Building Wealth

For the first 30 or so years of working, saving and investing, you’ll be first in the mode of getting out of the hole (paying down debt), and then building your net worth (that’s wealth accumulation.). But don’t forget, wealth accumulation isn’t the ultimate goal. Decumulation is! (a separate category here at the Hub).

Partnership and performance fees: a new risk-sharing model for investors?

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Tridelta’s Ted Rechtshaffen

By Ted Rechtshaffen, Tridelta Financial 

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

It was time for a change in thinking.

Why can’t investment management firms share the risk with their clients? Why does it always feel like it is stacked in favour of the investment managers and not the clients?

The answer to those questions is that investment managers CAN share the risk with clients, but they don’t want to. TriDelta Financial launched in 2005 and has charged traditional fees since the beginning. Today, we felt that we had the right investment management and infrastructure in place, and it was time to introduce a new approach.

I know that we wanted to be known as a firm that thinks differently and acts differently. It was time to put our money where our mouth is. As a result we have just launched the TriDelta Partnership Fee. At a high level, if your investment returns are negative, your management fee is credited back to you. If your 12 month return is between 0% and 3%, you will have 0.5% credited back to you. If your 12 month return is over 7%, there will be a performance fee charged to your account.

For the longest time, the investment industry was set up in a way that was tilted in favour of the industry. In fairness, every industry works that way to some degree. What is interesting about the investment industry is that there is a lot of discussion about risk and reward. Of course, this is only in relation to the clients’ portfolio. For the investment firm the only risk has been ‘don’t do too poorly or you will lose clients’.

Sharing gain and pain

If a client is down 5% on their portfolio, the portfolio manager will still make their 1% to 2.5% fee. If a client is up 15%, the portfolio manager will still make their 1% to 2.5% fee. There is no question that all investment managers would prefer a higher return for their clients. Having said that, the clear disconnect is the sharing of gain or pain.

Even worse is the traditional hedge fund industry. The fees of 1% to 2% are considered a weak year for a hedge fund. They decided that if they do ok or well, they should get a ‘performance fee’. If they do poorly, they don’t give back anything. Essentially their fee model is “you do poorly, we do well, you do well, we do great”.

If a manager can deliver something truly exceptional they deserve to be rewarded. The problem is when the truly average are simply charging very high fees.

Our new Partnership Fee truly shares the risk. In fact, if you lose money in a year, your management fees will be returned to you. On the other hand, if you earn 7% or more, you will pay a performance fee.

In addition to being a model that better shares the risk, it also lowers the clients overall volatility, essentially lowering their downside risk.

No other Canadian firm has this kind of fee-sharing model

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Prepare for big deficits but not yet time for Trump and Dump

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Character portrait of Donald Trump giving a speech on white backgroundBy Tyler Mordy, Forstrong Global Asset Management

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Donald Trump has claimed the US presidency. While this may be another “unthinkable,” no one should be surprised. Rising populist sentiment has been a defining feature of the post-crisis world.

While a confluence of factors are driving discontent, an overriding theme is the perception that gains since 2008 have accrued to a wealthy few.  Trump successfully tapped into those views and won. Clearly, America has sent a message to the political elite: “you’re fired.”

Where to from here? Not to be denied is that market volatility is set to rise. Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric could particularly create instabilities and imperil prosperity. But in a globalized world defined by a move toward closer interconnectedness, the “biggest loser” would undoubtedly be the United States.

Trump and Dump? Not Yet

Volatility should also be viewed opportunistically. Our Investment Team has written extensively on “Trump proofing” client portfolios. The first line of defense is wide global diversification with exposures to longer-running megatrends. For example, commodities are stuck in a grinding sideways market. Politics cannot change that meaningfully.

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How a Personal Pension Plan can mimic gold-plated DB pensions

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Jean-Pierre Laporte

By Jean-Pierre Laporte

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

There are approximately 1.2 million Canadians capable of saving for their retirement and mimicking the ‘gold plated’ pensions of federal civil servants and teachers.  Are you among them?

It’s well-known in policy circles that traditional defined benefit (“DB”) plans are better for employees but worse for the employers that underwrite them.

Why? Because the nature of the pension promise itself builds in an assumption that there will be sufficient assets, on an actuarial basis, to replicate a certain level of income, well into retirement.  If markets do well, the promise is met.  If markets underperform, these DB plans require that the employer  dip into its corporate pockets to make up the difference through ‘special payments’.  Short of a corporate insolvency, the DB model offers a guarantee of financial security that does not exist in any other type of tax-assisted plans (such as the RRSP, DPSP, PRPP or Defined Contribution plans).

While the mention of DB Plans conjures up visions of large public sector behemoths like the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan or the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan, they also exist at the other extreme:  small professional corporations created by a single individual to carry out a given profession.  Recently, small business owners and professionals are turning to the Personal Pension Plan (“PPP”), a type of registered pension plan that offers both DB and Defined Contribution (DC) accumulation methods under a single roof, with the freedom to select between the two each year.

The reason why the PPP works so well at the individual professional corporation (“PC”) level is that the interests of the plan member and of the shareholder are perfectly aligned. In years of market underperformance the requirement that extra tax-deductible contributions (special payments) be made, is simply a transfer of wealth from the owner’s taxable corporate pocket to his/her tax-deferred personal pension pocket.  Likewise, strong market performance can lead to a “contribution holiday” for the PC and an even safer retirement pension for the shareholder/member.

Upgrading from RRSP savings to PPP savings

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7 tips for investing in the Trump era

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Investors are inquiring how to invest their nest eggs after the U.S. election and the unexpected win by Donald Trump.” Let’s keep it very simple and explore a dose of reverse engineering. I highlight seven top tips for adoption:

USA presidential election donald trump, vector illustration, Editorial use only

1.) Ask where you want your nest egg to be in five, ten or twenty years.

2.) It’s imperative to always think and act logically, not emotionally.

3.) Accept that bond and stock market volatility is here to stay.

4.) Revisit your expectations as to goals, needs, objectives and plan of action.

5.) Implement, tweak and be patient with your long-term strategies.

6.) Cut to the chase and focus on managing your investing risks.

7.)  Keep cash available for buying opportunities during market sell-offs.

These straightforward, sensible tips can stickhandle your nest egg out of trouble most times.

AdrianAdrian Mastracci, MBA,  is president and portfolio manager for Vancouver-based KCM Wealth Management Inc., specializing in designing and stewarding retirement portfolios

Are your investing goals different after the U.S. election?

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President Elect Donald Trump

We’ve been doing a lot of reading leading up to and since the election: as you’d expect there is no shortage of opinions of what is going to happen to financial markets and how investors should position themselves as a result.

The investing opinions vary as extremely as the political views.  We’ve read crazy things and some very sensible things.  Perhaps the best articulation of how to approach this was written by Ron Lieber  in the New York Times on Wednesday when he asked, “Are your goals different now?”

“Once upon a time — like, say, last week — you had an investing plan that was based on goals that may come years or decades from now. Perhaps you’re hoping to buy your first home. Maybe you’re trying to save enough to send a couple of children to college. You hope to retire by age 67.

Has any of that changed? If it hasn’t yet, then it’s not clear why your investments should.”  – Ron Lieber, New York Times

Big events happen and market volatility sometimes accompanies. That doesn’t mean you should try to guess the market’s reaction. As Lieber hints, changing your investment strategy to either protect you or try to take advantage of market volatility can be a sucker’s game.  At best you’ll get lucky: at worst you’ll fall victim to many of the psychological pitfalls that leave most investors, both individual and institutional, chasing the market to the detriment of their investment performance. Speculating and investing are very different things. You are an investor and investing successfully is a long term game.

So what should you do?

1.) Ignore the noise

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