-Get practical tips on how to invest for your goals, whether you're just starting out, saving for a home, investing for retirement, or drawing income in your later years. -Find out how to build a balanced portfolio from an industry expert and learn ways to mitigate volatility through diversification across asset classes. -Discover alternative investment options like private equity, real estate, and private credit that were previously inaccessible to individual investors.
Trying to make sense of the current investment landscape? Worried about inflation eating away at your savings? Want to create a predictable income stream for your future? This episode is for YOU, the Canadian investor seeking smart strategies to build wealth.
In this episode of the Smart Advice Podcast, we are joined by David Scandiffio who is the President and CEO of CIBC Asset Management. David discusses the importance of diversification, asset allocation strategies for different life stages, and opportunities for growth, like private investments. David also shares an optimistic vision for the evolution of investing tools and technologies to better serve investors of the future.
Whether you're just starting your investing journey or looking to protect the wealth you've accumulated, this interview provides practical tips that anyone can apply to help meet their financial goals. By listening to this full interview, you'll learn strategies to help you invest with confidence no matter what challenges the markets may bring.
If you want actionable advice on growing your money throughout every phase of your life, tune into the full episode.
David M. Scandiffio, CFA brings over three decades of experience in wealth management and investment to his role as President and CEO of CIBC Asset Management. He joined CIBC in 2015 and is responsible for steering the bank's entire retail and institutional asset management business, including its portfolio management team.
Prior to CIBC, Scandiffio served as President of IA Clarington Funds for more than a decade. He also held the position of Executive Vice President of Wealth Management for Industrial Alliance Life Insurance Company, a subsidiary of IA Clarington. This extensive background positions him as a key leader within CIBC's Wealth Management Executive Team.
Scandiffio is a strong proponent of responsible investment and has been instrumental in establishing CIBC Asset Management as a leader in this field. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Actuarial Science and Economics from the University of Toronto and is a CFA charter holder.
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Carissa Lucreziano: Welcome to Smart Advice, a podcast connecting you with financial advice, investment strategies, and economic trends. Empowering you with insights you need to make smart decisions about your money. I'm CIBC's financial advice expert, Carissa Lucreziano. Today, we're talking about what you need to know about investing your money in 2024.
Investing can be used as a really powerful tool to grow your money and build wealth for the future. And fundamentally, it's the conduit to achieve whatever financial freedom and financial well-being means to you. Whether it's living a comfortable lifestyle, buying a home, or maybe a second home, living debt-free, which I think is on everyone's list, retiring early with income and assets to provide the means to do what you please, or leaving a legacy for your family.
Just to mention a few. When it comes to the economic environment, uncertainty is a theme that resonates with many Canadians. We conducted a poll in February, and Canadians are in a tug of war with meeting their current financial needs versus saving for their future. And as a result to this, 42 percent of Canadian investors are being mindful with their portfolio-building strategies to achieve more predictable and consistent returns, as opposed to shooting the lights out with aggressive growth asset allocations.
Why? Well, some of it is the realization of the need to keep savings growing above inflation and the requirement for producing steady and predictable income over the long term. What comes along with investing is always an element of unpredictability and market behavior, but that doesn't mean you have to sit on the sidelines.
With the right advice, an investment strategy, as well as a plan based on your financial goals, you can feel confident about how and where you invest your money. Today, I am thrilled to have one of Canada's asset management experts with me to give us a view on what's trending in the markets and which investment solutions Canadians should be thinking about right now.
Dave Scandiffio is the President and CEO of CIBC Asset Management. Somebody I've worked with for almost the past decade and whom I have immense respect for as an industry specialist. In his day-to-day, he oversees CIBC's retail and institutional asset management business, a team of over 90 highly qualified investment professionals with approximately 200 billion of assets under management.
Dave, I am so thrilled you're here with me today. Thank you for joining me in this conversation.
David Scandiffio: Thanks for having me. Always great to chat.
Carissa Lucreziano: Yeah, absolutely. So let's get right into it. Investing, big topic with Canadians. I know you joined the bank in and around 2015. You were interviewed by Wealth Professional in around 2016, and you spoke about how important it is for an asset management company To focus on adding alpha from an investment standpoint for clients in leading the oversight of CIBC asset management business for both retail investors and institutional clients.
Talk to us about how your team has focused on achieving this and through your experience, which I know you have 30 years plus of experience. How has this influenced your strategy?
David Scandiffio: Yeah, great. Well, for starters, maybe I'll, we tend to use a lot of jargon. So, the term alpha, just to explain that a bit more, alpha is generally, what we mean by that is adding value in how we manage money.
So, in industry terms, it's often, it means kind of how much performance have you added over the benchmark. So if the TSX kind of returned 10 percent over the last year, and say portfolio managers returned 12%, then you would say that portfolio managers added 2 percent or 200 basis points of alpha.
So that's kind of the definitional term to start with. This is definitely a goal for all of our particularly active portfolio managers, whether they're internal or external. I'll talk a little bit more about that. We constantly monitor kind of our performance and grade ourselves. And in fact, pay our portfolio managers based on how they did versus a benchmark.
So, adding alpha kind of avoiding risk in the marketplace and picking kind of the securities or the investments that are best suited for our clients is a huge part of what we do. So, it's very ingrained in everything that we do. And we don't, as I mentioned, don't manage all of our mandates completely internally, we also are able to complement our capabilities with very specialized external managers that our manager research team believes have unique skill sets that allow them to more likely than not.
And there's always an element of probability associated with it. But, outperform their markets too. So it's a huge part of what we do. But just having said that, I'd like to kind of broaden the term of what we mean by alpha. Alpha again, meaning just adding value. And so, you know, having your managers outperform their index isn't the only way that we can help add value to investors.
So, a big part of what we do also is to help act as kind of a consultant to the professional advisors across our network that are also recommending strategies to their clients to make sure that they really have the right level of targeted return and are maybe more diversified into asset classes or investments that they may not have thought of.
So, things like private market investments, opportunities that lie outside of the public benchmarks is one of the ways that you can really add value. Both in terms of added return, but also avoiding risks too. So, you know, over the last decade or so, I would say that we've had the benefit of working not just with individual investors, but some of the largest and most sophisticated pension plans in the world.
And we're able to kind of leverage that same capability when we do our managed solutions or balanced solutions for individual investors as well. So in the end, our goal, along with working hand in hand with the client-facing advisors Is to collectively add value or alpha in a number of ways, including the advice that the clients are getting, the structuring of the solutions, and also kind of, of course, still trying to add value more narrowly by beating the benchmarks as well.
Carissa Lucreziano: There's a lot that's making headlines when it comes to Canadians and what they're thinking about when it comes to investing. They're thinking about a lot, and we've done a few polls and some research on this, and according to one of the recent surveys that we conducted, Canadians that we surveyed, they expect to retire around the age of 60.
The amount the average Canadian would need to retire varies based on a number of lifestyle factors. But what is clear is that in order to retire comfortably, we need to start saving and investing as soon as possible. Dave, what are some of the biggest challenges Canadian investors are facing in the current market and when they're thinking about investing?
David Scandiffio: Yeah, for sure. No, I think it's a very important point that you raise. Often, for everybody, I know for myself as well, we don't start investing as early as we can. And, the power of compounding really only works for you if you start early. And then the other key is to stay invested and stay on that strategy, which is also tricky too.
So I'm going to answer your question in a couple of ways. So, the challenges that we have first, I'm going to talk about the macro environment and kind of those kinds of challenges. And then I'm going to take a slightly different attack for the second part of the answer. But in the macro environment, I mean, obviously a big topic recently has been interest rates.
You know, interest rates have been higher over the last couple of years, as central banks are looking to fight inflation. For some people, that's not a bad thing. If you're someone who's making new deposits, that's not a bad thing at all. You're getting yields now kind of that are certainly above where they were just a few years ago when they used to be very low, single digits and something that definitely didn't keep up with inflation.
But if you're somebody who was a bondholder or if you're somebody who has a debt and say a mortgage and most people do, the rising rates are going to be a challenge. You're going to have mortgage payments that have either have or will be going up pretty substantially. And that's something that, honestly, just competes with the ability for people to put money away into the long term for the market, but something that's still very important obviously to do.
But similarly, those higher rates and debt levels have also been tougher on the overall economy. It just makes the overall economy more sluggish. You'll have higher financing costs if you're a business now that the floating rate loan that you have is at a higher rate. And that ultimately will affect their returns that are then coming back from the equity markets as well.
The good news is rates are likely starting to come down. But there's a bit of a debate around really how much and how quickly. We've looked at it. I mean, the market this year was expecting to have a number of rate cuts, but now in the US we're kind of wondering if we're actually going to see something this year.
So rates are starting to stabilize, so that's a good thing. And there's also, of course, as always, but it seems like even more now, a fair bit of geopolitical uncertainty. You know, the world is becoming less globalized. You've got these political conflicts and wars that are happening in Ukraine and in the Middle East.
They’ve got relations with China, which are a lot tougher than they used to be before. So there's no shortage of short term issues that can distract people and think, ”Now's not the time to be investing in the market. I'm going to save my capital right now and put it in and when things look better.”
But the reality is, and I know this sounds like a bit of a cliche, but there's never any better time than the present to think about it. Maybe you adjust your strategy a little bit, or you have a professional money manager adjust their strategy a little bit. But the biggest challenge facing investors at all times is really saving ourselves from ourselves and from our own behavioral biases which tend to be focused and distracted by the short-term things that we see around us to the detriment of not investing for the long term.
We almost never get it right in terms of predicting what's going to happen next. And so it's maybe boring or a bit of a cliche, but the best strategy is really to put away the newspapers. Or more appropriately these days, the blogs or the X posts that you see and really try to save yourself from yourself and stick with a long-term diversified strategy that will deliver on the long term.
Count on the fact that you have professional money managers that will kind of navigate it and avoid some of those risks that you're seeing out there or jump at the opportunities that you see. So I know easier said than done, but lots of news in the background.
And honestly, it's good advice for people to kind of try to remember that we're human beings that are behaviorally flawed and try to kind of keep disciplined and focused, which is really the key to get that compounding and saving for the long term.
Carissa Lucreziano: You know, I wanted to ask you about that specifically, and it was a great articulation. I mean, it's heavy, it's easy to say, hard to do, ignoring the noise. But fundamentally, it's continuing to invest. And, like you said, inflation continues to be a hot topic. Our CIBC Economist team is predicting about 1. 25 rate cut by the end of 2024, but some of the things that you raised is earlier on in the year and even late last year, it was thought that maybe we have much more of a rate decline story than we do.
So what can we do about inflation and how it's affecting our portfolios?
David Scandiffio: Yeah, for sure. Lots, lots of good stuff to discuss there. And I would say, firstly, the first thing to do is to avoid the temptation, as we often do. Now, we've got a declining rate environment now. This is a better risk on environment versus, previously when rates are high, it's a risk off environment.
And we avoid because we almost never get it right. As I mentioned before, even professional economists, as much respect as I have for them, they're usually directionally right. But t the running joke was an economist will never give you both a direction and a timeline. They'll tell you one or the other, because it's pretty hard to get it all right.
And the reality is we got to make sure that we're not trying to just try to really time the market. And I know that that that's something that we say fairly often. Look, all investors, no matter how sophisticated or better off to not time the market, yes, on the margin, have a bit of tactics here and there.
But what I would say is that it's not really even clear that we're already in a declining rate environment. As you mentioned before, you can have economic forecasts for drops and I think you're going to get interest rate drops sooner in Canada than you might get in the US. We talked about inflation. Inflation seems more under control in Canada than in other parts of the world and in the US.
You may get the Bank of Canada making cuts ahead of others, but they got to be careful to not get too far ahead of others as well, and it can affect obviously the Canadian dollar as well. That's the first thing is it's not clear that it's probably going to be declining, but it may be higher for longer is the new phrase that everyone is using.
And I know nobody really wants to hear that, particularly people who have a mortgage that's coming up for renewal. The rates might need to stick up a little bit higher for the next little while. But having said that, when you had that environment where it's a bit more inflationary, the things that were kind of doing well were things like energy stocks, which were performing quite well.
But what you tend to have happening as rates do start to go down and do start to decline other things like real estate investment trusts, longer duration bonds will be rewarded. So it's important to make sure that you keep exposure to those. And again, the reality is you don't want to be too polarized one way or the other.
But on the margin, as we start seeing signs that that's happening, we'll start overweighting those parts of the portfolios a bit more. And again, we really like to employ relatively tight ranges around our tactical asset allocation and keep really the fundamental structural exposures that you want and need to get tokeep up with inflation.
As we talked about, inflation isn't just something that affects interest rates. It affects us as investors, too. If you're not keeping pace with inflation, you're actually losing purchasing power, which obviously is not a good thing for your retirement.
Carissa Lucreziano: Okay. Thanks for that. So let's talk a little bit about current trends in the market, or maybe it's opportunities.
I don't think they're trends, but I know you have extensive experience in product development and marketing and asset management. So, you've seen the evolution of different types of investment solutions.
We're seeing a rise in alternatives, direct investing, and private investment opportunities, the list goes on and on. So, what are some of these types of investments that investors can consider or learn about for their own portfolio?
And I think one of the biggest questions that investors have and Canadians have and I've heard is, what's the easiest way to access some of these investments?
David Scandiffio: Yeah, for sure. So one of the great things about our business is it's constantly evolving and changing and you named a number of things.
But another area that you touched on that's been a big area of growth in the last little while has been alternatives generally. There's kind of two buckets of that. I'll talk mostly about the first bucket, which is what we call private markets or illiquid alternatives. And then there's a second category that are more liquid alternatives, which are, you can think of kind of like a lot of the strategies for hedge funds where managers can go long or short, they don't have to just buy, they could also have a negative view on an asset class or use a leverage sometimes, which can be dangerous things, but that's why it's important to make sure that you have a professional managing it well. But I'm going to talk more about the private market side of alternatives.
And what we mean by kind of private markets or private assets is it's really investment opportunities that are just not traded on a public exchange like the TSX or the SMB or any of those public exchanges. And so one of the big categories for private markets is private companies. So you'll often hear people talk about private equity.
Most companies start off as private, right? And like even small businesses are private. They're not publicly listed. And you think of some major companies, Uber, Tesla, they started as private companies. And then often the move is to go public. You do what is called an IPO to go public, and then it's available for investment.
But usually, you'll have seed investors, or you'll have different types of institutional investors who get in ahead of the fact that it's available in the public market. And what we're finding now though, is that increasingly more and more companies or a number of companies are waiting longer before they go public or never go on public.
And even some public companies are actually being taken private by a group of investors. And one of the reasons they'll do that is they just have a bit more flexibility to do things with the company than when you're under the kind of watchful eye of every quarter having all the analysts kind of grill you on your recent results.
So it allows you to take a longer-term view as a part of one of the advantages that you have being a private investment. So, but the big point is there's a big investable universe of companies outside of the public markets. That's true of companies, but it's also true of other private investment types like large real estate or infrastructure projects, which have often been owned by kind of large pension plans who really like the long term nature of those investments.
So you think of an airport or a port or railway line or those types of things as infrastructure projects. And they like that they're long term in nature, and that really matches against the long-term liabilities they have with their pension plans where they need to pay out to the pension plan.
They're very diversifying and they're great investments and they're not usually that available to the public market. Another type of private investment would be private credit. So by private credit, that just means it's really loan funds. These are funds that lend out money to companies in the same way banks do.
So we're part of a bank at CIBC, we lend out to individuals, but we also lend to companies. It's particularly in the US, there's been a big boom in private credit. So you'll get large private credit managers like Aries, for example, that we partner with that lend money alongside banks in the same way banks do have the same kind of underwriting criteria and are able to directly for their investors to kind of earn a single, a high single digit or low double digit interest rates on those loans.
So again, not directly available. You can kind be buying one of these loan funds or private credit funds. You can be getting the economics that a bank would get by lending out to companies as well.
A whole bunch of different private market things. And while I'm mentioning is it's not really new to institutional investors, as I mentioned, pension plans have been in there. Some of the largest, most sophisticated Canadian plans have been leaders in this area and have up to 40 to 50 percent of their plans allocated to these types of investments.
But it's relatively new for individual investors, just because when you think about it, one of the reasons why you're getting these great returns from these investments is you're have to be willing to give up some liquidity. And what do I mean by that? That means you need to lock up your investments for a longer period of time.
So you might commit to not pulling your money out for 10 years or something up to, or for an infrastructure project, it's usually kind of lower than that for private equity investments. By doing that you get what's considered an illiquidity premium on your investment. So for this reason, for most investors, I'd say the best way to access these things is through a portfolio manager, such as ourselves, which can invest like a pension plan.
And mix those with the public market allocations that we have just to make sure that we have the right combination because most investors, if they're buying funds from us, if they need to be able to redeem we have to be able to come up with those assets. So we've increasingly had more and more allocation to these private investments in our managed solutions or balanced portfolios.
And it's an exciting new thing along with ETFs and other areas that we're constantly kind of modernizing the way we deliver our investment solutions for our clients.
Carissa Lucreziano: Yeah, those are some really good examples. Dave, I know you mentioned, it's relatively new for the individual investor, not so new for institutional. I can't tell you how many podcasts and different venues that I've listened to that talk about this, how do Canadian investors get access?
And you've mentioned it is one of the easiest ways is through managed solutions. So, thanks for that.
David Scandiffio: So I mentioned the pension plans, they're kind of 40 to 50 percent and we don't think that individual investors should ever get to that level. But right now, like across the board, people's allocations to private investments are probably, on average, zero to two percent, and we're already allocating more, so we think there's lots of runway in the next little while to bring that number up to have a lot of the benefits that the pension plans get, but in a more, I would say accessible and liquid kind of form.
Carissa Lucreziano: And professionally managed.
David Scandiffio: Exactly.
Carissa Lucreziano: Because I mean, for the average investor, like to be able to manage all of that, even if the XYZ was available at the individual level. Usually there's certain thresholds, et cetera, for institutional to do all that on your own. So the professional managed aspect of it is a huge benefit.
David Scandiffio: For sure.
Carissa Lucreziano: So let's talk about the opportunities in technology stocks. So technology stocks outperformed in 2023. A lot of that centered around AI technology. So the so called Magnificent Seven, that's come up a lot. Apple, Microsoft. NVIDIA, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Platforms, and Tesla.
It represents about 11 trillion U. S. dollars in the market cap, or roughly about 30 percent of the entire S&P 500. I'm hearing a lot on this, will tech companies, and the Magnificent Seven specifically, will they continue to lead in 2024, and what are some of the things that may slow it down?
David Scandiffio: Yeah, no, great question and certainly a big topic.
It's really been, if you look at the S&P 500, the performance has really been driven by this group of stocks that we call the Magnificent Seven, which are these, you know, huge mega cap often technology stocks that have really had huge growth. And so there's always kind of a question or concern about, “okay, wait a minute, is this a bubble? Are we just blindly buying into these things?”
I think there is a worry that as human beings who are flawed, as I mentioned before, in the market can be flawed overall as well, that we tend to often overestimate how sustainable things are, right? You think things will grow at the rate that they're growing indefinitely.
So I think the most important thing when you're thinking about growth stocks and stocks that are doing well is what's the sustainable level of growth in the future relative to the what we call price earnings or the price earnings multiple that the price that the stock is trading at relative to the earnings.
So you can have a high PE stock and say, you might have like an Nvidia, which historically is traded at kind of like 40-ish times that can be justified if you have huge growth rates. And so it really depends on the earnings growth and the forward-looking earnings growth. And the interesting thing is that we'd say, I always get nervous when you get so much concentration.
And it seems like a very, as we call it, crowded trade where everybody's in on it. But I think we got to keep in mind that the market has got this pretty right. The earnings for these companies have grown way more than the rest of the market. So while it seems strange and even going forward, the forward-looking growth expectations for the magnificent seven is kind of like 60 percent plus growth and earnings, whereas the rest of the S&P 500 is expected to be kind of flattish.
So the reality is that you have to have, and it was a market going to be a hundred percent right. Not necessarily, but you'll see in the results keep coming out when I talked to our tech PMs, they feel like the path, for example, in certain names and at the risk of getting into did too much.
But like, you get companies like Nvidia who have a pretty good pipeline of growth right to as people are buying. This AI tech is not just a fad. There's huge productivity that's coming at it. And hey seem to have competitive advantages around the way that the roadmap for creating these chips in the future, that is a pretty substantial, what we call ‘moat around their business.’
So will there be other competitors who are going to be going after them? For sure, but we also think that there's lots of room for growth. And so we wouldn't bet against these stocks is the way we were saying it. Now, having said that inevitably you get to a point where these companies, which are the biggest and best in the world, are going to bump up against those expectations.
So, at some point, nothing grows to the moon forever. Eventually, things are going to fade. And so that's kind of the job of our analysts and PMs, to kind of understand. Are the trading multiples right now reasonable relative to our expectations, not just the market expectations of what's going to happen in the future?
And so we do think that over time, the market returns are going to broaden out to more than these stocks, but we're very cautious and not taking, we wouldn't bet against them right now. In fact, we still have a pretty good, not across the board on all the magnificent seven, but for most of them, we have pretty good exposure to them because they are big drivers of growth in the US and the US has been an exceptional market overall.
Carissa Lucreziano: Yeah, that's really good insights. You mentioned earnings growth, and that's something that's hard to get it. If you think over the next year, there's a lot of individuals that are watching the whole AI space, and there's still a lot of growth. And to your point, a lot of competition that's going to come into the market.
There's different things to consider throughout your journey in financial wellbeing. There's those that are starting off and, you know, looking to really ramp up their savings, whether that be, you know, to purchase a home or to invest for the long term.
But then there's those individuals that have gained sizable wealth through time in the market. And those individuals sometimes are looking for their investment portfolio to produce maybe a little bit more income because they don't need the expansive growth where they spent that time in the market and to get where they need to be.
So they're looking for more consistent investments. What types of solutions should individuals that are in this specific situation which have done really well to gain a sizable asset, but what should they be considering in terms of investment solutions?
David Scandiffio: Yeah, for sure. And we do see all kinds of clients and there's different needs and increasingly just demographically. I think earlier in my career, the demographic boom was more in the kind of younger accumulators.
So everybody was focused on equity market returns. And I think now just generally, I mean, obviously, we have across the population, we have people at different stages of their life, but we have a lot of clients that are kind of in that phase where they're starting to get close to kind of payout phase or retirement phase. As you mentioned, they've accumulated wealth, they're more concerned about preservation of capital.
They're more concerned about the tax efficiency of the income that's coming out as well. What that means generally is clients at that stage are willing to give up some upside from kind of very frothy markets to protect their capital. So they're a little bit more worried about protecting capital, and what that means is on the margin, we'll probably, we would look to reduce exposure to higher-risk asset classes. Not completely. But things like small cap or smaller companies, emerging market equities, those types of things would have a smaller allocation.
And you tend to lean more towards quality companies that are more stable, that have a pretty predictable earning stream, and therefore, I would say dividend stream as well. So what you get with that, but with dividends from higher quality companies, which kind of fit the bill for all of what we've described there, not that you're going to have it just be in equities. But quality dividend-earning equities are great because they give you tax advantage earnings through the dividends.
But they also keep you exposed to the equity market. So they give you some additional inflation protection because those dividends continue to grow over time. The companies continue to expand with the overall economy. Whereas bonds, which are an important component in this as well, and way more topical now than they were a couple of years ago. But bonds now can give you a decent yield and are guaranteed.
They're a little less tax advantage though, right? They're paid out as interest income. But there are some bonds right now that are available that are trading because interest rates were lower for a while. Those bonds that were issued at lower interest rates are actually trading as a discount to par. So what that means is you can buy bonds now at less than a hundred cents on the dollar, knowing they're going to mature in the next few years at a hundred cents on the dollar.
Unless the government or the high quality company, you know, defaults, which is something you always have to look at, but not very likely. And by doing that, you get some of your return as a capital gain there. So tax advantage bonds, the discount to bonds that we've launched individual strategies that advisors can bring to clients as well that take advantage of that.
So you know, dividend-earning stocks, the tax advantage bonds. But overall, just having a diversified income or growth portfolio or dividend portfolio, income portfolio with a professional portfolio manager who can pull on these different things. But it's mostly about protecting capital and delivering income back to clients in a more tax-efficient way.
So that's kind of what I would recommend. And as always, like, obviously a number of our investments are available. All of them are available through direct investing. But because of the, uh, all the, the value of advice components, I, we highly recommend, and I personally use as well an investment advisor to help guide us and ensure that we're in the best investments that meet kind of our planning needs.
Carissa Lucreziano: Yeah, and you mentioned something important, like through all different phases in your life, investing is important. It's just what is important at the specific time, but preservation of capital, inflation protection, we've learned that whereas it's really fresh in our minds over the last few years. So it is really important to consider your investment strategy throughout your financial journey and where you are within building your wealth.
So we've had a lot of great discussion today, Dave. You have given us some really good perspective on what's happening in the market today, but also really thinking about how important it is to invest our money and to invest for the long term. So thank you for that. I just want to leave on a question because you, like I said, you have 30 years of experience. Your background is very fulsome knowledge, and thank you so much for sharing with us today.
What excites you most about the evolution of the industry, asset management, investment solution options, all of that, what do you think is next? And how do you plan to bring elements of that to CIBC asset management? So loaded question, I know, but very interested to know.
David Scandiffio: Yeah, no, for sure. But it always kind of shocks me a bit when I actually, I know the math is right, but to hear the 30 years of experience, I don't know when that happened, but turned around and all of a sudden it's the case. But no, I think one of the things that's really exciting about the industry is that it's constantly evolving.
There's always new and exciting things and new ways to kind of do things. I mentioned earlier kinds of alternatives and private markets. That's been a big focus for our team. We've been hiring a lot of people in that area. Another area I didn't really talk about is quantitative investing.
So leveraging data, machine learning, AI as well. And so we've been doing a lot in terms of building up. Making investments in the quad capabilities, data and AI are huge themes as well that we're leveraging both for the way we manage our investments, but also I think there's gonna be huge advantages that everyone's going to see in terms of helping clients better plan and understand their needs and goals.
If you think about nudging people all the time to kind of optimize to understand their financial planning goals setting needs. There's a lot of data people have better to leverage that data to help you plan better for the future rather than just watch videos on Facebook or whatever, too.
But I think it's going to be the future of investment management. Asset management is really partnering with the planning side of things to iteratively optimize right up and understand how people's needs are evolving. Helping young families who realize, for example, that they've got young kids and make them aware of things like RESPs or savings plans that are tax advantage for them and then us delivering solutions against that.
So, the exciting thing is that things keep changing. Technology makes that very interesting and it's kind of cool work in these fields. And so that's what makes it exciting for me and our team. And we're very pleased to be part of CIBC asset management partnering with all the different parts of the channel to kind of help everybody ultimately meet their ambition.
So that's kind of what gets us up every day and energizes us.
Carissa Lucreziano: Well said. Thank you. Thanks so much. And thanks for spending time with me today. Thank you for providing your insights experience to Canadians out there and to everybody that listens in to the podcast.
Your investment strategy should be part of your overall financial plan, which is driven by your short and long-term goals. It should consider elements like cash management, retirement, estate planning, and tax planning. A financial advisor can guide you. For more information, visit cibc.com/en/asset-management/ or follow CIBC Asset Management on LinkedIn.
Thank you for tuning in to our first episode of Season 2 of Smart Advice. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with someone who is on their own investing journey. To make sure you never miss an episode, follow Smart Advice on your favorite podcast platform.