PAUL GREEN Green Private Wealth Counsel
For Paul Green of Holliswealth’s Green Private Wealth Counsel, making a living as a portfolio manager came indirectly. “I started in ’92 in this business with absolutely no intention of being a portfolio manager,” he says. “I wanted to be a financial planner who delivered holistic advice in all areas of people’s finances but delegate the portfolio management. By the 2000s, I was getting fairly miserable results from the money managers, and that forced me to decide I needed to do it on my own.” Making the decision to switch to portfolio management was only step one. Such decisions are not made lightly, and it would take years of careful planning and hard work before Green Private Wealth Counsel was where he wanted it.
“There still is a lot of strength in US equities and bonds” “I needed to be more tactical and have the ability to make trades quickly on my clients’ behalf,” Green says. “It took me a little while because I was MFDA in 2009, so I had to figure out how to accomplish the portfolio management piece for my clients. Toward the end of 2011, we decided on Dundee, which is now Hollis. By October of 2012, we had the investment piece the way we wanted it, but we needed to satisfy three years as an IIROC advisor before becoming a portfolio manager.” The move into portfolio management has proven a great success so far, as the US economy’s resurgence in recent years has provided plenty of opportunities for growth. “Since 2012, it has gone very well for the firm,” Green says. “Our call was US-centric – US dollar, US stocks and US bonds and T-bills. We also have a concentrated Canadian stock portfolio, and that has done very well, certainly compared to the TSX.” The US-centric approach has not been as beneficial in 2016, but Green is still confident that things will turn around before too long. “What worked very well for us from 2012 to 2015, the US dollar, has turned around on us a bit,” he says. “We are experiencing some short-term pain, but we don’t see that continuing long-term. There still is a lot of strength in US equities and bonds, so we are feeling fairly comfortable.” As a relative newcomer to portfolio management who started in the job during a period of regulatory and technological upheaval, Green says adaptation is key to success in this industry. “It’s constant change. We try to keep it fairly simple. The main thing we look at is the ability to make tactical shifts quickly. If you have a client base of 300 or more households and you don’t have discretion, it’s almost impossible to make changes. So our main focus is the ability to make change and do it efficiently.”
MICHAEL CROFTS
DARREN DANSEREAU
RANDALL ABRAMSON
Mawer Investment Management
QV Investors
Trapeze Asset Management
As director of fixed management at Mawer Investment Management, Michael Crofts oversees Canadian fixed-income securities for the firm, serving as portfolio manager for the Mawer Canadian Money Market Fund and the Mawer Canadian Bond Fund, as well as co-manager for the Mawer Global Bond Fund. With experience in the investment industry dating back to 1997, Crofts is also part of Mawer’s asset allocation team. Founded in 1974, Mawer manages more than $30 billion in assets for individual and institutional investors, and continues to expand, now employing more than 100 people with bases in Calgary, Toronto and Singapore.
In a recent newsletter to his clients at QV Investors, Darren Dansereau outlined the fortunes of two companies that have prospered during a tough economic climate: oil & gas drilling services firm Ensign Energy Services and iconic retailer Canadian Tire. Dansereau explained that good governance and the ability to adapt to challenging conditions were the main reasons for this. As a vice-president and portfolio manager with QV Investors, Dansereau imparts similar advice to his clients on a daily basis in his management of the QV Canadian Equity Pooled Fund.
May was a busy month for Randall Abramson, CEO of Trapeze Asset Management, as the firm and its parent company, Trapeze Capital Corp., acquired beneficial ownership of $1.77 million worth of convertible debentures issued by Jackpot Digital. Jackpot develops software for online interactive games – clearly a growth industry – and Trapeze is using the purchase for its ambitious investment purposes. For Abramson, who co-founded Trapeze in 1999 to offer discretionary portfolio management for institutions and high-net-worth individuals, it’s another sign of progress for the growing firm.
www.wealthprofessional.ca
31