Most Canadians are aware of the Canada Pension Plan, and you may have heard organizations like those representing teachers, police and firefighters, Ivy league Universities, and charitable foundations have their own sophisticated investment management teams. We call these organizations “institutional investors”. They typically pay much lower fees for their investments and have access to types of investments that individuals investing through banks and independent broker/dealers usually don’t. Yet today only about 37% of Canadians still have access to these type of investments through their employer pension plans – leaving the rest of us challenged to keep up.
Inflation is back – which reduces the purchasing power of your money consistently if you don’t invest wisely, and interest rates drop to very low levels every time the economy hits turbulence. This means it’s difficult to diversify your investments and control the amount of volatility in your portfolio, which is the extent to which the value of your investments fluctuates. Since institutional investors are organizations, they don’t retire or experience anxiety when their investments drop in value, but they do seek consistent performance from their investments – in up or down markets - so they can fund their ongoing cash flow needs.
As both a Portfolio Manager and Investment Fund Manager, Q Wealth operates our own investment platform – designed to take a “buy vs build” approach, seeking the best possible mix of investment solutions combined with great value.
In many cases, we are able to use our capabilities and professional grade investment tools to replicate the same strategies used by third-party investment funds at lower costs, saving our clients money. To ensure diversification, our due diligence process identifies a hand-picked selection of outside managers (including popular Canadian fund providers) where we believe clients receive strong value from their expertise, and often obtain substantial discounts versus what retail advisors and their clients would pay.
We provide the flexibility to allow our registered advisors to use their professional discretion, with the collaborative advantage of being part of our investment committee – a multi-faceted team with greater capacity than individual advisors trying to pick and implement investment strategies alone. Using this approach, we’re able to enhance strategies by applying advanced techniques such as currency hedging, options overlays, and trading processes designed to minimize hidden execution costs. We also leverage our collective client buying power and status as a PM firm to access types of private investments not available to retail investors.
