Portfolio Management Strategy

Fisher Investments Canada offers personalised portfolio management services. We believe in putting clients’ interests first, providing world-class service and minimising conflicts of interest.

Personalised to Your Needs

Portfolios are tailored to each client’s situation and investment goals. The first step is understanding your personal situation, and then devising a portfolio strategy designed to maximise the probability of reaching your financial goals. Good investment advice focuses on your longer term goals and is aligned with your best interests.

Global, Flexible Strategy

Portfolios are globally oriented to capitalise on opportunities around the world, and adjusted based on your personal needs along with forward-looking views of the market. All portfolio investment strategies are directed by Fisher Investments’ five-member Investment Policy Committee with over 150 years of combined industry experience and supported by an in-house global research team.

Active Money Management

Our experienced analysts continuously monitor capital markets on a global scale—keeping an eye on market conditions, economic developments, and political issues. This information guides the portfolio management process in both identifying opportunities and recognizing risk factors. We summarize this information for clients through a variety of communications—keeping you apprised of our market thinking and what’s happening inside your portfolio.

Top-Down Approach

Fisher Investments takes a top-down approach to portfolio management that is dynamic and can adapt to changing market conditions.

We believe approximately 70% of long-term portfolio returns are attributable to asset allocation – i.e., what mix of stocks, bonds, cash or other securities you may own at any particular time. At the highest level, Fisher Investments gathers a wide range of data inputs, analysis of current market conditions, history and behavioural factors to develop our market forecast and make asset allocation decisions. Fisher Investments classifies these data inputs into three categories called “drivers”:

• Economic drivers can include monetary policy, yield curve and relative GDP growth analysis, as well as regulatory and accounting changes.
• Political drivers can include taxation, governmental stability and political turnover.
• Sentiment drivers primarily measure shifts in demand for investment categories, including factors driven by human behaviour.

We believe approximately 20% of a portfolio’s relative performance can be attributed to sub-asset allocation decisions – e.g., big or small cap, value or growth, foreign or domestic, etc. Based on the aforementioned drivers, Fisher Investments determines what it believes is the most advantageous blend of country, sector, size and style factors in keeping with higher level themes in our outlook and forecast.

Individual security selection is responsible for the (roughly) remaining 10% of a diversified portfolio’s total return over time once higher level factors are accounted for. Fisher Investments applies fundamental analysis to seek out companies with strategic attributes that provide competitive advantages within each portfolio category it wants exposure to.

Many investment managers and brokers focus solely on security selection. Unlike them, Fisher Investments tries to capitalise on significant opportunities to add value at all levels of the portfolio management process.