Archive for the ‘Industry Changes + Trends’ Category

Late last week, the media was buzzing about indexing giant Vanguard’s entry into the Canadian investment fund market.  (See today’s Globe & Mail and National Post for related stories.)  Today, Vanguard officially announced...

Earlier this year, I wrote about how to gauge the sustainability of monthly income funds’ fat distributions so that investors and advisors could make better decisions and set realistic expectations.  Since then, I’ve received a steady...

Real estate has long formed the core of investors’ hard asset exposure.  Individuals and institutions invest in real estate for many reasons – i.e. diversification, cash flow and/or inflation protection.  As with asset classes beyond...

In the May 2011 issue of Investment Executive, I wrote about how I approach the analysis of complex products.  In short, when analyzing products – particularly complex offerings – the most insight is often obtained via the simplest...

There has been a recent flurry of changes in mutual fund lead managers.  This is partly the result of industry consolidation – as managers become disenchanted with asset-gathering behemoths.  In other cases, money managers want to scratch...

I recently received an e-mail about a blog post questioning the validity of DALBAR’s annual study of investor returns – Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behaviour.  The blog post – DALBAR study overstates investors’ bad...

Last fall, GrowthWorks launched a very public campaign to win the takeover battle for the VenGrowth family of labour sponsored investment funds (LSIFs).  VenGrowth’s preferred offer was from Covington II Fund but I thought that...

Despite having spent most of my career designing & overseeing portfolios for various types of clients, I continue to be shocked as to how much time & energy is expended in the institutional asset management world (ie: group retirement...

I was recently asked to comment for an article on a small, top-performing mutual fund – Redwood Global Small Cap.  While the article included a couple of my comments, there was no room for some of the more striking statistics I found when...

Valentine’s Day is a day to celebrate love.  But on February 14, 2011, I wasn’t feeling the love from the mutual fund industry.  On that day, the Investment Funds Institute of Canada announced that it would cease reporting...