Tausi Insider

A man looks at a Bloomberg terminal. BEN FATHERS/AFP/Getty Images David McLean is the Owner of McLean Asset Management and Manager of the ROMC Fund . Active investment funds have been overcharging investors for decades. Nowhere is this more prominent than in the alternative fund category, colloquially known as hedge funds. Investment management used to be a profession. Today, it’s a business. Traditionally, fund management companies offered but one fund, managed for long-term maximum real return after taxes, in order to increase purchasing power for savers. Today, a typical manager offers hundreds of funds. And as what used to be a craft devolves into a numbers game, the whole industry has weakened. Assets in the hedge-fund industry have fallen by nearly US$220-billion since the end of 2021, with global economic conditions leading to poor performance, and investors redeeming funds in droves as a result. Two of the world’s richest, most successful investment managers, Warren Buffett a...

OUR METHODOLOGY Almost 25,000 lawyers as well as in-house lawyers and legal executives working in legal departments of a company across Canada were actively invited to take part in the survey. The sample was collected via research conducted by Statista on company websites and further public available sources. Invitations were sent by email with a personalized link that could only be used once. In addition, lawyers and clients could participate in the survey via an open link. In these cases, the participants had to validate themself by providing a personal company email address before their answers were included in the evaluation. The link was announced and made available online on Tausi Insider’s Report on Business magazine's website. The survey, available in English and French, was conducted online between May 17 and July 10, 2022 and more than 3,100 responded to the invitation. Statista recorded more than 10,000 recommendations for the...

The bond market is flashing code red on our economy. It’s a vivid warning of what’s likely to come, and what will likely cut the borrowing costs for millions of Canadians by the end of next year. What we’re talking about here is the yield curve, which has a compelling track record of predicting recession – and falling mortgage rates. What’s a yield curve, you say? Think of it as a graph – one that shows how interest rates, or yields, change based on how long you lend to the government. People looking at the curve often focus on the difference, or “spread,” between yields on 10-year bonds and two-year bonds. Normally, long-term yields are higher than short-term yields (reflecting the higher risk in lending for a longer period). Not today. As we speak, the 10-year yield is almost 100 basis points below the two-year. That’s extraordinary. (A basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point.) In fact, it hasn’t happened in more than three decades – and the last time it did, in the earl...

The Bank of Canada is expected to conclude a historic year marked by high inflation and aggressive monetary policy tightening with one more interest rate hike on Wednesday. Forecasters anticipate the central bank will raise its key interest rate, which is currently at 3.75 per cent, by either a quarter or half a percentage point next week. Even the smaller hike would bring the interest rate to the highest it’s been since 2008. In the wake of rapidly rising inflation this year, the Bank of Canada has raised its key interest rate six consecutive times since March, racing to clamp down on inflation expectations before they became unmoored. After raising its key rate by a historic full percentage point in July, the Bank of Canada has tapered the size of its rate hikes. In September, it announced a three-quarter percentage point rate hike, followed by half a percentage point in October. Now, the end of the rate hike cycle appears to be near. Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem said as mu...

It’s been a tense year for homeowners in floating-rate mortgages. They’ve watched their interest rates catapult 400 basis points in just nine months. DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press Mortgage rates are getting closer to a turning point based on Wednesday’s Bank of Canada announcement, which signalled that its rate-hike campaign may be nearing an end. Variable-rate borrowers shouldn’t plan on rate cuts for at least 12 to 18 months from today. If it happens sooner, borrowers should consider themselves lucky – very lucky. Default-insured borrowers saw fixed rates sink as much as 30 basis points on some terms this week. The lowest rates on one-year to five-year insured terms are now all below 5 per cent again, thanks partly to competitive discounters such as QuestMortgage. Unfortunately, the news was less cheery for uninsured borrowers. Unlike insured rates, which benefit from liquid government-backed securitization, uninsured rates are dominated by big deposit-taking lenders – mostly larg...

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board has appointed Romeo Leemrijse to lead its equities department, choosing an executive with a 16-year track record within the investor’s own ranks. Mr. Leemrijse will take over as executive managing director, equities on Jan. 1, leading investments in private and public equities. He will be based in Toronto and report to chief investment officer Ziad Hindo. He succeeds Karen Frank, the former equities head who was based in London, England, and who left Teachers last month. She joined Teachers two years ago from a career in private banking at Barclays Bank PLC and investment banking at Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. Equities accounted for $78.5-billion, or about 32 per cent, of Teachers’ $242.5-billion in net assets as of June 30. The lion’s share of that is in private equity, which accounted for $55.3-billion in assets. Equities assets were down from $82.3-billion at the end of 2021. Most recently, Mr. Leemrijse has overseen direct investing in North Ame...

The logo of the World Economic Forum in the Alpine resort of Davos, Switzerland, on May 25, 2022. ARND WIEGMANN/Reuters Don Tapscott is an author, executive chair of the Blockchain Research Institute , adjunct professor at INSEAD and a member of the Order of Canada. He formerly led the Global Solution Networks research initiative exploring new methods of global co-operation, problem solving and governance. For years, critics have viewed the annual Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum as a cabal of the rich and powerful, conspiring to bend the world to corporate interests. Today, the political right leads the criticism, spinning up conspiracy theories on how the global elites seek to run the world. Plots range from forced vaccinations and mandatory ID cards, to radical limits on property rights and wealth ownership, to chips implanted in people’s brains. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has aligned himself with the some of these theorists – saying he opposes the WEF’s “socia...