The Story Behind the Story
“A minute into our first phone call, Sellery was telling me I had it all wrong.”
by Michael McCullough
Knowing that we would be publishing our Money Issue as usual in February, the height of RRSP season, back in October we began looking for the story that would crystallize what investors needed to know in the wake of the great financial crisis of 2008-09. Not an easy task for a regional business magazine when there is 24/7 financial media blaring at us from all quarters.
The meltdown, it seemed, had liquidated some widely held articles of faith in the investing business, such as diversification and buy-and-hold. What was called for was a rethink of our whole worldview about money.
The trouble is abstract ideas don’t sell magazines. We needed a person or persons who had seen through the crash and now had a new set of predictions that investors should heed – a financial sage, if you will, who could personify those ideas. And, for our purposes, they had to come from Alberta. So I started emailing writers, readers, investors, anyone I knew who had their ears to the ground. I got some intriguing suggestions of oil-and-gas fund managers, newsletter publishers and economists who had predicted the market collapse, but no one who precisely fit the bill.
Eventually my search led me to Bruce Sellery, a former anchor of CTV’s Business News Network who had relocated to Calgary to become a financial educator. A minute into our first phone call, Sellery was telling me I had it all wrong. My search for a financial clairvoyant played into the whole notion of beating the market, which is the mirage that ends up worsening returns for investors. What people should be doing instead is investing passively: meeting instead of beating the market and paying as little as possible for the privilege. He backed up his argument with charts and statistics demonstrating how actively managed funds consistently underperformed index and exchange-traded funds – even in the down markets like the one we recently experienced.
OK, I conceded. He had a point, one that in my gut I knew to be true. That still left us needing somebody to symbolize this philosophy. Sellery offered himself or, if that was too self-serving, he could suggest a portfolio manager with whom he shared a lot of common ground. Like Sellery, Terry Shaunessy had worked at the heart of the investment-industrial complex as an analyst, pension fund manager and ultimately president of Gordon Capital in Toronto. And he too had experienced a conversion on the road to Damascus (or, in his case, Calgary).
Together, they had a potent, contrarian argument that urged readers to rethink their money worldview, albeit not in the way that we had originally imagined. So we went with it. Sometimes the facts get in the way of a good story. But just as often they present you with a better one.
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