Matson Money, an asset manager and advisor coaching firm based in Ohio and Arizona, has announced a “strategic alignment” with Canadian advisory firm Origin Wealth to provide its portfolios and investment philosophy north of the border.
Founded in 1991 by Mark Matson, Matson Money is a multigenerational SEC-registered investment advisor with $9 billion in assets across all 50 states and Puerto Rico. The firm is now also registered as a portfolio manager in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.
Origin Wealth founder and President Cameron Langlois first learned about Matson’s investment philosophies while attending the firm’s 2019 Advanced Advisor Conference in the United States, a free, three-day event for financial professionals. After returning to Vancouver, he decided to leave his father’s wealth advisory practice and open his own firm.
“Attending Matson Money’s Advanced Advisor Conference showed me how advisors can better serve clients with academically tested investment principles and how to become a coach on the investing journey,” Langlois said in a statement. “I started Origin Wealth to align with Matson Money and make these breakthroughs available to Canadian investors.”
“He actually left a really good position to start Origin Wealth and to bring this new philosophy of investing up to Canada,” said Matson VP of Coaching Josh Crawford. “He saw a better way to take care of clients— eliminating the guessing, the speculating on active management, picking stocks, track record investing—and he decided he didn't want that anymore.”
To reach a broader, global market, Matson has created an updated version of its signature two-day coaching event, “The American Dream Experience,” developed about five years ago. The retooled event, dubbed “Breakthrough Investing,” was created for investors around the world and is being hosted by Origin in Canada and an affiliated advisor in Puerto Rico.
“We really train people on what it takes to be a successful investor,” said Crawford. “And then we walk them through these Nobel Prize–winning investing principles, namely Efficient Market Hypothesis, the Three Factor Model, and then Modern Portfolio Theory, which is from Harry Markowitz, who's on our academic board.”
Matson Chief Compliance Officer Dan List has been working with Canadian regulatory authorities to bring the Matson methodology to Canada, but he and Crawford said the new event will ultimately be a global endeavor.
“There are a couple of unique opportunities in Canada, and one is that roughly 80% to 85% of investible funds is managed by five big banks,” said Crawford. “So, there's not a lot of choice. And then the other thing we've seen is that the Canadian market is about 30 years behind the U.S. market, and there's no traditional RIA model. I know Dan had to jump through some loops to get us registered up there, but it's a wide-open market. There's not a lot of academic methodology being promoted and there's really no coaching model that we've seen.”
“We’re trying to get a foothold up there to start,” said List. “As well as introducing some new potential assets that mimic our funds here in the states a little bit closer. Right now, we're using Canadian assets, ETFs and mutual funds, but the goal would be to introduce something a little bit different up there in the future.”
“And we do have future plans to expand globally,” he said.
