Warren Buffett is often described as the ultimate value investor. The “Oracle of Omaha” certainly deserves that moniker but what he and Berkshire Hathaway practice is much more nuanced than simply buying cheap stocks. Indeed, in his 2024 Shareholder Letter, Buffett reflects on an early conversation with his late, great, partner of many...

We’ve written and spoken several times in recent years about the pros and cons of including private assets in portfolios (here and here and here), as we launched two infrastructure funds and a diversified private assets fund, for clients. As with all we do, we have strived for balance in our positioning of...

Leith Wheeler has engaged Canada Gives, a Canadian foundation that offers Donor Advised Funds (DAFs), to provide our clients with an effective philanthropic and tax planning tool. The following article outlines the potential benefits of the DAF structure. Donor Advised Funds are an exciting innovation in charitable giving that offers individual donors many...

It has been a volatile few years in capital markets. Both equity and fixed income portfolios posted strong returns in 2023, with significant help from a fourth-quarter rally that boosted modest (non-US) equity returns and saved bond markets from another negative year. The year also provided a significant turnaround from 2022, when investors...

While the internet has democratized access to all human knowledge (and opinions), it has simultaneously created endless opportunities for fraudsters to separate trusting or uninformed citizens from their hard-earned money. Unfortunately, odds are you and your family will be targets at least once in your lifetimes, so we put together this resource to...

This edition of Quiet Counsel focuses on measuring value creation through the magic of Return on Equity (ROE). In the short term, sentiment can help boost the price the market is willing to pay for a given set of earnings but long term, without a demonstrated track record of being able to grow...

Living a long life is only fun if you have a quality of life in which you can move around, think clearly, look after yourself, and pursue your interests. A long life span is best accompanied by a long health span. It’s remarkable that 150 years ago, the average lifespan was only about...

In our business, it is often a challenge to communicate how our macro views (“We expect an economic soft landing”) maps to our view of portfolio (“We were happy to see Company A raised its dividend again”). Visit our website, to download previous Newsletters and read our latest Insights.While our economic outlook is...

Many Canadians contribute to philanthropic causes and registered charities and benefit from both tax deductions on the donation and, when transferred as a security (not cash), shielding of tax on capital gains embedded in that security. This year the budget released by the Canadian Federal Government (the “Budget 2023”) proposed changes to the...

Banking is best when it is a dull business, devoid of excitement. Unfortunately for some bankers and their shareholders, though, excitement has been running higher than normal lately, resulting in the collapse of a few regional US banks. There are two sometimes related sources of worry within any banking system: credit losses and...

Matching intentions and results is the truest definition of success in estate planning, and one strategy to achieve this is what I call a "flow analysis." Where does my property go when I pass away? Where does it “flow”? I like the concept because for me it conjures the image of a creek...

In Part I of our two-part Outlook series, we concluded that inflation was likely to continue to decline, and that interest rate hikes were probably in the final innings. In Part II, we explore the impact on the economy and capital markets. Will we get a recession? While our base case continues to...