Markets were anything but quiet in Q1. This month we sit down to give you an honest look at what happened this quarter, what hurt, what crushed it, and where things are headed.

Here’s what we get into:

Q1 2026 performance recap across our three strategies: Enhanced Index Aggressive Growth (Value), Canadian High Dividend, and Canadian Momentum

Why a rough month is the worst time to ditch a strategy — And when you actually should make a change

Introducing “Dump the Dogs” — Our new momentum enhancement that’s already showing a 9% spread over our standard momentum strategy year-to-date

How a robust portfolio is built — Think of it like a ship: value as the ballast, dividends on the deck, and momentum as the sails Canadian High Dividend strategy — Up 14% year-to-date and 38% over the last 12 months

At Tower you have full transparency with 24/7 account access, and we only invest in liquid assets, which means getting your money when you need it (no penalties, no drama) We always tell you when the numbers are good — and we tell you when they’re not. This is both.

📞 Got questions? Reach out to Tarek or the team anytime.

tarek.williams@towerasset.ca
403-952-9696

Full Transcript

00:00
Mark
Greetings, everybody. Thank you for making time to listen to our view of the market. We’re looking for opportunity in the midst of chaos. And I put on my very serious blue jacket just so you know that I’m a serious portfolio manager. And now I’ll get to work. So I’ll take it off. Try and keep up with Tarek there and then.

00:20
Tarek
Okay.

00:20
Mark
Tarek is going to lead us off with a market look at what we’re, what we’ve been through this quarter, first quarter of 2026, and then we’ll have a few comments on where we think we’re going.

00:32
Tarek
Very good. Yes. So we’re going to take a look at the way the first quarter of the year went, but the specific focus on the last month. You know, if you’ve had your finger on the pulse of capital markets at all, the last month has been particularly, let’s say interesting or challenging. So we’ll start with our enhanced index aggressive growth strategy. That’s our value based Strategy. It’s down 2.5% for the last month, but still up 5.8 for the year. Our Canadian, or excuse me, our Canadian high dividend strategy is actually up 2.9% for the month of March and year to date is up 14%. So strong year to date performance there. And then our Canadian momentum strategy is down year to date 6.7% with the last month showing a negative 11.9% showing. So it’s. Yeah, the challenging is a challenging month for momentum strategies.

01:40
Tarek
And you know, the technical term for what happened is a momentum trend reversal. If you can think of the fact that whatever was driving market fundamentals before the war in Iran flipped on a dime, which is, you know what, okay, quick question.

01:56
Mark
What day did that war start?

01:57
Tarek
February 28th, I believe is the bomb started dropping.

02:01
Mark
Oh, March is a good measure of the impact of the war.

02:05
Tarek
Yes.

02:06
Mark
And how did the whole market do on a year to date basis or.

02:10
Tarek
Good question. So TSX for the month of March did 4, negative 4.3. The S P 500 did negative 5. Year to date, the S P is down or the S P500 is down 4.3. Year to date, the TSX is up, still about 3.9 despite the negative month in there. So yeah, that’s for context. Right. And, and you know, we’re never gonna lie to your clients. We’re gonna be happy and shouted from the rooftops and we have excellent returns. But we also want to be honest and not disingenuous until you, when we have A, you know, there’s a rough return and that’s a down month in the Canadian momentum strategy for sure.

02:49
Tarek
I think that leads in nicely to what I think you’re going to talk about, Mark, is what do we do when we have a negative month in the Canadian momentum and in general.

03:00
Mark
Let me, let me take it from there, Tarek, to talk about two or three important things. One, an 11.9. Was that the number?

03:10
Tarek
That’s correct.

03:11
Mark
Okay. We’ll just never say that number again. And certainly we won’t put it in a recording an 11.9% negative month. Is that the time to bail on a strategy? Okay, let me give you this as the first answer to that. And then we’re going to talk about our whole portfolio strategy. So stick with us. We’re going to try and be done in 11, in 12 minutes total. So eight minutes left. The best time to change strategies. Almost everybody wants to do it when the strategy has not been working. That is the exact wrong time if you want to diversify away from too much in our momentum because you and we have been believers in it and now suddenly it’s got an 11.9.9% and boy, we’re never going to do that, like get, got to get out of this thing. No, no, no.

04:03
Mark
The time to change a strategy is when it has been running well because good days and bad days and, and what you want to do is get the best out of whatever strategy that is. So those of you who have too much in momentum, and I would represent that my wife’s account has been in that one singularly and well focused on it. And she’s been bragging about how well her numbers are doing. Suddenly, you know, she’s got a bad month and I’m looking really smart because I’m over in the diversified value strategy. The right time to diversify away if you feel like you’ve got too much momentum is call us in three months or six months and we’ll reduce your concentration in that momentum because it will have come back. You don’t want to miss the rebound. Okay.

04:50
Mark
Number two, what you really want is a robust. Robust. What’s robust? You want a robust portfolio strategy that can handle the bumps and weaves and tosses in turns of a normal market. This is what we’ve got in our three strategies. We have a value strategy that we call the ballast in the boat. It’s the body of the boat. It should have on the whole, probably between 50 and 65% of your total investment assets. You might have it with us, you might have it with other people, but it is the larger, bulkier piece of assets. And it’s your safety net. It’s the, it’s the ballast that gives the ship the ability to ride through waves. Then we have this dividend strategy which we think of as being on the deck.

05:41
Mark
And the dividend strategy we’re going to close with because its numbers are unbelievably good for the last year. So Tarek’s all set up to close us and then we’ve got our sails on a sailboat and that’s the momentum strategy. And we always describe this and we are thinking if you want to have a healthy ship that rides storms well, you want all three parts of this thing.

06:01
Tarek
Yes.

06:01
Mark
That the sales will give you. And that is why we think we’ve got a robust combination. We don’t have a lot of strategies. There are investment firms out there, large ones, very successful ones, that have so many strategies that you can always find one of their names. Usually they’re mutual funds in the top 10% of all firms. Some of them. You know, there are so many funds, I’ll use one name. And this is one of their strategies at say, Fidelity. They have so many different funds out there in the market that they know they will always have something that they can brag on as being top decile or many that are top quartile. What they don’t focus on is the other 3/4 of their funds that are 3rd and 4th quartile.

06:50
Mark
It’s just that’s their strategy is to always have something they can brag about, something to roll out. And everybody’s rotating into these high performing funds. The time to roll into a high perform is when it’s underperforming.

07:02
Tarek
Yeah.

07:02
Mark
So if any of you don’t have any momentum, let me encourage you to pick up some momentum right now. This war will end. Here’s. Here’s another thought. Why do markets always go up? One is survivorship bias. Bad companies go out of business. They’re the ones that cause bad news. You know, Bre X Nortel, other companies have gone under or been taken over. The reason markets continuously go up is people are innovative, inventive. They resolve their problems. When they see their stock tanking, they go, we have a problem, we have to figure it out and fix it. And then the stock turns around and starts to go back up. That’s why markets go up over time.

07:51
Mark
There is something I’ll say God, given that a genius that he has put into our psyche, into our makeup, and we are continuously working on improvements as human beings. That’s why markets go up. Okay, let me talk about another couple things. You need complementary strategies in your portfolio. If you are singularly focused in one area, give us a call. We’ll figure it out with you and we will move you around between our three different strategies. We would love to manage your whole portfolio. We what we need to do is make sure we understand where the rest of your wallet is so that we can have our addition to your whole wallet be one that complements what you’re doing. Ideally, you’ll think we’re really smart and you’ll give us the whole wallet and we’ll look after it in this complimentary way.

08:40
Mark
But honestly, we’re not worried about whatever you’ve got at other places. Just tell us what you’ve got so that what we do can complement what you’ve got sitting elsewhere. One of the things that we talk about is the genius of investing. Long time investing is avoiding torpedoes. Now I’m switching topics real quick here because in probably November, maybe December, Tarek began working on an improvement to our momentum strategy. And so way back then he was going to, I think there’s something we can do better. And, and we began labeling this dump the dogs strategy.

09:20
Tarek
That’s right.

09:21
Mark
You know, what we’ve been doing in momentum is rebalancing every order. So take a position. 12 Stocks, hold them for three months and then rebalance. And Tarek began wondering, you know, sometimes right after you get your whole 12 in place, some of those stocks roll over, they turn into dogs, and you have to hold onto it for three months because we’re hooped. And Tarek began testing thesis on this thing. Tarek’s idea. But I’m going to take credit for it because it’s such a good idea. One month later, we tried it on our own account and Tarek’s getting lined up to give us some numbers on how that strategy is. So in our own money, this is where we test new theories.

10:03
Mark
We pull off some money of our own, put it in that strategy and then take a look at it to see if it works. And then when it doesn’t, we don’t tell anybody about it because we don’t roll it out. But if it does work, we roll it out and then we take it to all of your accounts the same way. And so what he began postulating was, what if we didn’t hold 12 names for the whole time? Or what if we held names that changed through the period? He tried several different thesis and I hope I added a little bit of value to that conversation.

10:32
Mark
But in the fact he arrived at a conclusion that said, what if we changed one third of the worst, found the worst third in the first month and just hooked them up and then went looking for a new replacement of those. We tried it with bigger numbers instead of 12, maybe it should be 18. We tried it with, maybe we should change half in two months. We tried it with different ideas. What we have, I mean, let him describe what we’re doing now and where we think we’re going and the result has been remarkable. So take it from there to tell us whether or not you want to talk about the numbers or what it is that we’re doing in our strategic rebalancing.

11:14
Tarek
I’ll tell you about the strategic rebalance just to build anticipation for the numbers at the end here. But, so we’ve coined the term, I don’t even, I don’t know if you’ve said it yet, the dump the dogs term. Because the idea is that like you mentioned, we’re going to turn the portfolio over similar overall, but a little quicker on a monthly basis as opposed to waiting for quarter end. So what we did was with momentum, we currently wait till the end of the quarter, we find the 12 best momentum stocks for a proprietary process and then we, you know, switch out the names. Now what we’re going to do is run that same process but monthly, removing the worst performing third.

11:59
Mark
12 Minutes is up. Keep going.

12:02
Tarek
Sorry folks, adding the best performing third. And then by that method we’re dumping the, you know, if it stays at 12 names, we’re dumping the four worst for getting the four best and keeping the portfolio even fresher without actually substantially increasing the portfolio turnover will increase, but it’s not that much more than doing the same thing month or, sorry, quarterly. Now let’s get into the returns. What we’ve done is we’ve run this in one of Elaine’s accounts, that’s Mark’s wife, to just see. We always tested on real money in our accounts because we don’t want to trial things like this with client money. And for the month of March, that’s the challenging month, the trend reversal month, that was down 11.9 for standard momentum. The dump the dogs Momentum was down 6.6 or 6.7%. So it did better then.

12:53
Tarek
And then year to date we Started this in. In January. Mid January is so year to date, it’s actually up 3.4 compared to the. The current momentum version, which is down 6.7. So in both instances, it’s relatively short time frame.

13:11
Mark
Let me say that again. The current momentum strategy is down 6.7, and the dump the dog strategy is up 3.

13:19
Tarek
That’s right, 3.4.

13:20
Mark
That’s a 9% spread.

13:22
Tarek
It is a 9% spread. It’s very substantial. And what we like about, you know, like we said, it’s a short time period. It’s a short time horizon. But what we like about it is it the strategy makes sense. That’s what I always say to clients. You may not be a portfolio manager, but we should be able to describe to you in simple terms what we’re doing, and it should make sense to you as a, you know, a person who understands how the world works. And, and that makes sense. We can quickly say these stocks are out of favor. Let’s not hold on to them for any longer than we need to and get into ones that are in favor.

13:51
Mark
Okay, one other question, and then we’ll sign off. You were testing on numbers. Size. Is 12 the right number from based on your research, or is 18?

14:03
Tarek
It might be 18. You know, we’re still actively trying that. Currently we have 12 in Elaine’s account. I think 18 may be the number. We’re going to be implementing this change soon. I wouldn’t commit to a date just yet, but I do think the back test and the actual historical test have been compelling enough that we will likely make a change. And the final determination will be in the next couple days here, I think.

14:26
Mark
Okay. Okay. And when do you see us rolling this out into client accounts? If the performance is that much better? Can we do it sooner or are you waiting until June 30th?

14:39
Tarek
It may be as soon as mid April, if not mid May. I don’t think it’ll take as long as June 30th. We do have some regulatory disclosures we have to make, and you’ll find more information. If you’re a momentum investor, you’ll get more information on what’s happening specific to when that rollout is going to be. I’m sure TCR compliance officer John has a lot to say about how this was rolled out, and so we’ll let him guide us in terms of how we exactly do this in a way that’s compliant.

15:09
Mark
So this is prepping the ground for that.

15:11
Tarek
Yeah. Okay. I think we’re.

15:14
Mark
I Think we’re done. I want to, I want to recap on a couple of things and then you can think of close Closing comments There Tarek. A while ago Derek and I sort of started to formulate what a firm should look like in this business, in the money management or investment management business. One, we wanted a firm that had good portfolio returns. And remember in your closing comments, you’re going to get the returns for the dividend strategy, which is like a boom over the fence. Okay, so we want good, solid, long term, we want a robust investment strategy where the three strategies work together or maybe it’s four or maybe it’s two. But where the holistic works together, one performs one, another’s not in favor and then so on. They complement each other. We want competitive fees.

16:04
Mark
We are required by the securities regulators to charge everybody the same fees. So we have this tiering of fees that comes down. The larger the client, the better. I want to say at the same time, if we’re going to 18 names instead of 12, the cost of trading is higher. So the larger your account is, the more efficient your account will be. So I am encouraging you, if we don’t have all of your wallet, to think about increasing the size of your wallet because it will reduce the trading costs. Our trading costs are institutional level, very low cost. But that same low cost is applied to a trade in a small account or in a big one because that’s the way we negotiated the deal. So the bigger the account, the more efficient it is, the higher your return.

16:53
Mark
You have visibility on our accounts. If you’re not using our 724 access to your account, you can, you don’t have to. You can also call Tarek anytime. Don’t call me, but call him anytime. Midnight is fine. And, and have a look at your account. You can know pricing in your account as of the night before. You can also see what exact positions are in your account. You are not commingled with others. But we do trade everybody’s account together and then we distribute those the one trade into all the different accounts. So we’ve got the different strategies and we trade them together to try and gain efficiencies for you. But you’ve got account visibility. Finally, liquidity. You’ve got 724 visibility on your account. Anytime you want to, you can go look at it. Secondly and really important, you can access your money anytime you want.

17:46
Mark
I think the law right now is T +1. But to set realistic expectations, trading +1 day is really tight for you. To get your money. T plus 2 is very realistic. You call us, you’d like to get some cash out. You’re buying a car, you’re buying a house, you’re buying some furniture, you need some cash, great, just let us know. No penalties, no pain, no problem. We liquidate the next day, it settles into your account the day after that, and then it just takes a few days for the banks to transfer the money out. We like to think that we are. We’ve built a firm the way that it should be and we hope that you’re happy with it. Tarek, close this up.

18:26
Tarek
Absolutely. So we’ll find. We’ll close with our dividend strategy, which is our newest strategy. The year to date numbers, as I said, that’s from January till the end of March, are 14, which substantial on its own. But the. What?

18:40
Mark
14%.

18:41
Tarek
14% Year to date. And this is. And it actually did. It’s up for the month of March. You know, some of the dividend names we had as Canadians, we all know that resource companies are big in Canada and resource companies do well when oil price shocks happen, and they have done well in the month of March. So that was in the dividend strategy and led to its outperformance there. And for the last 12 months, the strategy is up 38%. So big numbers there. We’re really happy about that. You know, like I said, we shouted from the rooftops when we had good numbers. But don’t forget, we also tell you we have bad numbers. 38.9 Or, sorry, 38 on the dividend strategy for the last 12 months. Really happy about that. And it just adds to what you were saying about complimenting. Right.

19:32
Tarek
So, you know, a lot of clients have all three of these strategies in their account and they will perform at different times. And this is the way it’s supposed to be.

19:43
Mark
You’re done. Good man.

19:45
Tarek
Yeah.

19:46
Mark
We wish you all well. Happy Easter to you and we hope you have a good week.

19:51
Tarek
Yes. And let us know if you have any questions. We’d be happy to chat. Talk to you later.