Where Macro Meets Opportunity: A Time-Tested, Three-Pillar Approach to Global Equities
When the market itself quietly becomes the concentration risk, a top-down process built over 30 years may be exactly the second tool advisors didn't know they were missing. For most of the past decade, buying the market and achieving broad diversification were the same act. Today they are two separate jobs. In this episode of Insight Is Capital, host Pierre Daillie sits down with Christian Crête, Senior Portfolio Manager, Global Top-Down Strategies at Desjardins Global Asset Management, and Patrick Gagnon, Managing Director and Head of National Sales, Desjardins Investment Solutions, to examine exactly where that gap has opened and what fills it. Christian traces a macro-led process born in 1991, stress-tested through the GFC and Brexit, and refined for a world moving from one economic center of gravity to many. He walks through how his team reads the forest before the trees, working across macro, valuation, and investor sentiment simultaneously, to surface opportunities that passive indexing and conventional bottom-up stock picking are not designed to find. Japan's structural shift, European defense rearmament, and fragmenting global supply chains are not just headlines here — they are live portfolio positions with reasoned conviction behind them. Patrick brings the conversation to the advisor's desk: the quiet anxiety building around CRM3 and total cost reporting, the behavioral challenge of diversifying away from what has worked, and why Desjardins' co-creation approach — listening first, building second — is redefining what an asset manager partnership can look like. The episode closes with a plain-English breakdown of where DAGL sits alongside the newly launched Desjardins Active Canadian Bond Universe ETF (DACU) and Desjardins Canadian Equity Leaders ETF (DACL). Timestamped Chapters 00:00 — Introduction: When the index kept its promise but the market narrowed 02:00 — Guest introductions: Christian Crête and Patrick Gagnon 03:00 — Career backgrounds 05:30 — The shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world: what it means for portfolios 09:00 — Europe, defense spending, and the emerging investment opportunity 12:00 — Japan: 30 years of deflation, rising rates, and the carry trade risk 15:00 — Concentration risk at the advisor's desk: index ETFs and the seven-name problem 19:00 — The three pillars: macro, valuation, and investor sentiment 24:00 — How advisors are quietly rethinking who they lean on, and why 25:00 — Origin of the process: 1991, pension mandates, and a founding client still with them today 29:00 — What advisors need from asset managers in a CRM3 environment 33:00 — GFC playbook: building defensively in 2007-08, buying financials in January 2009 37:00 — Brexit: positioning before the vote, buying UK homebuilders in the two-day collapse 42:00 — Trusting the process when it hurts most 44:00 — Forest before trees: why 300 names is not 300 stock picks 46:00 — Quality and value as design, downside resilience as byproduct 49:00 — Advisor objections and how Patrick answers them 51:00 — Where DAGL sits in the Canadian ETF landscape 54:00 — Which clients this fits: balanced, growth, high net worth, and where to be cautious 55:00 — The active fixed income and Canadian equity case: DACU and DACL 57:00 — CRM3, cost transparency, and expense ratios across the lineup 58:00 — Rapid fire: one reason to add a global top-down strategy 59:00 — What Desjardins offers an advisor's practice that the street does not 01:00:00 — Co-creation: building solutions from the voice of the advisor 01:01:00 — Why institutional durability matters inside the investment process Funds Mentioned DAGL — Desjardins Global Opportunities ETF (global top-down active equity) DACU — Desjardins Active Canadian Bond Universe ETF DACL — Desjardins Canadian Equity Leaders ETF #ActiveETF #GlobalEquity #MacroInvesting #PortfolioDiversification #ConcentrationRisk #AdvisorInvesting #CanadianETF #DAGL #DGAM #Desjardins #TopDownInvesting #WealthManagement #InsightIsCapital #CRM3 #FinancialAdvisor #InvestmentStrategy #MacroEconomics #MultipolärWorld #ETFCanada #ActiveManagement
