Scott Sheppard
May 02, 2022
Tactical Growth Mandate - Weekly Briefing
It’s been a great week here in The Bahamas. Great weather, resort, and food. To my surprise is wasn’t the best spot I could have chosen to tune out the noise of Wall Street. The first annual “Crypto Bahamas” conference was hosted here and it was star-studded, and not just from my financial perspective. The attendees featured many of the great minds in blockchain technology and investment management that I follow and subscribe to their services. Key note speakers also included Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Tom Brady. This was essentially my equivalent of the Oscars – without the face slap, of course.
From my deckchair on Saturday, I also tuned into Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder meeting. In a world where media and opinions are more common than the grains of sand on the beach, it’s nice to sit and listen to the original voice of reason. My favorite part was when Mr. Buffett slammed Wall Street for turning the stock market into “a gambling parlor”.
The Tactical Growth mandate exists to help you navigate the noise, be different than the crowd, and achieve stronger results. Mr. Buffet is living proof that not mimicking the big institutions of Wall Street can lead to outperforming them. The investment management industry has become very different in recent years. For the do-it-yourself investor, discount brokerages in the U.S.A. allow you to trade for free, but do so by selling your orders to hedge funds who control the price on you. For the passive investor, you usually end up owning a well-marketed portfolio that acts just like every other institution’s, meaning that you can’t beat the market, because you end up owning a part of the whole market.
Consider my simple weekly chart of competitor performance below. We are starting to see some trends emerge after just 4 months of tracking. Firstly, on a year-to-date basis, the Vanguard All-Equity Portfolio, VEQT (which you can buy on-your-own for a cost of 0.24%) is performing as-good-or-better than the managed-portfolio solutions of the biggest Canadian Banks. VEQT is composed entirely of low cost index-ETFs. Secondly, you’ll also notice that the returns of the different bank-portfolios mimic each other extremely closely.
Clients are going to have difficult conversation with their advisors about strategy and fees as the stock markets are now well off their highs. On my end, I hope to continue to offer full transparency in what I’m doing – besides suntanning – and keep delivering strong returns year-over-year.