John Porter joins the firm, walking a tightrope between driving change and preserving what works
John Porter stays curious. The newly appointed Chief Investment Officer of AGF Investments grew up in a family of Michigan auto workers, with no personal exposure to financial services. After ‘stumbling’ into the industry, as he puts it, he found a space where intellectual curiosity is rewarded. That curiosity took him through a host of rolls in the United States, most recently Chief Investment Officer at BNY Investments Newton, running teams in Boston and London. After leading a team with evolving mandates that expanded from US equities into global equity, multi-asset, and fixed income, he says he’s now being offered a chance to apply his experience at a pure-play asset manager.
Porter is not coming to AGF simply to keep the firm’s approach static. He explains that in his six-month recruitment conversations with AGF CEO Judy Goldring, he emphasized that he would be striving to push the firm further while maintaining what has worked for the firm in the past. He stressed that solving advisors’ challenges will be an instrumental part of achieving his goals.
“At one point, I remember [Goldring] travelled to Boston to see me in December. And I pointedly said to her, ‘are you sure you want someone like me? I’m not the person you hire to come in to sort of keep the trains running on time. I’m the one who comes in to think about how can we take this existing set of capabilities and enhance it,’” Porter says. “Obviously she was very comfortable with the notion of having someone who’s going to come in who’s not looking to sit still, but is looking to challenge the organization to grow and improve from a starting point of a tremendous amount of respect for what we have.”
As much as he wants to push AGF forward, Porter pays homage to the existing foundations at the firm. He praises the work done by his predecessor, the late Kevin McCreadie, in establishing a strong culture and a collaborative organization. It’s an approach that he says is well suited to a world where ‘star investors’ no longer hold sway. He argues that investment success is rooted in collaboration and continuous improvement. He wants to build meaningful differentiation through those strategies.
Porter says his broad goal is to build a “world class global asset manager,” which he sees as an ongoing process rather than a final destination. The industry, he says, is one where nobody is perfect and where strategies can always be improved. He wants measurable goals that serve the broader objective, aiming for broader and greater outperformance by AGF’s strategies against their benchmarks. While he’s still in the early days of his role, learning each team’s investment process, Porter says he wants to challenge those teams to make sure they’re thinking through all appropriate scenarios while he supplies them with the resources they need to outperform.
Achieving that goal of outperformance, he says, can help AGF’s advisor clients navigate a highly complex global landscape. He identifies geopolitical uncertainty, tech disruption, volatility, and evolving client expectations as some of the most acute challenges advisors ow face. Looking at Canada specifically, Porter notes the role of home bias in investor portfolios and the heavy weighting to certain sectors that come with it. He also highlights the aging of client demographics and the increasing client interest in alternatives and private market assets as issues for advisors to navigate.
Those complex dynamics will play out over different time frames. Porter acknowledges that Canadians’ home bias served them well so far in 2026 and that short-term market shifts can’t be tuned out entirely, but he also argues against letting recent wins lull investors into complacency. He says that advisors need to make sure that their decisions are informed by broad global context that balances those short-term moments with longer-term convictions. To that end, he wants AGF to continue to reach advisors through their communication and research, helping advisors explain why markets are behaving the way they are to clients.
Porter believes those communications are essential because the market and the world are going through another period of significant change. He says that AI will completely redraw the competitive landscape in countless industries, which he finds “fascinating and frightening at the same time.” Most people, no matter their level of investment expertise, are now grappling with questions around AI. Geopolitical uncertainty, too, remains a significant overhang for investors and global debt levels could become a growing source of risk, in his view.
All of these factors, he says, demand the kind of collaborative approach that Kevin McCreadie and the AGF team already built. Porter’s role as the incoming CIO will be to push that view forward.
“For me, it’s a blessing to be able to join this organization and to appreciate what they have, but then bring some perspectives of how we can be even more for our clients, how we can adapt to this world. So not to get stuck in our ways, but to have more of a continuous improvement mindset,” Porter says. “We want to be a culture where people take pride of being part of something that isn’t afraid to stand out. In an industry where frankly, too often everyone looks and feels the same. We’re going to be willing to be differentiated. Not just to be different, but to be better.”
