FEATURES
COVER STORY: HOT LIST 2017 JOE CANAVAN
ALAN WICKS Manulife Financial
The Manulife Dividend Income Fund marks its fifth anniversary this year, and during that time, assets have grown to $2.1 billion. Rated as a five-star fund by Morningstar, its five-year rate of return stands at an impressive 15.94%. Overseeing that performance is lead portfolio manager Alan Wicks. Alongside Duncan Anderson, Jonathan Popper and Conrad Dabiet, Wicks heads the Manulife Value Equity team, a collaboration established in 1996 that now manages more than $17 billion in assets. “The Value Equity team seeks to de-risk businesses and invest in companies with the best risk/reward,” Wicks explains. “We achieve this by comparing the buy and sell targets with the current market price of every security in the team’s investment universe – this comparison determines the upside opportunity or downside risk that exists for every company, given its current market price.” In constructing the portfolio for the Manulife Dividend Income Fund, Wicks and his team use a strategy called ‘conglomerate portfolio,’ which ensures that anyone buying into the fund can count on numerous checks and balances embedded in the way it is run. “This approach involves thinking about the portfolio as if it were a conglomerate, with divisions of the conglomerate comprised of individual public businesses,” Wicks says. “The Value Equity team constructs the conglomerate with diversified and uncorrelated divisional profitability, and focuses on bottom-up stock selection and diversifying by business risk.” This method is used to limit exposure to the more cyclical sectors such as materials, energy and financials, which have a heavy weighting in the Canadian markets. For that reason, the portfolios managed by Wicks and his team bear little resemblance to the underlying benchmarks. “Active management is nothing new to us – we have never looked like the index,” he says. “The challenges are no different today than in the past 20 years. The goal is to provide superior risk-adjusted returns for clients and partners, and the team has done that by looking different than the index.”
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LOGiQ Asset Management
A respected veteran of the business, Joe Canavan knows a thing or two about what it takes to succeed in the asset management field. Previously the CEO of both Synergy Asset Management and Assante Asset Management, Canavan occupies the same position at the newly formed LOGiQ Asset Management. The firm is a result of last year’s merger between Aston Hill Financial and Front Street Capital; the company has since also acquired Integra Global Advisors, bringing its total AUM to $5.2 billion. Soon after being named CEO of LOGiQ, Canavan outlined his vision for the firm: “This transaction positions the combined company for future growth as a leading intermediate independent asset management company and a strong alternative to bank-owned asset managers.”
KAREN ADAMS Fundserv
In April, industry service provider Fundserv named Karen Adams its new president and CEO. In doing so, the company selected someone with a wealth of experience across the financial sphere. A graduate of Queen’s University and the University of British Columbia, Adams received her Institute of Corporate Directors designation at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management in 2014. During that time, she served as president and CEO of Alberta Pension Services, where she oversaw a $60 million revamp of the organization. As the new leader of Fundserv, Adams will oversee strategic direction, products and day-to-day operations.
STEVE HAWKINS Horizons ETFs
Horizons president and CEO Steve Hawkins has been a regular fixture in financial media over the past couple of months, following his company’s launch of the world’s first marijuana-focused ETF in April. The Horizons Medical Marijuana Life Sciences ETF (HMMJ) includes licensed medical marijuana producers in Canada, as well as various ancillary companies across North America. With the legalization of recreational cannabis slated for Canada Day 2018, Hawkins has been a noted advocate for the vast potential of this burgeoning industry. Currently, Horizons has 77 ETFs listed on the TSX and more than $7.5 billion of assets under management; Hawkins and his team will be hoping the firm’s latest product can boost that number considerably in the years ahead.
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