The Emotional Currency of Wealth Transfer: Navigating Complex Conversations

Money is emotional. Within families, differing values, financial literacy levels, and expectations around inheritance can create tension and avoidance. As a result, family conversations about money and wealth transfer often remain superficial......

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Weekly Strategy Perspectives: Guest Feature - Dissing the Dollar

The Through Line: The U.S. dollar has underperformed many of its currency peers this year – most visibly during times of interim market stress. This unusual occurrence has led some to question the greenback’s traditional role as a safe-haven port......

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Weekly Strategy Perspectives: Climbing the Wall of Worry

The Through Line: Ironically, it seems the more fraught the short-term headlines become, the higher markets want to tiptoe. For the average investor, the sheer quantity of shifting variables can understandably prompt “freeze or flight” reactions......

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Weekly Strategy Perspectives: Consumers – The (not so) Little Engine that Could

The Through Line: For months, the disconnect between sturdy economic data and steadily weakening sentiment readings has perplexed those trying to decode the market’s long-term path......

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Weekly Strategy Perspectives: Riding Herd on a Budget Deal

The Through Line: As U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson tried to herd the cats toward passage of a budget reconciliation deal, bond vigilantes kept a close eye on the details. The U.S. budget deficit run rate – and the accumulated total debt......

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Why you need to include your digital assets in your estate plan

Many people think of estate planning in terms of traditional assets like investment portfolios, homes, artwork, vehicles and the family cottage. But as our lives become increasingly digitized, it’s important to include online assets, too....

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Weekly Strategy Perspectives: Guest Feature – Fixed Income in Focus

The Through Line: Volatility in treasury markets has surprised investors in recent weeks as participants have grappled with a matrix of issues including the sustainability of global growth, fluidity in U.S. trade policy and the growing relative......

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Weekly Strategy Perspectives: After ‘Liberation Day’ What Now?

The Through Line: Markets reacted sharply after President Donald Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariff plans, moving rapidly to reset valuation levels. Did they go far enough to accommodate the current fundamental situation or overreact?......

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Inheriting family wealth: How to prepare

For many high-net-worth individuals with children, amassing wealth may be the easy part; successfully passing down that wealth to their children is where things can get difficult......

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Investment Strategy - April 2025

Still slightly overweight Canada – Now underweight U.S. and market weight Europe and Emerging MarketsIt is becoming clearer that Trump’s tariffs and trade wars are less a means to an end than an end in themselves. The implications are profound. The...

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Retirement Planning Calculator Tool

This Retirement calculator will allow you to input assumptions to generate a retirement illustration and a tool for estimating income in retirement.  This self-input calculator tool will provide a good high level summary while we would develop a more comprehensive tax optimized plan for our clients using our access to a more detailed and sophisticated planning software when we meet.  Enjoy!

https://www.bmo.com/financial-calculators/retirement-savings/

 

Portfolio

To Preserve & Protect Your Legacy

Managing the Health of Your Wealth by Building Smarter Portfolios

 

We believe the greatest opportunity for clients to achieve their investment objectives and to realize optimal risk-adjusted returns is by using a well-constructed portfolio combining active, passive and alternative strategies allocated to meet their unique needs. Given all of these factors, we believe portfolio construction efforts should focus on seeking a balance between growth potential and downside protection. This means being sensitive to stock valuations, ensuring wide-ranging diversification and focusing on income.
 



In its broadest sense, diversification means exposure to a variety of asset classes that have historically had lower correlations to each other.  For many investors, this could mean adding real estate, international exposure and alternative strategies (such as long-short, absolute return, and market neutral mandates) to their portfolios.

Our Portfolio construct provides adequate and prudent diversification to global equity markets and fixed income, while incorporating an allocation to Absolute Return managers. 

Please contact us to learn more about our portfolio construct and historical performance.
 

Why Select a CFA

Why Choose a CFA?

The Case for Passive VS Active US Equity

Historically, the US equity market as represented by the S&P 500 Index, has been extremely difficult to beat!  In the past 15 years, less than 3% of Active Managers have been able to Outperform the Index. 

The S&P 500 is highly efficient, liquid, and does not suffer from high single security concentration risk (ie. like the TSX Index has in Canada in the past with Nortel, RIM, Valeant, and Shopify today). 

Please click here to see the latest SPIVA research on how difficult it is to outperform the S&P 500 US equity index.  This is why our core strategy for US equity market exposure is a Passive US Equity allocation incorporating low cost Index ETFs.

Benefits of Alternatives

With markets at all-time highs, volatility at multi-year lows, high equity market valuations and general political and economic uncertainty, investors have a desire to protect capital and earn a competitive return. Absolute Return Strategies are often utilized by High Net Worth families to Enhance Returns & Add Downside Protection to complement Traditional Portfolio Asset Exposures.

Click here to discover the Power & Benefits of Adding Alternatives to your Portfolio!