- michael@michaelbowman.ca
- (905) 528 6524
What is an Investment Counsellor?
Investment counselors provide up-scale professional money management to affluent Canadian investors. An investment counselor is a professional whose only business is to manage portfolios and advise clients.
My clients include wealthy individuals, companies, trusts and estates, foundations, endowment funds, and retirement and mutual funds. While the concept may seem a fresh one to a generation of investors weaned on mutual funds, investment counsel has existed in North America since the early part of the 20th century. Certain principles of practice were well established and have become formalized into a statement of ethical conduct by which all members must abide.
What are the benefits of dealing with an investment counsellor?
One of the primary benefits of dealing with an investment counselor is that they carefully align asset classes with your specific objectives. True high-end discretionary management also involves tailoring investment objectives to a particular client, which requires asset allocation and regular monitoring. Even though you hand over day to day discretion, this is done with the parameters that only you establish in the preliminary investment policy statement you create when you first begin your relationship with your investment counselor, such as investment horizon, overall financial position, tax status, and benchmarks against which the portfolio returns are to be measured, leading to investment objectives for the portfolio. Counselors are granted discretion to adapt the products to the client’s personal investment profile, and you receive a personally tailored investment program.
How does working with an investment counsellor differ from investing in mutual funds?
Mutual funds are the entry level, mass-market version of managed money, and serve as an excellent introduction to the concept. For an investor with over $100,000, it’s time to be weaned off mutual funds and into an up-scale diversified personalized portfolio. Mutual funds do have their uses however; the main one is to help small investors achieve that diversification. Until you have amassed that $100,000, you can’t truly invest, which is money earning more money. What you are really doing by squirreling away a couple hundred a month into a mutual fund is saving, which is what you do before you invest. In the early years most of your gains come from what you put in, not from what it has earned. Use a mutual fund only to save.
