Spencer Platt
Jean-Guy Desjardins, the investing entrepreneur behind fast-growing Fiera Capital, is still looking for two things – more acquisitions of alternative investment management platforms and chances to grow in the U.S.
The company bolstered its alternative platform last week with the purchase of most of the assets of GMP Investment Management, adding $570-million of hedge fund assets to Fiera's $58-billion of assets.
Mr. Desjardins expects to see a lot more potential purchases in Canada.
"The Canadian investment management industry is in the beginning of a consolidation cycle that will certainly last a number of years," said Mr. Desjardins, the chief executive officer and chief investment officer at Fiera.
However, Fiera, after years of growing in Canada, prefers the U.S. He wants to be big enough to compete on a continental scale. That means getting to something more like $150-billion in assets. And that means looking south, where the bites Fiera can take are larger.
"We are not going to turn our back on a Canadian opportunity," he said. Still, faced with roughly equivalent acquisitions on either side of the border, "if we have to choose, we definitely would go to the U.S."
Mr. Desjardins, despite his focus on alternative investment managers, thinks that the pieces are in place for a nice run in simple, old-fashioned equities in coming months.
His view is that stocks will rise as investors realize that the problems in the U.S. and Europe are under control and China's risk of a hard landing is also shrinking.
"We're going to have a big bull market in 2013. The large structural imbalances that we had to deal with are not totally resolved, but the elements are in place to deal with those imbalances completely in the course of the next couple years."