Driving growth at an independent business

Hi. My name is Philippe Le Blanc. I’m the Chief Investment Officer at Cote 100. I’d like to share with you three things that I think are critical to build a successful portfolio management business.

The first thing I think that’s really important is to be true to yourself, but I think that’s really a key for a portfolio management business to really stay independent and think differently and not be influenced by outside thinkers or influences.

In the stock market, you will face more difficult periods. The stock market doesn’t always go up and when it goes down, that’s where the value of the relationship really emerges and I think that’s really important to do that. If you’re going to build a successful firm over the long term, you need to build very strong relationships with your investors.

Try and build a resilient business model. For our firm, obviously, we’ve been in business for 30 years and we’ve been through ups and downs. There have been some difficult times in the stock market but building a resilient business model I think, in my mind, consists of very defensive portfolios and when the market goes down, our portfolios will go down, but probably much less than the market.

And, for example, last year, in 2020, during the pandemic, when the market really took a beating, we did much better, and that’s the reason why we build these more defensive portfolios.

You can’t control the stock market but you can control the way you invest in your process.