Listen on The Move
When the market itself quietly becomes the concentration risk, a top-down process built over 30 years may be exactly the second tool advisors didn't know they were missing.
For most of the past decade, buying the market and achieving broad diversification were the same act. Today they are two separate jobs. In this episode of Insight Is Capital, host Pierre Daillie sits down with Christian Crête, Senior Portfolio Manager, Global Top-Down Strategies at Desjardins Global Asset Management, and Patrick Gagnon, Managing Director and Head of National Sales, Desjardins Investment Solutions, to examine exactly where that gap has opened and what fills it.
Christian traces a macro-led process born in 1991, stress-tested through the GFC and Brexit, and refined for a world moving from one economic center of gravity to many. He walks through how his team reads the forest before the trees, working across macro, valuation, and investor sentiment simultaneously, to surface opportunities that passive indexing and conventional bottom-up stock picking are not designed to find. Japan's structural shift, European defense rearmament, and fragmenting global supply chains are not just headlines here — they are live portfolio positions with reasoned conviction behind them.
Patrick brings the conversation to the advisor's desk: the quiet anxiety building around CRM3 and total cost reporting, the behavioral challenge of diversifying away from what has worked, and why Desjardins' co-creation approach — listening first, building second — is redefining what an asset manager partnership can look like. The episode closes with a plain-English breakdown of where DAGL sits alongside the newly launched Desjardins Active Canadian Bond Universe ETF (DACU) and Desjardins Canadian Equity Leaders ETF (DACL).
Timestamped Chapters
00:00 — Introduction: When the index kept its promise but the market narrowed
02:00 — Guest introductions: Christian Crête and Patrick Gagnon
03:00 — Career backgrounds
05:30 — The shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world: what it means for portfolios
09:00 — Europe, defense spending, and the emerging investment opportunity
12:00 — Japan: 30 years of deflation, rising rates, and the carry trade risk
15:00 — Concentration risk at the advisor's desk: index ETFs and the seven-name problem
19:00 — The three pillars: macro, valuation, and investor sentiment
24:00 — How advisors are quietly rethinking who they lean on, and why
25:00 — Origin of the process: 1991, pension mandates, and a founding client still with them today
29:00 — What advisors need from asset managers in a CRM3 environment
33:00 — GFC playbook: building defensively in 2007-08, buying financials in January 2009
37:00 — Brexit: positioning before the vote, buying UK homebuilders in the two-day collapse
42:00 — Trusting the process when it hurts most
44:00 — Forest before trees: why 300 names is not 300 stock picks
46:00 — Quality and value as design, downside resilience as byproduct
49:00 — Advisor objections and how Patrick answers them
51:00 — Where DAGL sits in the Canadian ETF landscape
54:00 — Which clients this fits: balanced, growth, high net worth, and where to be cautious
55:00 — The active fixed income and Canadian equity case: DACU and DACL
57:00 — CRM3, cost transparency, and expense ratios across the lineup
58:00 — Rapid fire: one reason to add a global top-down strategy
59:00 — What Desjardins offers an advisor's practice that the street does not
01:00:00 — Co-creation: building solutions from the voice of the advisor
01:01:00 — Why institutional durability matters inside the investment process
Funds Mentioned
DAGL — Desjardins Global Opportunities ETF (global top-down active equity)
DACU — Desjardins Active Canadian Bond Universe ETF
DACL — Desjardins Canadian Equity Leaders ETF
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