Cutting Through the Noise
November 12, 2007
The Globe and Mail, Report on Business Published November 10, 2007 As an equity guy, I don't like to admit it, but I recently spent some time with the bond team at Connor Clark & Lunn Investment Management. Bondies aren't ...
Read MoreNovember 8, 2007
I don’t know what the market is going to do in the coming months. I do know we will have weak markets at some point (and I suspect they could be quite messy given the extremes we are now experiencing ...
Read MoreNovember 6, 2007
As I caught up on my reading this weekend, I was perusing an advertising feature that the Investment Fund Institute of Canada (IFIC) placed in the papers last week. The lead article was a review of a survey that IFIC ...
Read MoreOctober 30, 2007
After being grounded for five months, I got back on the road last week. Connor, Clark & Lunn was putting on an Investor Day in Toronto for their clients and that was ample reason to get me on a plane ...
Read MoreOctober 29, 2007
The Globe and Mail, Report on Business Published October 27, 2007 My partners and I were bouncing around ideas this week for an advertising program. We weren't coming up with anything too brilliant and even starting to get a little ...
Read MoreOctober 22, 2007
We have recently submitted a comment to the Joint Forum of Financial Regulators on their proposal (National Instrument 81-406) for a point-of-purchase document for mutual and segregated funds. If you have trouble sleeping, we have posted a copy of our ...
Read MoreOctober 17, 2007
On August 13th, we published a piece titled Proud to Shroud II – Claymore Balanced Funds , in which we discussed two new ETFs being offered by Claymore Investments. The new funds prompted us to make two comments. First, these ...
Read MoreSeptember 25, 2007
On efficientfrontier.com , William Bernstein recently published an article titled ‘ Comin’ Around Again? ’ in which he made some comments on the proliferation of ETF offerings in the U.S. I think it serves as a good follow-up to our ...
Read MoreAugust 13, 2007
I’m picking on Claymore Investments again. I don’t have a thing about them, but they’re hard to ignore because they advertise a lot and are releasing a steady stream of new products. They are also an interesting firm in that ...
Read MoreAugust 8, 2007
I wrote a piece in March about the TD Bank double ending an investment banking transaction ( TD Securities Does a Double Ender ). The theme of the posting was how free the investment banks are to operate with huge ...
Read MoreAugust 7, 2007
The Globe and Mail, Report on Business Published August 4, 2007 At some point in the next year or two, it is going to get much harder to be an investment professional. A significant market decline and/or bursting of the ...
Read MoreJuly 31, 2007
I’ve admitted before that I am a Jeremy Grantham junky. He’s not ahead of Steve Nash or Lucinda Williams, but he’s in the running. He’s often accused of being perpetually bearish, as am I, but both of us are able ...
Read MoreJuly 25, 2007
In this podcast, Dr. Sandy Nairn, the chief executive of Edinburgh Partners, discusses his firm's history, investment philosophy, approach to global equity investing, and why "this time it's different" are the four most expensive words in the investing language.
Read MoreJuly 23, 2007
The Globe and Mail, Report on Business Published July 21, 2007 My first gig in the investment industry in the early eighties was as a conglomerate analyst at Richardson Greenshields. It was while doing that job I first became sensitive ...
Read MoreJuly 19, 2007
Chris, Scott and I have had ample opportunity to see what’s going on out there in investor land as we’ve each had a chance to work with a number of our new clients. We have done enough portfolio reviews and ...
Read MoreJuly 9, 2007
The Globe and Mail, Report on Business Published July 7, 2007 Avner Mandelman's column in this space last Saturday featured the investment philosophy of Warren Buffett. If you've been reading this column or my blog, it's obvious that I also ...
Read MoreJune 28, 2007
We read in Larry MacDonald’s blog ( Avalanche of New Exchange Traded Funds ) on the Canadian Business site that there have been 18 new exchange-traded funds (ETFs) created this year in Canada. Horizons BetaPro has been the most active ...
Read MoreJune 27, 2007
We’ve written about fund manager changes a couple of times this year ( When a Manager Moves, Be Prepared and Knowing When to Sell is Key to Smart Investing ). Needless to say, we think that the person pulling the ...
Read MoreJune 25, 2007
There has been lots written about the impact that hedge funds and private equity firms are having on the stewardship of public companies. There is a concern, which I share, that with these deep-pocketed players hovering, it is more difficult ...
Read MoreJune 25, 2007
The Globe and Mail, Report on Business Published June 23, 2007 When it comes to distribution, the investment management business is remarkably similar to the media industry. The number of distribution channels is growing rapidly and change is the only ...
Read MoreJune 21, 2007
My wife tells me I can be a real downer at parties. There are lots of reasons why she says that, but one is that I just can’t help myself when people start telling me how well they’ve done on ...
Read MoreJune 18, 2007
Early on in his book Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment , David Swensen talks about market timing and asset allocation. His words reinforce how we feel about the topic. After writing about how market timing has had ...
Read MoreJune 12, 2007
I’ve shown great restraint. It’s been seven months since I wrote specifically about principal-protected notes (PPNs). But I came across two things last week which reinforced that the structured product lunacy (including PPNs) continues unabated in the Canadian wealth management ...
Read MoreJune 11, 2007
The Globe and Mail, Report on Business Published June 9, 2007 One of the reasons I’ve recently focused my career on the individual investor, after years of working with pension clients, is because there is a huge disconnect between their ...
Read MoreJune 6, 2007
Steadyhand has a very definite investment philosophy. We believe our funds should be (1) absolute-return oriented; (2) concentrated on the managers’ best ideas; (3) unconstrained; and (4) have low turnover (i.e. tax efficient). The least understood of these four tenets ...
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