on the grocers. We've pretty aggressively trimmed our grocer exposure and a lot of that's been Loblaw, to a lesser extent Metro. We still have modest positions in them.
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