Paul Musson, the head of the Ivy team at Mackenzie Investments, acknowledges that Ivy has a reputation for not keeping pace in bull markets. But he doesn't see this attribute as a negative, so long as the managers capture "a reasonable amount" of the market gains.
"We're being careful," says Musson, who is the lead manager of Mackenzie Ivy Canadian, a Morningstar 4-star rated fund in the Canadian Focused Equity category. "We don't know when the bear market will start and our plan is to not capture as much of a down market."
To help protect capital in anticipation of a market downturn, Musson is taking what he describes as a counter-cyclical approach to stock selection. "We have a strict valuation discipline," he says. "By definition, if something is getting more expensive, it's because people are rotating to that sector."
