Erika Toth shares her first hand perspective about the work she’s doing with advisors to assist them into the realm of top shelf wealth management. This was a comprehensive talk about the trends shaping the wealth management business, the evolution investment advisors have undertaken to become Fee-based, to earn PM designations, and to level up and grow their business, to go toe-to-toe with ICPMs (Investment Counsel PMs).

What’s driving this massive change, this levelling of the playing field?

Erika Toth is the director of Institutional and Advisory for Eastern Canada at BMO ETFs. She has extensive experience in investment analysis, portfolio construction, and trading of equities, fixed income, foreign exchange, options, ETFs and mutual funds. She is known for her attention to detail and providing support and education to advisors and portfolio managers in a consultative manner.

We discuss:

– Erika’s experience and background

– The size and growth of the ETF space in Canada

– The proliferation of ETF options/solutions in ten years, ranging from simple to very complex

– the trend of advisors graduating to PM in the field, gaining the credentials to do so

– from index ETFs to liquid alternative ETFs.

– how ETFs are levelling the playing field between Investment Advisor PMs vs. Investment Counsel PMs

– how ETFs are providing advisors with all the building blocks they can use to compete

– how advisors are competing with ICPMs using ETFs

– how she and the team at BMO ETFs are assisting advisors on a daily basis to level up their competitiveness

– how the playing field is levelling

– ideas and strategies advisors can implement to be competitive in the business and vs. ICPMs.

– portfolio construction and investment planning tools BMO ETFs have created for advisors

Connect with Erika Toth on Linkedin

You can find pretty much everything we discussed at https://bmoetfs.ca

BMO ETFs Trade Ideas and Podcasts

ETF tools and resources: https://www.bmogam.com/ca-en/advisors/tools-and-resources/etf-investing-basics/etf-tools-and-resources/

 

Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. Please make sure to like us and share us wherever you can. It helps more people like you find us.

Alfonso Peccatiello, Founder, CEO, & Macro Strategist at The Macro Compass (https://themacrocompass.com) joins us for an amazing deep dive into what is behind all of today’s macro-economic and macro-market considerations and discussions. If you’re interested in getting at what is at the heart of today’s volatile inflation, interest rate, bond yield, and monetary policy considerations across all regions including Europe and the US, don’t miss this conversation.

Alfonso Peccatiello’s explanation of what is driving all macro considerations in the sobering monetary policy environment we find ourselves in today, is eye-opening. Macro Alf, (@macroalf on Twitter) as he is otherwise known across the internet, provides an eloquent and lucid view of the bewildering plumbing of the economy and markets.

Alfonso once ran a $20-billion portfolio at ING Bank, and while there, operated in the midst of personal consultations with among many others, all central bankers, central banks, and trading floors across Europe and the UK. He has a deep understanding of global bond markets, and his familiarity with all things macro has bestowed him with a rare gift of being able to explain some of the most complicated topics of the financial system so that anyone can begin to understand how it all works.

His substack and podcast are/were among the most popular finance outlets across the financesphere of the internet.

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Where to find Alfonso Peccatiello, The Macro Compass

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The Macro Compass

Alfonso Peccatiello on Twitter

Alfonso Peccatiello on Linkedin

The Macro Compass Substack

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Where to find the Raise Your Average crew:

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ReSolve Asset Management

ReSolve Asset Management Blog

Mike Philbrick on Linkedin

Rodrigo Gordillo on Linkedin

Adam Butler on Linkedin

Pierre Daillie on Linkedin

Joseph Lamanna on Linkedin

AdvisorAnalyst.com

This is part two of our thought provoking conversation with Richard Heft, President and Co-Founder at EXT. Marketing, which is in my opinion, one of Canada’s premier expert financial communications and marketing firms. I’m always excited to talk to Richard; he’s one of those folks who talks to everyone in the business. He always has a ton of takeaways and insight to share, every time.

In part two, we talk about how advisors can add gravity to their communications with clients at a time when little else matters more. Clients are getting their statements every month and each time they do, especially these days with the rough year it’s been, it’s potentially a trigger for all their fears and concerns about their investments, about you their advisor, and about whether it’s time for a change of direction or worse. This is the call to arms if there ever was one. It’s a time to be proactive, it’s a time to be sensitive, and Richard and I talk about how you can cement your brand as an advisor, in this critical moment.

Please enjoy our conversations and thank you again for listening.

We recently had a thought provoking conversation with Richard Heft, President and Co-Founder at EXT. Marketing in Toronto. We like talking to Richard as he as a uniquely qualified perspective on the entire Canadian investment industry, as one of the heads of what is arguably one of the best institutional communications consulting and production teams, now on both sides of the border. Along with EXT.’s co-founder, Jillian Bannister, Richard leads a group of communications and marketing experts working with North America’s largest financial institutions.

They talk to just about everyone in the business about what’s going on and all of the thought leadership that’s occurring across the investment company ecosystem, and have a bird’s eye view all that is happening, all of the opinions that are floating around, from all sides of the investment business.

Please enjoy our conversation and interview. This is part one of our conversation.

We will share part two of our conversation tomorrow, in which we discuss a multitude of ways advisors can step up their communications strategies with their clients in what is and has otherwise been a very difficult and challenging year and transition period, for all as investors.

David Burrows, President & Chief Investment Strategist, at Barometer Capital Management joins us for an in depth discussion on the markets, inflation, monetary policy, outlook, his base case, and exchanges his contrarian case for what possibly lies in the future vis-à-vis domestic and global economics, as well as sharing a few of his surprising ideas regarding what he’s doing in the alternative investing space.

David provides the Barometer team with macro driven quantitative analysis. Covering mobile markets and asset classes, Barometer tactically manages investment portfolios, targeting structural revaluations.

David co-founded Barometer Capital Management, in 1991 after beginning his career in 1986 with the Private Client Group at Scotia McLeod. With Greg Guichon, David sits on the firm’s investment policy committee and is responsible for the overall construction and daily review of all client portfolios.

David is a frequent guest as a market commentator on CTV, CBC and BNN Bloomberg.

Barometer manages discretionary investment portfolios for private investors, foundations and endowment funds. Their stated purpose is to earn consistent, absolute returns while preserving capital. In an industry that measures success by relative performance to the market, Barometer is unique for its commitment to, and history of, producing consistent absolute returns.

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Where to find David Burrows

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David Burrows on Linkedin

David Burrows, Barometer Capital Management

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Where to find the Raise Your Average crew:

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ReSolve Asset Management

ReSolve Asset Management Blog

Mike Philbrick on Linkedin

Rodrigo Gordillo on Linkedin

Adam Butler on Linkedin

Pierre Daillie on Linkedin

Joseph Lamanna on Linkedin

AdvisorAnalyst.com

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“You don’t have to be brilliant, just wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long time.” Charlie Munger

Welcome to Raise Your Average, our deep dive journey into learning from the people and process behind the world of investing. Through conversations with leaders in the investments game, we peel back the layers of the onion on how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time, their energy, and their dollars.

We are all students and we are all teachers. We are the average of the 5 people we spend the most time with. Come hang out with us for a while and raise your average, as we raise ours.

Music credit: In Hip Hop, Paul Velchev (8MJZA6T3LK)

Joining us to talk about how liquid alternatives and real assets are integral to diversifying portfolios against today’s inflation and rising rates are Jeff Evans and Travis Wetsch from TD Asset Management.

2022 has been a challenging year so far for most investors. Falling stock and bond prices are taking a toll on investors, marking perhaps the abrupt end to a 40-year period of gains in the bond market like no other, and rates of inflation and inflation growth not seen since 1983.

With correlations in stocks and bonds climbing to 100% this year, it’s been challenging, at the very least to find much of a diversification punch among traditional assets. BUT, liquid alternatives are reminding us that diversification is out there if you are willing to look into some of the more-complex, and often actively managed, parts of the ETF ecosystem.

Rising inflation, tightening of monetary policy in the form of rising interest rates, ongoing post-pandemic supply shocks which are the result of disruption of global supply chains, and War in Ukraine have highlighted the fact that investors need to begin to seek alternative investment return streams that do not correlate or have structurally low correlations to the equity/bond portfolios made popular during the last 4 decades.

Since 2019, Liquid alternative investments as well as real assets have become readily available to retail investors in the form of ETFs and Funds that trade on a daily basis. So, we’ve now had in and around three years plus of experience and two major market downturns, the Spring of 2020 and the first three quarters of 2022, for investors to draw from, to understand and see how newly available liquid alternative investments are delivering on their intended value proposition, and, how they can playing an effective role in diversifying portfolios for better outcomes against market volatility, economic and interest rate risk.

Please enjoy our conversation!

Highlights

• What are you seeing in the markets today and how have things evolved over the course of 2022?

• What has been TD Asset Management’s experience with Alts and Real Assets through numerous market cycles?

• How can portfolios benefit from Liquid Alts? What are the greatest weaknesses of today’s popular investment portfolios?

• In the context of portfolio construction – how can advisors or investors integrate alts and real assets into model portfolios to hedge against volatility and inflation?

• Lots of similarities between Infrastructure and Real Estate. What are the key differences?

• Please explain the significant divergence between public and private asset classes which makes the public ETF quite attractive today.

• How do you manage these unique strategies? Fundamental? Quantitative?

• How do liquid alternatives like like infrastructure and real estate fit into existing model portfolios?

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About our guests

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Jeff Evans, CFA is Vice President and Director of Quantitative Research and Risk Management. He focuses on factor analysis and quantitative risk assessment for the TD Active Global Infrastructure Equity ETF, TD Active Global Real Estate Equity ETF and Greystone funds. He is Co-Lead Portfolio Manager for the TD Global Active Real Estate Equity Strategy and the TD Active Global Infrastructure Equity Strategy. Jeff designed the first equity exchange traded fund offerings for one of the major Canadian banks.

Travis Wetsch, CFA is Lead Portfolio Manager for the TD Active Global Real Estate Equity ETF and is the Global Real Estate Sector Analyst responsible for U.S. and International Equity strategies. His career began in 1997, and he joined TDAM in 2003. Travis holds a B. Admin. from the University of Regina. He has organized fundraising campaigns for Camp Circle O’ Friends and the Chris Knox Foundation.

Darius Dale, Founder and CEO, 42 Macro LLC, and Jason Del Vicario, CFA, Portfolio Manager, Hillside Wealth Management at IA Private Wealth join us to talk about the inflation outlook and debate the “weather” and whether the threat of inflation, inflationary volatility, and recession are overblown in this climate of extremely negative sentiment around both bond and stock markets.

Darius Dale and his firm, 42 Macro, now based in upstate New York, are a ‘macro-quantamental’ research shop which have had incredible success in disrupting the world of market and economic research with his unequalled economic research and forecasting model, which now provides top down views and signalling to literally trillions of dollars across institutional investment assets, as well as a full spectrum of asset management firms, advisors, family offices and investors of all categories.

Jason Del Vicario, Hillside Wealth Management was our guest advisor and portfolio manager panelist for this episode and he contributed his bottom up fundamental views to the debate.

As a result of our guests’ philosophically opposite views on the economy, markets and investing, the debate managed to reach an interesting conclusion, where top-down meets bottom-up.

We hope you enjoy our conversation.

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Where to find our guests:

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Darius Dale on Linkedin

42 Macro LLC

Jason Del Vicario on Linkedin

Hillside Wealth Management

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Where to find the Raise Your Average crew:

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ReSolve Asset Management

ReSolve Asset Management Blog

Mike Philbrick on Linkedin

Rodrigo Gordillo on Linkedin

Adam Butler on Linkedin

Pierre Daillie on Linkedin

Joseph Lamanna on Linkedin

AdvisorAnalyst.com

“You don’t have to be brilliant, just wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long time.” Charlie Munger

Welcome to Raise Your Average, our deep dive journey into learning from the people and process behind the world of investing. Through conversations with leaders in the investments game, we peel back the layers of the onion on how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time, their energy, and their dollars.

We are all students and we are all teachers. We are the average of the 5 people we spend the most time with. Come hang out with us for a while and raise your average, as we raise ours.

Music credit: In Hip Hop, Paul Velchev (8MJZA6T3LK)

Barry Gordon, Head of Canadian Retail Asset Management, at Guardian Capital LP, and Dr. Moshe A. Milevsky, Ph.D., Professor at Schulich School of Business at York University join us to discuss how they went about solving what Nobel Laureate, William F. Sharpe, has described at the “nastiest, hardest problem in finance.”

Guardian Capital made quite a splash recently, announcing their partnership with Dr. Moshe Milevsky to develop a suite of retirement decumulation solutions, that are now available as securities for investment advisors to utilize, to address the quintessential “Retirement Dilemma,” which combine compelling income and growth strategies of targeted-yield and return asset decumulation, in what is definitively described as a ‘Modern Tontine.’

We are in the midst of what appears to be an historical regime change, following 40 years of declining government bond yields, into new regime that won’t be as friendly to investors as the last, with historically very low, though rising rates and inflationary volatility. Investors are facing what may be a very trying period for retirees, or those in pre-retirement, from a sequence of returns risk and market volatility perspective.

Highlights:

• What was the genesis of GuardPath Longevity Solutions – when did you first realize this project needed to be brought to life?
• How does the GuardPath Suite address these problems?
• What is a Tontine? What is the origin of the Tontine?
• The science of mortality credits or survivorship credits (monetizing mortality)
• Why should the insurance industry have a monopoly on mortality credits?
• How does the decumulation strategy work? What can investors expect from the Managed Decumulation strategy?
• Can the two main components of the Guardpath suite be used separately, or are they only intended to be implemented together?
• how do you operationalize the complete modern tontine strategy?
• What can the estates of investors/retirees expect from GuardPath in the event of death?
• What happens if you live past the 20 year term?

Thank you for watching and listening.

For more on GuardPath™ Longevity Solutions, visit guardpath.ca

Martin Lefebvre, Chief Investment Officer & Strategist at National Bank Investments joined us for a chat to discuss the tug of war that is going on between the bulls and bears.

Our conversation begins with Martin Lefebvre’s background as an economist, a portfolio manager and his rise to the CIO position at National Bank Investments. From there, we quickly segué into what’s been going on in markets, sentiment, and his office’s perspective on how investors should think about positioning their asset allocations for the period ahead. We also discuss in detail his team’s process and the factors and data they track and use on an ongoing basis to inform their asset allocation models, as well as the inclusion of alternative investments.

2022 has been a rocky and volatile year, so far, marked by what appears to be a change in economic and market regime, triggered by inflation volatility (supply chain disruptions and a tight labour market) and rising rates (central bank tightening), war in Ukraine, and energy crisis and economic upheaval in Europe. Broadly speaking, both stock and bond prices have seen sharp declines and while investors have suffered, they nonetheless have also bifurcated into two camps. Those who feel the Fed may begin to turn dovish sooner rather than later (hope), as a result of softening economic conditions, and those who believe we are in for a longer stretch where monetary tightening is concerned (fear).

Which camp is more likely correct? Join us for this conversation – please enjoy.

Our guests on this episode are our co-hosts , Mike Philbrick and Rodrigo Gordillo. They are principals at ReSolve Asset Management Global. They happen to also be the sub-advisors to the Horizons ReSolve Adaptive Asset Allocation ETF ( HRAA:TSX ).

We talk about the chronic problem that the majority of us investors are UNDER-DIVERSIFIED. Profoundly under-diversified.

Why? Diversifiers are either ‘killing it’ or ‘killing you.’

The problem is that effective uncorrelated diversifiers underperform during benign market periods, and therefore wind up being under-invested during volatile down market periods. This time has been no exception, as most investors have discovered.

The past two years’ conversations on this show with some of the industry’s most interesting and successful thought leaders has been so highly instructive on this topic.It’s become obvious in all these conversations is that our fellow hosts Mike, Adam, and Rodrigo from ReSolve Asset Management not only love to talk about what they do, i.e. what they’re their cooking – they eat their own cooking.

So it’s fitting that today we’re going to be talking thoughtfully about how ReSolve ‘eats the free lunch’ of global diversification.

Having been in your shoes, as investors, as former advisors, and then as portfolio managers, Mike, Adam and Rodrigo and their firm, have been through multiple major market cycles. They each brought their personal experience and learnings of the last 20-30 years to the table and devoted the last 10-12 years to developing versions of what they do now at ReSolve Asset Management, in the strategies they manage and sub-advise.

They co-founded ReSolve Asset Management in order to break out on their own in September 2015 and began the process of offering their investment strategies to investors via separately managed accounts, mutual funds, hedge funds, and ETFs (HRAA is sponsored by Horizons ETFs) in both the U.S. and Canada.

The last three years, which have seen some the most volatile and unprecedented bouts of uncertainty and market fluctuations beginning with the Pandemic, and culminating in this years violent reaction to inflation volatility and rising policy rates, have been a rock-solid proving ground for ReSolve’s strategies.

YTD to September 21, 2022, HRAA has a positive return – during the same period that has seen the traditional assets of 60:40 portfolios get trounced, as inflation volatility, market volatility, and rising rates have moved sharply against both stock and bond values, broadly and at the same time.

We hope you enjoy our conversation – we get to the bottom of these questions:

– Where are we in the life-span of the last cycle’s winning 60:40 portfolio model?

– What are some diversifiers investors have been reaching for?

– What is different about ReSolve Asset Management’s investment approach?

– What is HRAA?

– How is HRAA possible?

– What is ReSolve’s Adaptive Asset Allocation framework?

– How does it work?

– What can you learn from it?

– How does ReSolve manage risk?

– How does the strategy provide tail risk protection?

– How can you begin to think about risk-balanced adaptive asset allocation and portfolio diversification?

– Where and how does it fit in a portfolio?

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Where to find the Raise Your Average crew:

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HRAA – Horizons ReSolve Adaptive Asset Allocation ETF

ReSolve Asset Management

ReSolve Asset Management Blog

Mike Philbrick on Linkedin

Rodrigo Gordillo on Linkedin

Adam Butler on Linkedin

Pierre Daillie on Linkedin

Joseph Lamanna on Linkedin

AdvisorAnalyst.com