The end of the year is a good time for a moment of reflection to consider your successes and failures as an investor. An objective review of investment decisions, performance and risk is a cornerstone of a good portfolio management process. Let’s look at some lessons of the past year and talk about a couple of key risks for 2016.

2015 can be summed up with a quote from Macbeth; “…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. The S&P was up only 1.5% and 10 year US bond yields were up only 0.06% to 2.26%. The Canadian market performed poorly with the TSX down just over 8% and the 10 year yield dropping 0.30% to finish the year at 1.45%. The route to these results was tumultuous as both equity and bond markets experienced some of their largest intraday moves in history.

During 2015, three unforeseeable events had huge portfolio implications for unprepared investors. The first was the almost 17% drop in the Canadian dollar – the second largest drop ever. Toron AMI always advocates that investors maintain consistent exposure to assets outside of the Canadian market. In 2015, this discipline helped your portfolio generate good returns in a difficult environment. The lesson? You need to access the deepest, broadest set of investment opportunities to take advantage of the risk reduction that portfolio diversification provides.

The second event was when the Swiss central bank abandoned its pledge to limit the appreciation of the Swiss Franc vs. the Euro. While this had a limited impact on your portfolios, it speaks to the issue of central bank credibility. If investors start questioning a central bank’s commitment to a policy, it makes a central bank’s ability to shape investor expectations even more difficult. The lesson? You can’t always count on central banks to keep their word and should incorporate that uncertainty into your portfolio construction and asset allocation.

The third surprise was the further 20% drop in oil prices – along with the overall commodity index. Early in 2015 there was so much optimism that oil prices would rebound, that many investors plowed large percentages of their portfolios into energy, only to see dramatic losses. It was not being wrong that torpedoed these investors; it was the size of the position relative to their overall portfolios. The Toron AMI exposure to energy had only a small impact on your portfolio, more than offset by other investments. The lesson? A properly diversified portfolio limits the damage from a single large economic event: “risk not thy whole wad”.

Looking forward to 2016, it seems there is more uncertainty than we have seen in years. Any number of unanticipated factors could easily alter the economic outlook materially and invalidate even the most thoughtful forecasts. In no particular order, some things we are thinking about:

• What would a Trump/Cruz presidency do to markets?

• Is OPEC going to change its oil price policy?

• Will the US consumer continue to spend?

• What if we have more terrorist events in the US and Europe?

• Can the Chinese government continue to orchestrate growth?

• Can commodities rise without an increasing Chinese growth rate?

• What if the Federal Reserve raises interest rates too quickly?

• Why is productivity not recovering?

You can drive yourself crazy thinking about all of the potential risks. The key is to ensure that no single event dominates the return on your portfolio. It is this risk management ethos that continues to be central to our portfolio management approach: we spend as much time thinking about risk as we do thinking about returns. If you get the risk management process right, the returns will look after themselves.

I wish all of you a happy and prosperous 2016.

Arthur Heinmaa, CFA

Managing Partner