The Electrification Investment Everyone Wants to Own

Picture the electrical room of a large data centre. Power arrives at high voltage and is stepped down, split, protected and backed up before it reaches servers that cannot tolerate a flicker. Much of that equipment carries the Eaton name, and as electricity demand climbs and the buildings, factories and grids attached to it need heavy investment, Eaton sits in several of the best-paying corners of that spending.

The record is hard to wave away. Eaton’s GAAP operating margin rose from 11.2% in 2015 to 19.0% in 2025, and its order backlog reached USD 24.1 billion at the end of June 2026. The International Energy Agency’s base case has global data-centre electricity use roughly doubling to about 945 TWh by 2030, from about 415 TWh in 2024 (IEA, Energy and AI).

The Electrification Investment Paradox

GE Vernova builds some of the most important machines in the electricity system. At the end of June 2026 its remaining performance obligations, the contracted work it has yet to deliver, stood at USD 176 billion, and second-quarter orders rose 88% on an organic basis, according to its second-quarter results filing. At its 15 October 2026 close of USD 926.44, it also trades at roughly 78 times my estimate of its normalized earnings, or roughly 61 times the consensus estimate I could retrieve.

I do not read that as a prediction that GE Vernova will stumble. It is arithmetic. To earn an 8% annualized return over ten years from that price, my model says GE Vernova’s earnings per share would have to grow about 21% a year, every year, for a decade. My own base case is already generous, with earnings per share growing 16.6% a year, and it still produces a return of only 4.0% a year, because the multiple I assume compresses from 78 times earnings to 24 times by 2036.

That gap between a superb operating business and a mediocre investment is the subject of this article. Electricity demand is growing, grids are being rebuilt and the equipment is being ordered. What is not obvious is how much of that is already in the price.

Enbridge is one of the first names a Canadian dividend investor learns, and that familiarity is part of the problem. A long dividend record and a yield near 6% tell you the company is a reliable payer. They do not tell you whether the stock is cheap, or whether owning it will build wealth faster than the alternatives. Those are three different questions, and Enbridge answers them differently.

This analysis uses a research reference date of October 13, 2026, and a reference price of CAD 67.15 per share on the TSX (an intraday quote). All yields and multiples below are calculated from that price. If the stock has moved by the time you read this, the ratios move with it, and the conclusions about price matter more than the exact figures.

A Canadian investor can buy Royal Bank, Apple or an S&P 500 ETF in a few clicks. An online brokerage makes it feel as though every listed company is available. It isn’t. If the company you want trades mainly in Zurich, Tokyo, London or Frankfurt, you may find a US ADR, an OTC quotation, a secondary listing or no North American line at all. Direct access to the foreign exchange opens up more companies, along with a longer list of complications.

This is the last of four articles on how stock markets work. TSX vs NYSE vs Nasdaq covered where stocks trade, S&P 500 vs Nasdaq vs Dow Jones vs TSX covered what indices measure, and OTC Stocks, ADRs and Pink Sheets covered depositary receipts. This one covers buying ordinary shares on the foreign exchange itself.

Financial headlines tell you the Dow gained 300 points, the Nasdaq fell 2%, the S&P 500 hit another record and the TSX outperformed Wall Street. Each sentence describes a different group of companies, counted by different rules. A 300-point move in the Dow isn’t comparable with a 300-point move in the S&P 500. A rising Nasdaq-100 doesn’t mean the average American stock is doing well. A strong TSX doesn’t mean Canada’s economy is beating the United States.

Stock market indices are how we summarize markets, and index funds are how most of us own them. When you buy an index ETF, you’re buying a methodology: which companies, in what proportions, measured in which currency. This is the second article in the Understanding Stock Markets series. It covers what the major benchmarks measure, why they diverge and what that means for a Canadian portfolio.

From a single self-directed brokerage account, a Canadian can buy Royal Bank, Berkshire Hathaway, Microsoft, Shopify or a small mining company in the same afternoon. Those securities sit on different exchanges, meet different listing standards and, in some cases, trade in different currencies. The investor sees a ticker and a buy button. Behind it sits a market structure most people never look at.

For the large, liquid companies that fill most portfolios, that structure matters less than most explainers imply. It isn’t irrelevant, though. Canadian stock exchanges and their American counterparts differ in which companies they list, how easily shares change hands, which currency a trade settles in and how much disclosure you can count on. This is the first article in a four-part series, Understanding Stock Markets. It covers where your stock is listed, what separates the major North American exchanges, and which differences deserve your attention.