CEO says products satisfy investors' need for value and core portfolio oversight
The Investment Planning Counsel has announced a family of three new lower-cost ETF mutual funds that it believes go “one step further” in helping the average Canadian investor.
Billed as no-fuss, no frills solutions, the IPC Essentials Portfolios consist of globally diversified ETFs with added features such as strategies for downside protection and currency risk management.
The three new portfolios are:
IPC Income Essentials Portfolio: designed to provide investors with a monthly income stream while emphasizing capital preservation.
IPC Balanced Essentials Portfolio: aims to provide long-term capital appreciation from a practical blend of stocks and bonds.
IPC Growth Essentials Portfolio: designed to let investors benefit from the growth of global markets over the long term.
Sam Febbraro, president and CEO of Counsel Portfolio Services, said the family has been launched in part because of the growing appetite for ETFs in mutual fund products.
He said: “ETFs alone could be exposed or vulnerable to changes in the volatility of the market.
"So this is why we decided to go this route where we have an ETF-based mutual fund which can combine certain elements of active management with the simplicity and cost of passive ETF investments.”
The IPC Essentials features include: the flexibility to strategically manage allocations within the portfolios to take advantage of changing market conditions; downside risk protection strategies that employ dynamic asset allocation aimed at re-allocating assets to lower-risk holdings during times of market stress; and currency hedging strategies aimed at reducing the portfolios’ US dollar exposure when the Canadian dollar is expected to rise.
Febbraro said the offerings elevate an investor’s portfolio to higher levels when compared to buying ETFs on an individual basis.
He said: “When we look at our portfolios, we combine the cost benefit of the ETFs but we can also add things like portfolio construction optimization. We can globally diversify the asset allocation, we have systematic regular rebalancing, we can risk mitigate the currency and those are all things we can provide where we can help reduce the volatility of an index-based ETF if they were just standalone.
“Investing in an ETF-based mutual fund provides that level of diversification and it’s not necessarily possible for the average investor who is just buying the individual ETFs. But we believe our family of IPC Essentials portfolios go one step further and includes the active oversight that have some defensive strategies that are designed to provide downside protection.
