Our Family Office team understands the challenges that successful families face and help you examine all options so you can choose the right path for your family.
The team of investment advisors here at Fuller Landau in Toronto will work closely with you to evaluate your financial situation and develop a clear understanding of your financial goals and objectives to ensure they align with our core tenets of:
Capital preservation
Our primary focus is to preserve your invested capital, particularly in down markets. We never want to lose your money.
Balanced risks and returns
Our investment policy aims to deliver steady, absolute, risk-adjusted returns while minimizing risk and volatility. A portfolio that earns consistent, positive, higher single-digit returns will perform better in the long run than a portfolio with volatile returns.
How our investment advisors help
Asset allocation
In addition to traditional and hedge/alternatives strategies, our seasoned investment advisors in Toronto also offer access to unique or opportunistic investments that you might not see elsewhere.
Investment strategies
Once we understand your goals, we create a custom asset allocation strategy and investment policy statement (IPS) for you that will govern our recommendations. Next, we’ll give you portfolio manager recommendations that align with your IPS strategy.
Portfolio manager selection
We are truly independent and can work with any manager, with no restrictions. However, the following three characteristics are important to us when we select portfolio managers:
- Trust – We must trust the portfolio managers with whom you place your money.
- Experience – The portfolio manager drives strategy and oversees all major decisions. In our minds, they’re the most important key to every allocation. We carefully vet all our fund managers, reviewing their past performance and gaining a deep understanding of their investment selection process.
- Alignment of interests – We tend to work with smaller, boutique portfolio managers with whom we can build a close-knit relationship, for several reasons. These portfolio managers are the owners of their business so “key decision maker” turnover is not an issue. We are able to pick up the phone and call these key decision makers directly, at any time, rather than dealing with layers of associates. And, the managers have a significant amount of their own capital invested, alongside and on the same terms as our clients’ capital.
In addition, our portfolio manager selection process considers these criteria:
- Decision making – We inquire about every aspect of the portfolio manager’s decision-making process, including security selection, buy/sell decisions, leverage, currency hedging, and criteria used to make decisions.
- No style-drift – We work with portfolio managers who demonstrate consistent conviction in their core strategies and who follow through on them over the long-term, ignoring short-term volatility and fluctuations.
- Risk management – Our primary focus is to preserve your capital, which our portfolio managers understand. We make sure our managers’ strategies don’t involve taking undue risk and that they are willing to revert to cash when there is too much volatility in the market. We review the systems they have in place to prevent having concentrated security positions.
- Metrics – Along with absolute performance, we also analyze funds for risk-adjusted returns, volatility, and benchmark comparisons, where available, using various ratios and metrics.
Ongoing monitoring
Our investment advisors stay in regular contact with our fund managers throughout the year, and we:
- Prepare easy-to-read consolidated quarterly reports for all our clients
- Arrange in-person meetings with each fund manager to review our clients’ portfolios and current and forward-looking positioning
- Compare our fund managers to other managers using the same strategies to ensure they are performing in the top quartile within their peer group
- Rebalance your portfolio as your circumstances, goals, and risk tolerance change, if there are changes to the asset allocation strategy, or when a manager is no longer performing at the level we expect
For more information, contact us or meet our investment advisory team.
