Is a Discretionary Mandate Right for Our Family?

Mo Lidsky — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Families have many questions when considering a discretionary mandate. Here, we have captured eight questions we hear often and give our honest answers.

Prime Quadrant Market Outlook: Q2 2026

Alex Da Costa — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Forget the Moon, we’re going to Mars (apparently)

The Third Education: Preparing the Next Generation to Steward Wealth

Mo Lidsky — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:46:00 GMT

A few years ago, one of Canada's most affluent individuals said something to me that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

When Should You Talk to Your Children About Family Wealth?

Angela Smith — Mon, 25 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

One of the questions we hear most often from ultra-affluent families is, “When should we tell our children how much we have?” In many families, children understand that they have grown up with comfort and opportunity, but they may have little sense of the true scale, complexity, or responsibility attached to the family’s wealth.

White Paper: Financing Liquidity Without Liquidation

Prime Quadrant — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

How Ultra-high-net-worth Families Think about Capital, Control, and Optionality

Imagine a family navigating a meaningful liquidity need. Not because something had gone wrong, but because several things had gone wonderfully right. A compelling new investment opportunity. A timely philanthropic commitment. A chance to support the next generation.

Prime Quadrant Market Outlook: Q1 2026

Alex Da Costa — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

"The Signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth."
- Nate Silver

What a time to be alive! When X (formerly “Twitter”) launched 20 years ago, I doubt many of us thought it would mushroom to where it is today and become a major forum for market moving “news”. (I certainly didn’t!) And now with the advent of possibly the most disruptive technology in human history, markets seem to be moving almost daily by the latest tweet about a new AI model or agent. As if all that is not enough, investors are also having to contend with a seemingly endless stream of geopolitical headlines. Compounding this information overload, the biological technology we use to discern real signals (our wonderful brains) is being re-wired by electronic technology to be hyper focused on short-term stimulus. As investors and stewards of capital, it has never been more important to step back from the cacophony of noise and focus on what really matters. In these pages, we attempt to do this, accepting that in an uncertain world, very little is more dangerous than false certainty.

The Future of Finance is Feminine

ssolit@primequadrant.com (Sylvia Solit) — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 05:00:00 GMT

By 2030, women are projected to control more than $30 trillion in financial assets in the United States alone. This statistic is more than market momentum; it is a signal of profound transformation. The defining question is not whether this shift will happen, but how the institutions and families stewarding capital will respond to it.

How to Stay Connected with the People Who Matter Most

Jolene Watkin — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

Where Connection Feels Hard Today

We live in a world that is constantly connected, yet real connection is becoming harder to hold.

Prime Quadrant Market Outlook: Q4 2025

Alex Da Costa — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 05:00:00 GMT

You never know you're in a bubble until it pops.

As autumn falls into winter, a decided chill is blowing in the air and over stock markets. Top of investors’ minds are concerns over a possible bubble. Bubbles present many vexing challenges for participants. How do we know when we are in a bubble? Unlike the soapy kinds, we can only know for sure we’ve had a market bubble after it’s popped. There is no standard definition, but one way to describe a historical bubble is one where investors buy into stocks which ultimately crash and then take many years to recover (and some individual stocks may never recover at all). Many of us carry the scars of the late 1990s / early 2000s “dot.com” bubble. Back then, if you had been unlucky enough to pile into the Nasdaq Composite Index right at the March 2000 high, it would have taken an interminable 15 years to see that level again, during which time you had to endure a massive 78% drop. But while you were not gifted with luck, maybe you were blessed with patience and today your investment would have multiplied nearly 5 times. You may also have been blessed with wisdom and not had all your public equity capital in the Nasdaq!

Now let’s suppose you don’t like the idea of re-living that experience (who would!); what can you do about it? Should you sell all your equities, sit on the sidelines and hope to get back in at better prices in the future? You could, but history shows that the second feature of bubbles is that trading them is fraught with difficulty. Get out too early or buy back too late and you miss returns. Possibly a lot of returns. That is, unless you are in possession of a mythical market crystal ball, something we have yet to encounter on our journeys … though we have met many who thought they had a crystal ball which regrettably turned out to be defective, leaving them with lower long-term returns than the patient investor.

So bubbles are hard to identify ex-ante and even harder to trade. Now that doesn’t mean investors should do nothing in response to markets which appear stretched, but it does mean investors should be very careful about doing anything that could significantly damage long-term returns. The tried and tested approach to success is the same in all markets, bubbly or not: focus on the long term, diversify, rebalance periodically. Going back to the late 1990s, if you had been periodically trimming your exposure back to target, yes you would have missed some returns as markets continued to rip higher, but the ensuing crash would have been less painful. And you would have been in a better position to put money back into the market as valuations became attractive once more.

Back to today. In our last letter, we noted that while there are some signs we may be in a bubble, there are also reasons to believe we may not be. Some commentators have drawn parallels to previous bubbles including the dot.com period. While there are some similarities, we would highlight that there are also significant differences.

Macro: At a macro level, both fiscal and monetary policy are currently on an easing path, which contrasts with most historical bubbles bursting. For example, leading into the dot.com crash, the US Federal Reserve hiked rates nearly 2% while on the fiscal side, taxes were increasing and the US government was reducing spending. A further macro difference often forgotten is that oil prices rose dramatically leading into both the dot.com bubble and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, whereas oil prices have been stubbornly grinding lower over the past three years. Oil remains the largest source of US energy supply (~38%) and its impact on economic growth should not be underestimated. Tariffs are certainly unique to the current period and are not growth positive. But as we noted last time, the most extreme outcomes have been dialed back and so far, the US economy seems to be absorbing these with less impact than expected. We should also not lose sight of the political cycle. With US mid-term elections next year, the political incentive to pull out all the stops to juice the economy would seem high. In sum, this set of macro conditions would seem more likely to be supportive of economic growth and market expansion than contraction.

Leverage: Another notable difference between now and previous hot markets is that much of the AI infrastructure spend has come from the cash flows of the largest, most successful companies in the world. Leverage is an essential ingredient for a bubble and debt-funded spending has only recently started to accelerate. We think this acceleration warrants close attention and are wary of some of the off-balance sheet financing deals of recent weeks which bear an eerie resemblance to problem lending of previous eras. But it seems more likely that the debt-fueled AI investment cycle has further to run.

Valuations: We agree that valuations are elevated, particularly in some technology / AI stocks. However, we would highlight that valuations are not nearly as elevated as the truly insane levels seen towards the end of the dot.com era where many companies had miniscule revenues and even lower profits (if any). During that period, even well-established companies traded on extraordinary valuations. Let’s take Microsoft, which is the only company from that era to consistently hold a top position in the S&P 500 for the next 25 years. Back then, Microsoft traded on a peak trailing P/E valuation of 60-80x as compared to about 33x now. At the same time, Cisco Systems was briefly the largest company in the world and touched a P/E of 200x as compared to about 29x now. Examining the top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 today reveals only one stock (Tesla) trading at what looks more like a bubble P/E multiple of ~85x. (Not so) Fun Fact: if an investor had been unfortunate enough to buy Cisco Systems at the peak in March 2000, they would have had to wait until November this year for the stock price to (almost) recover to the same level. This demonstrates the point that valuations do matter and the importance of diversification!

Concentration: We agree that the concentration of major US stock markets indices in a few big companies warrants attention. Indeed, the top 10 names in the S&P 500 account for around 40% of the index as compared to around 20% in late 1999. History reveals that while the current concentration is very much at the high end, there have been many other periods where top 10 concentration reached around 30% and stayed there for some time. Analysis also reveals something of a cycle in markets with concentration generally rising in bull markets and falling in bear markets. This makes intuitive sense but like all things in markets, there are exceptions and we would caution using concentration as a signal to time markets (though we would suggest it as a signal to be increasingly focused on diversification). While it is often dangerous to assume “this time is different”, we observe that many aspects of society are increasingly trending towards “winners take most”. The stock market may be the ultimate manifestation of that trend. It is certainly the case that the internet has fundamentally changed the economic landscape and has given companies unparalleled global reach. Nonetheless, concentration is a concern particularly when considered in the context of a US economy where the top 10% of US households by income account for ~50% of consumer spending, which itself accounts for 70% of US GDP. Thus fully 35% of US GDP is exposed to a spending slowdown by that top 10% who also happens to own ~90% of the US stock market.

Putting this all together, we agree there are legitimate reasons to question whether this market is a bubble, but markets are always climbing a wall of worry and the optimist who thinks about what can go right tends to have the long-term edge over the pessimist. In May this year, we suggested investors who were underweight equities consider rebalancing up to target. Just as rebalancing seemed prudent then, we believe rebalancing is still prudent now. Over the long term it is rarely beneficial to be materially underweight equities and equally, when markets are stretched, being significantly overweight increases risk. As we have noted in previous letters, we doubt that US exceptionalism is dead but we do believe diversifying more globally is a sensible way to improve portfolio resilience.

In our Asset Class Outlook, which is available to Prime Quadrant clients, we share our thoughts on the investment landscape.

Please click here to request the full Asset Class Outlook

Prime Quadrant Partners Invests Alongside 8090 Industries in Armada – Pioneering the Future of Edge AI and Cloud Infrastructure

Prime Quadrant — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

We’re excited to announce the completion of our direct investment in Armada, a next-generation platform strategically backed by SpaceX (Starlink) and Microsoft (Azure). Armada is redefining cloud and AI infrastructure for the world’s most demanding, remote, and operationally complex environments, serving industries such as energy, mining, logistics, and defence.

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