THE END OF A SERIES AND THE BEGINNING OF A JOURNEY Upon addressing, debating and resolving the aforementioned topics and issues, the portfolio building process will be com­plete. Investment policy has been developed, macro- and micro- expectational factors relevant to investing have been identified, portfolio composition has been decided, and assets have been allocated and [...]

Dollar cost averaging versus lump sum investing: Once money managers have been selected, either in the form of mu­tual fund managers or professional managers to whom you give discretionary power to make the day to day decisions in your in­vestment accounts, the final decisions to be made are about the timing of the actual placement [...]

On the other hand, a large influx of cash from new investors may force the same manager to invest even when the markets are soft to prevent a larger cash position from pulling down the overall performance of the portfolio. Diversification: Most equity mutual funds hold 80 to 120 dif­ferent securities. In a separately managed [...]

‘Separate account portfolios’ differ from most common in­vestment accounts with a stockbroker in that it is rare for bro­kers to be qualified or licensed to manage accounts on a discretionary basis. According to securities regulations, brokers must ask for and receive consent on every transaction in a cli­ent’s account before executing that transaction. Failure to [...]

The Europe Australia Far East (EAFE) index is the most widely used benchmark for evaluating the performance of for­eign equity money managers. It is interesting to note that inter­national managers have performed much better than their Canadian counterparts compared with passive forms of money management (Figure 2). Some argue that there are more oppor­tunities to [...]

For most investors, implementation consists of simply ‘biting the bullet’ and putting real money into action. However, we can learn from people with successful pension plans who first complete a due diligence process, and then implement their IPS by proceeding with the investment options and strategies pro­posed by an investment management consultant. This is an [...]

When asked recently what I am writing about in this se­ries of articles, I explained that each of the last few arti­cles has outlined how the individual investor can apply one step of the six-step investment management consulting (IMC) process in their own portfolio. My colleague was surprised be­cause it is typically affluent institutional or [...]