Market Insights

Market busters

When markets tank – even though a correction, or even a bear market, was long overdue – investors usually have difficulty staying the course. That’s not news for fi- nancial advisors. Risk tolerance morphs into loss aversion as the enduring fact of market cycles is learned one more time. Are market cycles avoidable? There’s no […]

By Scot Blythe |December 22, 2008

8 min read

Rewarding risk

Portfolio and fund managers have short time horizons when investing. Their compensation promotes asset gathering and short-term performance. That means managers are paid for hot annual numbers, trade more frequently than is sometimes prudent, and subject clients to unnecessary costs. Managers will deny it, but they all try to “time markets,” a notoriously difficult and […]

By Ioulia Tretiakova |December 22, 2008

5 min read

Southern saga

What’s up down south? Over the past year, we’ve witnessed the re-emergence of a presidential candidate who in August 2007, with a campaign in tatters, was counted out. We’ve heard about pigs and lipstick. We’ve met Joe the Plumber. We’ve been witness to unprecedented natural and financial disasters. We’ve seen what for many Canadians have […]

By Terry Ritchie and Brian Wruk |December 12, 2008

5 min read

Retirements last longer than the market correction

It might be an obvious statement to some, but it’s one I feel needs to be made: your clients’ retirement will last longer than this market correction — much, much longer. It might be hard to think about this right now, given how much the markets have dropped, but it is important to keep perspective […]

By Peter Drake |December 11, 2008

6 min read