Upstairs, Downstairs

Read this year’s Investment Executive Brokerage Report Card firm by firm and the striking thing is not any single dealer. It is the sameness. Fourteen firms, one pitch — comprehensive wealth, a partner for every stage of life — and one strategy. Keep the wealthy households you already have. Grow with them. Capture the wealth when it passes to their heirs.

It is a sound plan for any one firm. The disappointment is that every major dealer has settled on the same one, and the model it produces serves fewer and fewer Canadians.

By most measures the firms are thriving. They are investing in planning and technology, advisor satisfaction is high and the households they court are served well. That is not in dispute. What is worth examining is who the model is now built for — and who it prices out.

The strategy is retention. The growth the firms chase is not the new investor or the younger saver; it is the book they already hold and the inheritance behind it. Advisor books grew again this year, to an average $310 million.

But the gains were concentrated at the top. The wealthiest fifth lifted their average book to $637.6 million, most of it in households worth over $2 million. The other 80% barely budged. The average client household now holds about $1.8 million. RBC calls the intergenerational transfer its “big growth opportunity.”

Why concentrate on the wealthy? There is a logic to it. Comprehensive advice is expensive to deliver. The planning bench the firms advertise — tax, estate, insurance specialists — costs money to build and more to keep. And every dollar spent to serve a client raises the minimum necessary for that client to pay their way.

So, the fuller the service, the higher the floor. Most firms post no formal minimum, but the floor is real all the same. As research manager Katie Keir puts it, some of the planning on offer opens, even if “you may need a million” to secure it. The floor is not on the rate card. It is in the math.

Run that logic across every dealer and you get the shape of the market. The firms have built advice upward, not outward. Full service rises to the wealthiest households; everyone else gets less help, often little more than a self-directed screen.

This would matter less if advice were a true luxury — a nicety the wealthy can afford and the rest can skip. It is not. According to the industry’s own studies, advised Canadians accumulate two to four times the assets of comparable non-advised households over 15 years.

The value comes mostly from the plain things: saving more, staying invested, not selling in a panic. Not the estate planner, not the tax specialist, not the insurance agent — just discipline. The part of advice that builds wealth costs the least to provide.

The smaller client is not always turned away. Most times they’re just sorted. The integrated firms keep the advisor for their larger accounts and route everyone else to a discount brokerage or robo-platform they own. To that client the offer looks generous: low fees, a portfolio in minutes. But only the portfolio is cheap. Real advice — a human, a plan, someone who knows the household — still commands a premium.

Priced out of advice, these clients are handed an app offering one-tap trading, crypto and myriad single-stock and thematic bets. Frictionless to start, corrosive to returns. The Ontario Securities Commission has shown that these apps drive overtrading, which in turn drags returns down.

The Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization’s own 2026 testing found that investors opening crypto, options and margin accounts could barely answer basic questions about the risks; even the highest-scoring group averaged fewer than one of three correct.

The people shut out by asset minimum thresholds are the ones advice helps most. The young saver with decades to compound. The family one bad decision away from a costly mistake. For them advice is the difference, yet too often it is the one thing they can’t afford.

None of this was dictated by the math. The arithmetic is real, but the strategy is chosen — and a handful of firms, Edward Jones among them, have chosen differently, setting thresholds low to serve the smaller client.

That only sharpens the disappointment. Most of the major dealers ran the same numbers and reached the same conclusion: the affluent are worth the cost of serving, and most Canadians are not. So, they built a basement for everyone else — and left it empty, no one down there to guide them.

The dealers did not pour this basement alone. Regulators and the industry have spent years widening retail access to products once reserved for institutions: private equity and private credit, liquid alternatives, leveraged and single-stock ETFs, crypto and event contracts. All of it sold as giving ordinary Canadians more. More ways to bet, mostly.

If better outcomes are really the goal, the answer was never one more product in the basement. It was a person — someone who knows their client, someone who will take a call before that client sells at the bottom. That is the access worth widening — the staircase out of the basement.