Homer Simpson and sex are the two biggest factors that drive our economy, said Harry S. Dent Jr., author and sub-advisor to AIM Dent Demographic Trends Class, in his key note address, opening the 17th annual Canadian Association of Financial Planners conference in Montreal this morning.

Dent spoke to more than 1,100 delegates and used Homer as a euphemism for people and their spending habits.

Dent said sex also dictates market booms and busts because it leads to more and more people. Almost every economic trend in the last 50 years can be attributed to the baby boomers. And they will continue to dominate market fluctuations for decades to come.

“People do predictable things and even in the next downturn retirement products and services will still be booming,” he says, because the boomers will demand them.

Dent isn’t predicting a recession any time soon and says the market correction has shaken out all of the light weight companies and the technology industry leaders, like Cisco Systems Inc., will dominate in the coming years. He expects to be in a boom market for the rest of this decade and says it’s a perfect time to buy, buy, buy. He’s recommending growth and tech stocks.

In the first education session of the conference Duff Young, president of FundMonitor.com Corp. slammed the industry for the way it measures mutual fund performance, saying it’s “not just bad, it’s dangerous.”

Young says we should be reporting a personalized rate of return for clients and not the quartile performance because recommending a hot fund that’s first in the quartile doesn’t represent past or future performance.

Also, a fund that shows a return of 13% means that clients probably saw 10%, which can mislead both advisors and clients. Young conceded that measuring a personalized rate of return involves incredibly difficult math and is a major deterrent.