Portfolio Manager Favors Tech, Healthcare Over Energy Amid Iran Conflict Uncertainty

Darren Sissons, a portfolio manager at Campbell, Lee & Ross Investment Management, is steering clients away from energy stocks and back toward technology and healthcare—a deliberate reversal of the panic-driven trades that dominated the first quarter of 2026.

When Iran tensions flared early in the year, markets reacted with the kind of violence that makes headlines and empties rational thought from trading floors. Money poured out of artificial intelligence stocks and growth plays into energy, chasing the geopolitical premium that conflict seemed to promise. It was the kind of rotation that feels inevitable in the moment and foolish in hindsight. Sissons watched this happen, then made a different choice. He trimmed the energy winners his firm had held, raised cash, and began deploying that dry powder into the very sectors that had been hammered by the energy trade—technology, software, healthcare, and data-driven industrial companies now trading at depressed prices.

The logic is straightforward: you make money when you buy, not when you sell. If everyone else is running toward energy, the smart move is to buy quality assets that nobody wants right now. But there's a harder calculation underneath. Sissons is betting against the durability of energy gains themselves. Tax bills on those divested growth stocks come due in March 2027, and so do taxes on energy sector exits. More pressingly, he sees a high probability of sudden reversal. When peace breaks out—and he believes it will—energy stocks will crater. The investors who jumped in late to the conflict trade will be left holding the bag.

His reasoning points to American politics. The second Trump administration's approval rating has fallen below 30 percent. Midterm elections arrive in November, and history suggests voters punish sitting presidents for high energy prices and rising unemployment. A president facing "lame duck" status in his final two years has strong incentive to implement growth catalysts and, if necessary, to end the Iranian conflict early. That's not a prediction; it's a structural bet on how power works.

Sissons' three top picks reflect this thesis. Accenture, the IT outsourcing giant, trades at a discount because the market fears artificial intelligence will replace its workforce. That fear is unlikely to materialize. Fortune 2000 companies and governments—Accenture's core clients—learned from the dot-com era that betting on nascent technology from unproven vendors is commercial folly. Chief information officers want mature solutions from established peers. Accenture has spent decades embedding itself into client operations through multiyear, expanding contracts. The company has grown revenue and earnings per share at annual average rates of 7.7 percent and 7.1 percent over the past decade. It yields 3.7 percent and raises its dividend annually while buying back shares at depressed prices.

Alphabet, meanwhile, is a natural beneficiary of artificial intelligence spending given the scale of its infrastructure and the interconnected nature of its business. Google Cloud grew 63 percent year over year. Digital advertising, enhanced by AI functionality, grew 13 percent. YouTube and AI properties continue to attract users. Over ten years, Alphabet's revenue and earnings per share have grown at annual average rates of 16.75 percent and 23.4 percent respectively. In Canadian dollars, it delivered a five-year annualized total return of 30.3 percent.

S&P Global, the third pick, is a dividend aristocrat with fifty years of consecutive dividend increases. It yields one percent. The company provides market data, indices, and commodity pricing to the financial world. It benefits directly from the growth of exchange-traded funds and passive investing flows, and it operates an asset-light model that requires modest capital spending to grow. Since 2016, revenue and earnings per share have grown at annual rates of 12.5 percent and 7 percent.

Sissons is not predicting the future. He is positioning for multiple futures—one where energy gains reverse, one where tax bills arrive, one where political pressure forces resolution. In the meantime, he is buying quality at a discount. His previous picks, made a year earlier, returned an average of 17 percent, suggesting the strategy has merit. The question now is whether the market will eventually agree.