Three of the excellence awardees up for Advisor of the Year – Alternative Investments share their approach to the category
Alternatives have become a vital and dynamic part of modern advisors’ asset allocation strategies. The never-ending drive to provide clients with better diversification has seen advisors follow pension funds and institutions into asset classes and investments far beyond the traditional 60/40. The WP awards have long celebrated advisors’ adoption and use of alternatives, with the Centurion Asset Management Award for Advisor of the Year – Alternative Investments.
Excellence awardees for the WP awards were announced last week, and three advisors now nominated for this awards weighed in on why they use alternatives in their client portfolios, the kind of alternatives they use, and what this nomination means for them now.
“We use alternative investments because our clients are comfortable with some risk, but they don't want to see all the ups and downs anymore as they're kind of getting closer into retirement or in retirement,” says Krissy Morrison, Senior Investment Advsior with Harvey Morrisson Private Wealth of Wellington-Altus Private Wealth. “So we use it more as a stabilizing factor in their portfolios. It helps to reduce volatility but still gives them potentially the same returns as what they would see in a modern portfolio.”
Morrison has been using alts for the past six years, following the lead of Canada’s leading institutions and pension funds in adding them to client portfolios. Within the admittedly huge investable universe under the alts umbrella, Morrison says she tends to specialize in private real estate and private equity allocations.
Her process has involved a great deal of education. She’s educated herself for the past six years, through KYP processes, regular meetings with fund providers, and is currently pursuing her Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) designation, having completed level one. She extends that education to her clients, outlining specific details of a product as she would with any security, before exploring how some of the features of alternative investments, such as lower daily liquidity, might mesh with their goals. She also ensures clarity with regards to risk, making sure clients understand unanticipated market developments, issuer default risk, liquidity-risk/391885">liquidity risk, and the prospect of an entire investment being lost. That expectation setting, Morrison notes, is key to how clients can get on board with alts allocations.
John De Goey has been using alternatives since the 1990s, with his first allocations to real estate. The Portfolio Manager with Designed Wealth Management has tried to stay on the cutting edge of alts innovation throughout his career.
“In some instances that makes you bleeding edge,” De Goey says.
Through alternative allocations, however, he argues that he can get clients better risk-adjusted returns. Like Morrison he has had to constantly educate himself on the evolving field, but he leverages that education to bring clients closer to 20 per cent total allocations to alternatives. He argues that this level of alts allocation can result in better alpha generation, better risk-adjusted return, and better behavioural outcomes.
“The behavioural advantage is not because these things are only priced once a quarter, or once a month,” De Goey says. “My clients rely on me to do the due diligence, to allocate judiciously. And I tell them that the net effect will be that they're less likely to experience a meaningful drawdown. So as an example, in 2022 both stocks and bonds dropped by 15–16 per cent peak to trough. my clients actually made money in 2022 because they had less exposure to public assets and more exposure to privates that are weakly and negatively correlated. So that was a win from a performance standpoint. But I would argue that it was an even bigger win from a behavioural perspective because my clients were not freaking out.”
Scott Starratt uses a unique framework in his expectation setting with clients. Starratt is the investment advisor and portfolio manager at Starratt Wealth Management of Canaccord Genuity. He has long maintained a policy of re-classifying his clients’ allocations, not by traditional asset class but by objective. An investment is put into one of three categories: market, yield, and defense. Different alts strategies, he explains, can play roles in those different categories.
“For our models, we're looking at certain things from certain managers for certain outcomes we would like. In some cases, those outcomes are volatility management or grinding out a reasonable return,” Starratt says.
Starratt notes that his approach to alternatives meshes well with his clients’ expectations. They know that if they can maintain solid single-digit returns over the long-term, then they can retire safely and achieve their life goals. Alternatives are, in Starratt’s view, a way to help achieve market-like returns for clients without as much volatility.
As much as they understand the utility of the alternatives they’re engaging with, they also understand the differentiation that comes with them. Certain alternative investments, Starratt notes, are both tangible and interesting. He uses the example of a music royalties fund to explain how clients can connect with a strategy that both hedges against certain kinds of risk, drives overall return, and makes them feel more connected to their portfolio strategy. Achieving that kind of connection, in Starratt’s view, comes down to maintaining simplicity in explanations and connecting products directly to a client’s goals.
Starratt, Morrison, and De Goey all emphasized the value that comes from pushing this asset category forward and celebrating its use through an event like the WP awards.
“Sometimes advisors might not understand something, so they won’t use it. That might be the starting point, but it’s important to try to cross that threshold and start to educate yourself,” Morrison says. “continuously educating yourself on [alternatives] and getting more comfortable in that space is going to be good for an advisor and for their clients.”
You can find the full list of excellence awardees for the 2026 WP Awards here.
