Transform Your Approach: Investment Services Built on Radical Transparency

Discretionary Portfolio Management — Your Portfolio, Our Full Attention

We construct and manage individual portfolios on a fully discretionary basis. Each portfolio is built from your Investment Policy Statement — return objectives stated in real after-tax terms, risk tolerance expressed as a maximum acceptable drawdown, time horizon, income needs, liquidity constraints, and any ethical or sector exclusions you require. This is the core of what we do, and it's what most of our $340 million under management falls under.

Portfolios hold individual stocks, bonds, and low-cost ETFs directly. No proprietary funds. No wrap accounts. No fund-of-funds layering where you pay fees on fees. We custody all client assets at CIBC Mellon, and every account is covered by CIPF protection up to $1 million per category. Priya Chandrasekaran and her research team cover approximately 180 securities with full fundamental analysis — you can review the same research notes we use through the Open Book portal.

Every trade generates a next-day notification with the rationale attached. Not a confirmation slip buried in your email — a written explanation of why the trade was made, how it fits your IPS, and what we expect the impact to be. Material strategy changes always require your written consent first.

Real outcome: Dr. Osei's $1.8M portfolio was rebuilt from bundled mutual funds to direct holdings. All-in costs dropped from 2.77% to 1.08%. Annual savings: $30,400. Full details are available on our performance page.

Corporate Surplus & Treasury Management — Make Retained Earnings Work Harder

For businesses with retained earnings beyond working capital needs — professional corporations, holding companies, and owner-operated firms sitting on cash that's earning next to nothing in a business savings account. We build corporate investment policy statements tied to your exit timeline, dividend strategy, or strategic plan, typically for portfolios starting at $250,000.

Allocations are designed to optimize the interaction between the corporate investment portfolio and your Capital Dividend Account (CDA), the integration rules governing eligible vs. non-eligible dividend extraction, and Refundable Dividend Tax on Hand (RDTOH) balances. We coordinate with your accountant — we don't replace them, but we make sure the investment side and the tax planning side are actually talking to each other. Too often they aren't.

This service is particularly well-suited to Canadian-Controlled Private Corporations with passive investment income, where the interaction between the Small Business Deduction clawback threshold ($50,000 in passive income) and investment yield requires active monitoring and strategic asset location decisions. Our Corporate Surplus strategy addresses this directly.

Real outcome: Rideau Mechanical's $4.2M surplus earned 6.1% annualized over five years, with $387,000 accumulated in the CDA for tax-free extraction. The portfolio was structured to keep passive income just below the SBD clawback threshold in three of the five years.

Fee & Portfolio Audits — See Exactly What You're Paying (For Free)

A complimentary diagnostic open to anyone — you don't need to be a client, and you don't need to become one. We review your existing holdings, fee structure, and account arrangements across every account you share with us: RRSPs, TFSAs, non-registered, corporate accounts, group plans — all of it.

The audit identifies total all-in costs (management fees, MERs, trading commissions, trailing commissions, and account fees), asset duplication across accounts, tax inefficiencies including poor asset location between registered and non-registered accounts, structural issues like unnecessary DSC-locked funds, and any holdings where you're paying active management fees for what is essentially index-like performance. Our methodology is published on our about page — no surprises in the process.

The typical audit takes 7–10 business days from the time we receive your statements. We deliver a written report, usually 8–15 pages, that you keep regardless of what you decide to do next. About 40% of audit recipients become clients. The other 60% leave with a clearer picture of what they're paying — and we consider that a contribution to transparency in the industry.

Real outcome: One prospective client discovered $61,000 in annual trailer commissions they'd never been explicitly told about. They kept the report. (They also became a client, but that was their call.)

Investment Policy Statement Development — The Constitution of Your Portfolio

Your IPS is the most important document in your investment relationship. It defines return objectives in real after-tax terms (not nominal, not gross-of-fee), risk parameters including your maximum drawdown tolerance and recovery timeline, asset class constraints and permitted ranges, rebalancing rules and thresholds, benchmark selection with rationale for why each benchmark was chosen, review schedule, and governance procedures for institutional clients.

We build it together over two to three sessions — nothing is decided behind closed doors. The first session maps your financial picture and goals. The second presents two to three allocation models with projected returns, historical worst-case drawdowns, and Monte Carlo simulations. The third finalizes the document. For families and institutions, we often include multiple stakeholders in these conversations because the IPS needs buy-in from everyone whose money it governs.

A standalone IPS development engagement costs $3,500–$8,500 depending on complexity. For clients who move into discretionary management, the IPS cost is credited against the first year's management fee in full.

Real outcome: AMRQ's board selected from three allocation models with different risk/return profiles and projected drawdown scenarios — the first time they'd ever seen their options modeled side by side. The process took four weeks from initial meeting to signed IPS. Read more about how we structure institutional engagements on our strategies page.

Reserve & Endowment Fund Management — Portfolios Designed for Organizations, Not Individuals

For non-profits, associations, unions, professional organizations, and foundations. We design spending-rule-integrated portfolios linked to your organization's annual spending rate (typically 3.5%–5% of a trailing average), drawdown timeline, inflation exposure, and any restrictions imposed by donation agreements or bylaws. Assets are custodied at CIBC Mellon with full CIPF protection.

Institutional portfolio management is fundamentally different from individual wealth management. The time horizon is often perpetual, the stakeholders change regularly as board members rotate, and the reporting requirements serve governance functions that go well beyond "how did we do this quarter." We structure everything accordingly — from the IPS through to the quarterly board package.

Reports are written for non-investment-professional board members. We've learned over 19 years that if a board can't understand the report, the report is the problem — not the board. Each quarterly report includes a plain-language executive summary, a governance checklist, a compliance attestation, and detailed appendices for board members who want the deeper numbers. Our Institutional Reserve strategy provides the investment framework.

Real outcome: Carleton University Faculty Association's $2.9M strike fund went from 0.9% return to 3.8%, recovering $84,000 in additional annual income while maintaining the capital preservation mandate required by the membership. See the full case study on our performance page.

Retirement Income Planning & Drawdown Strategy — Don't Run Out of Money

Focused entirely on decumulation — the phase of your financial life where the portfolio needs to pay you reliably for 25, 30, or 35+ years. This is a fundamentally different challenge from accumulation, and it requires a fundamentally different approach. Sequence-of-returns risk — the danger that a market downturn early in retirement permanently damages your portfolio's ability to sustain withdrawals — is the single biggest threat to a retiree's financial security. We build every drawdown plan with this risk at the center.

We construct tax-efficient withdrawal sequences across RRSPs/RRIFs, TFSAs, non-registered accounts, and corporate accounts. The sequence matters enormously: drawing from the wrong account in the wrong year can cost tens of thousands in unnecessary taxes over a decade. We model the optimal order year by year, incorporating OAS clawback thresholds, pension income splitting opportunities, the RRSP-to-RRIF conversion timing, and TFSA contribution room maximization.

Monte Carlo simulation models longevity risk to age 95 and 100, running 10,000 scenarios across different market conditions. Every plan includes a "worst-case decade" stress test using actual historical data from 1929–1939, 1973–1974, 2000–2002, and 2007–2009 — because averages are a dangerous fiction for retirees. Your plan needs to survive the bad decades, not just the average ones.

Real outcome: A client two years from retirement had never seen a projection. Under one scenario, she ran out of money at 84. We adjusted the withdrawal sequence, shifted asset location across accounts, and deferred her RRIF conversion by two years — now funded through age 100 even in a bad decade.

Tax-Loss Harvesting & Tax-Efficient Transition — Migrate Your Portfolio Without a Tax Catastrophe

For legacy portfolios with embedded gains — typically clients coming to us from another advisor, consolidating accounts, or restructuring after a major life event. We build multi-year transition plans that systematically move you from your current holdings to the target IPS allocation without triggering an unnecessary capital gains event.

The process involves systematic loss realization against gains, cross-year timing to spread gains across multiple tax years, superficial loss rule workarounds using correlated but non-identical securities (for example, selling a Canadian bank ETF at a loss and purchasing individual bank stocks to maintain sector exposure without running afoul of the 30-day rule), and strategic use of registered account contribution room to absorb high-gain positions.

Patience matters here. We've seen firms rush a transition and trigger six-figure capital gains bills in a single tax year — often because the advisor's compensation was tied to assets under management and they wanted the portfolio fully transitioned as quickly as possible. We'd rather take two years and do it right. Our timeline commitment is documented in the transition plan and shared with your accountant.

Real outcome: The Pelletier family's consolidation from four advisors harvested $210,000 in unrealized capital losses, reducing their combined tax bill by approximately $98,000 in year one. The full transition took 22 months. See the complete Pelletier case study on our performance page.

Concentrated Stock Position Management — Reduce Risk Without Panic Selling

For clients with disproportionate single-stock exposure — executives with stock options, founders who took their company public, recipients of share-based compensation, or anyone who inherited a large position in a single security. Concentration risk is one of the most dangerous portfolio risks because it's invisible during good times and devastating during bad ones. A single stock can lose 50–80% of its value in months, even when the broad market is flat.

Strategies include systematic disposition plans on a predetermined schedule (removing emotional decision-making from the process), protective collar options strategies to establish a floor while retaining upside, staged charitable gifting of appreciated shares to maximize the donation tax credit, and full accounting for insider trading restrictions, blackout periods, and regulatory filing requirements under securities law.

The goal is risk reduction first; return optimization is secondary. We start with the question: "If this stock dropped 60% tomorrow, what would that do to your retirement?" Then we build a plan to ensure the answer is survivable. Every concentrated position strategy is stress-tested against the worst single-stock declines in our historical database before implementation. Our Concentrated Position Diversification strategy details the framework we use.

Custom Reporting & Open Book Access — See Everything We See

Quarterly reports include gross and net performance (both time-weighted and money-weighted returns), benchmark comparison with attribution analysis showing which decisions added or subtracted value, individual security commentary explaining why each holding is in the portfolio and what would cause us to sell, all trades executed with rationale, a risk summary including current portfolio volatility, drawdown metrics, and correlation data, and the "What Went Wrong" section — an honest assessment of our mistakes, underperformance, and what we're doing about it.

The "What Went Wrong" section is unusual in the industry. Most firms only tell you what went right. We publish our errors because accountability isn't something you turn on selectively. If we bought a position that underperformed, you'll read why we bought it, what we got wrong, and whether we still hold it. Our about page explains the philosophy behind this approach in more detail.

Institutional clients receive board-ready packages with governance summaries, compliance attestations, and policy adherence reports. The Open Book portal shows real-time holdings, pending trades, and internal research notes — the same documents the investment committee uses to make decisions. Nothing is withheld. Nothing is reformatted to look better for clients.

Why do we share our internal notes? Because Lily's engineering rule still applies: if you wouldn't show the calculation to the person whose money it involves, the calculation probably isn't good enough. Meet Lily and the rest of the team.

Multi-Generational Wealth Structuring — Keep Wealth in the Family Across Decades

For families managing wealth across two or three generations with different time horizons, risk tolerances, and income needs all connected to the same pool of assets. This is the most complex engagement we offer, and it requires careful coordination of investment, tax, and estate considerations.

Services include prescribed-rate loan structures for legitimate income splitting between spouses and adult children, in-trust account management for minor beneficiaries with proper documentation and compliance, family trust investment oversight including annual distribution planning to minimize overall family tax burden, and intergenerational IPS documents that address different time horizons and risk profiles within a single family unit.

Each generation gets its own section of the IPS. A 72-year-old retiree drawing income and a 34-year-old beneficiary in accumulation mode have fundamentally different needs — but their portfolios are connected through the trust structure, and the investment strategy needs to reflect that interconnection. We work directly with your estate lawyer and accountant to ensure the investment decisions support — rather than contradict — the broader family plan.

Real outcome: Pelletier family: consolidated from four advisors, fee savings of $97,000/year, portfolio grew from $14M to $17.4M over five years at 7.2% annualized against a 5.5% target. The multi-generational structure included a prescribed-rate loan, three in-trust accounts, and a family trust — all governed by a single coordinated IPS framework. Full case study on our performance page.