Answering Your Financial Questions | #414
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Why have AMA episodes become less frequent?
This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making from two Canadians. We're hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, Chief Investment Officer and Portfolio Manager, and Ben Wilson, Head of M&A at PWL Capital.
What observations does Ben have about PWL's institutional investment business?
Yeah, this is episode 414. We're doing another AMA. I think it's actually the first one of the 2026 calendar year, so excited to get back into some questions.
Which means it's been like six months-ish since we did an AMA.
How have newer products simplified the Rational Reminder model portfolios?
A lot of people ask for more AMA episodes. People seem to like them a lot. I was going through the questions to choose them for this episode. There's like over 300 in the bank.
Should U.S. investors underweight their home market?
Oh, wow. And that's from what I downloaded in December, I think. And so there's probably a bunch more that if I reopen the form, there'll be more AMA questions. So we're working through them slowly. But it's just between interesting guests that come up and timely topics that come up, we fell out of the cadence of doing AMA. an AMA. We were doing them very intentionally every third episode for a bit. We'll try and get back into it now. I do think we have some good questions. We have some on the old Roush Reminder model portfolios. An interesting question on what popular ETFs we would avoid, which is kind of hard to answer actually, but I tried to work through it.
What are the pros and cons of leasing versus buying a vehicle?
Someone asked if we were wrong about Warren Buffett's long-term performance back in episode, I think it was 335, where we talked about Berkshire Hathaway's long-term performance relative to index funds and the implications of that. Someone had a good question that introduces some interesting topics that we can talk about. I do want to mention that we are recording this on May 26th and the episode will come out on June 18th. So when you're listening, it'll be far in the future relative to when we record it. I just mentioned that because it always feels a little bit weird talking to people far in the future because stuff can change.
What common misconceptions exist about currency exposure and ETFs?
Maybe some big event happened and the comments we make in this episode might feel out of touch for some reason or whatever. Just keep that in mind as you listen.
Either that or it just feels weird for us.
Maybe. I don't know. Like some major world event happens and we don't mention it and it might feel out of place. Oh, for sure. I get that. I'm going, taking my family to the West coast of Canada for a little vacation. So we're going to be gone for a couple of weeks. So we're recording this ahead of time because when this comes out, I will be on vacation. Real quick, before we get into the content, I do want to just mention that PWL's institutional business has continued to see a lot of success, which has been really cool. And it's a part of the business that I'm increasingly passionate about as I get increasingly familiar with the institutional space. It's kind of one thing to read papers about or practitioner reviews about how institutions invest, but seeing actually what PWL is coming up against is really eyeopening.
One of the things that we're seeing is that it's really hard to find institutional investment management service providers that will just take an institution's money, invest in low cost index funds, not push active management and alternative investments and take a holistic planning centric view of the institution's objectives.
What do portfolio managers at PWL focus on beyond market performance?
That service, as far as I know, maybe it exists outside of PWL, but it's really hard to find.
Yeah, there's been some really cool, interesting stories talking to Lucas on our team who has been involved in a lot of these discussions.
Yeah, and we will get Lucas on at some point to talk about his learnings working with institutions and just seeing what else is out there in the institutional space. One of the really interesting things that we're learning as we onboard more institutional clients is that PWL's fees are broadly actually really similar to institutional service providers on the advice and implementation side, because there's always, just like with PWL, there's a fee that you pay to the firm to build the portfolio and give you advice and all that stuff.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why have AMA episodes become less frequent?
0:04–0:17
2
What observations does Ben have about PWL's institutional investment business?
0:17–0:32
3
How have newer products simplified the Rational Reminder model portfolios?
0:32–0:41
4
Should U.S. investors underweight their home market?
0:41–1:18
5
What are the pros and cons of leasing versus buying a vehicle?
1:18–1:50
6
What common misconceptions exist about currency exposure and ETFs?
1:50–3:04
7
What do portfolio managers at PWL focus on beyond market performance?
3:04–4:08
8
How does financial planning integrate with portfolio management?
4:08–1:15:22
Speakers
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80 Years of Financial Knowledge in 53 Minutes | #422 (Bill Bernstein)