Category: Consolidated Reporting
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What Canada’s 2025 MFO Survey Really Reveals About “Family Offices”
The newly released Canadian Family Offices Multi-Family Office Landscape 2025 report provides a clear view into what Canadian Multi-Family Offices (“MFOs”) actually look like; who they serve, how they charge, and how they operate. But beneath the numbers lies a deeper story about what is and is not a true family office. Two findings stand…
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The 9 Most Common Asset Classes Used by Canadian Investors
Investors in Canada rely on a core set of asset classes to create balanced, resilient portfolios. Each asset class behaves differently—its volatility, expected returns, and correlation patterns shape how it contributes to long-term wealth. Clear understanding of these characteristics, along with the benchmarks that represent each category, helps families build simple, enduring investment policies. 1.…
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Active Returns: More Than a Simple Calculation
Active return is one of the most important measurements investors should make with their portfolios. And a full understanding of active return can provide powerful insights into how your investments are performing. Many investors often compare their portfolio’s performance to a benchmark. Like, an index or composite that represents the market or strategy they’re making.…
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Would You Rather Build a Complex Tech System or Simply Hire Another Admin?
As family offices grow, the volume of data grows with them. More accounts, more private assets, more custodians, and more reporting requirements. At some point, every wealth-holder or family office faces a pivotal question: Would you rather embark on an overwhelming new tech project with a long onboarding process that nobody on your team is…
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Understanding What You Really Pay: Helping Investors See the Whole Picture
When investors divide their wealth among several advisors, it often becomes difficult to get a clear picture of how much they’re really paying in fees. That was the situation for one of our client’s holding companies, which had split approximately $100 million across three investment advisors — each responsible for a “low,” “medium,” or “high”…
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Beyond the 5% Hurdle: How Wealthy Families Can Benchmark More Effectively
Benchmarking is one of the trickiest parts of portfolio reporting for wealthy families. While it might seem straightforward at first to compare performance against a benchmark. Some benchmarks are obvious such as the S&P 500 for US stocks. Other simple hurdles like CPI plus 4% or a fixed 5% return don’t offer a fair comparison…
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Active Returns, Benchmarks, and the Truth About Performance
Many investors describe their portfolio performance in raw returns, like, “my portfolio made 15% last year” or “my portfolio gained $300,000”. While such statements may be true, they don’t tell us the whole story. And cannot tell us whether results have been good or bad. Since, what if the average return was 20% compared to…
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Bringing the Portfolio Into Focus
Step 2 – If You Can’t See It, You Can’t Manage It After setting a clear investment strategy with the family, the next question was straightforward, but daunting: What exactly are we working with? The family’s assets were spread across three different investment advisors, each using their own custodians, platforms, and reporting systems. There was…
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Behind the Reports: How We Set Up Addepar
At Markdale, we believe in meeting you where you are—and organizing your financial life so it’s easy to understand and manage. That’s why we use Addepar as the foundation for our reporting. But before we can generate beautiful reports and dashboards, there’s some behind-the-scenes work that happens first. Here’s how it works: 1. We start…
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Managing Multiple Investment Managers: Best Practices for Efficiency and Clarity
Diversification with Purpose Diversifying your portfolio by asset class and investment manager is a sound strategy. It spreads risk and provides exposure to various management styles and market perspectives. However, many investors inadvertently over-diversify within the same asset class. For instance, having multiple managers handling Canadian equities can lead to inefficiencies and hidden risks. Strategic…