The investments nobody talks about at dinner parties tend to be the ones that quietly build wealth. Here is why we have always chased consistency over trends and why one client is very glad we did.
Every few years a new investment idea captures everyone’s attention. Crypto. Cannabis stocks. AI plays. Clean energy. The story is always compelling, the upside always sounds enormous, and the fear of missing out is very real. We get it. Shiny things are hard to ignore. But chasing them has never been our approach. From day one, our focus has always been the same: consistency over excitement, durability over hype.
Boring is not a flaw. It is the whole point.
The client who almost chased cannabis
A real situation. (Details changed to protect privacy).
It was 2018 and a client, a successful business owner in his early fifties came to us fired up. His golf buddies were making money in cannabis stocks. His brother-in-law had doubled his money in three months. Everyone he knew seemed to be in on it, and he did not want to be the one who missed it.
He wanted to move a significant portion of his personal investment portfolio into cannabis. Not a small position. A meaningful one. Enough that if it went wrong, it would change the conversation about when he could retire.
We pushed back. Not because we thought we were smarter than the market, but because we asked him one question: what does this do to your plan if it drops 60%? He did not have a great answer. So instead of chasing the story, we kept him in what he already owned, a mix of steady assets that nobody was talking about. Unglamorous. Reliable. Boring.
The fund? The Horizons Marijuana Life Sciences ETF (TSX: HMMJ, now rebranded as Global X Marijuana Life Sciences Index ETF) was one of the most widely held cannabis funds in Canada at the time. It peaked in late 2018 and dropped more than 90% over the following three years. His golf buddies stopped talking about it. His brother-in-law stopped bringing it up at family dinners.
Our client? He stayed on track. His retirement timeline did not move. His plan held together exactly as it was designed to.
That story is not unusual. We have had versions of that conversation with clients during the crypto boom, during the AI frenzy, and during every other moment when the market decided something was the next big thing. Our answer has always been the same: if the thesis depends on the story being right, it is not an investment. It is a bet.
The problem with chasing trends
Trend-chasing feels rational in the moment. You see an asset class moving, you read the headlines, and you convince yourself that getting in now still counts as early. But by the time an investment theme is generating buzz, the easy money has usually already been made. What is left is volatility, hype, and a lot of other investors with the same idea and the same exit strategy.
The math is also unforgiving on the way down. If your portfolio drops 40%, you need a 67% gain just to get back to where you started. Avoiding large losses is not a conservative cop-out, it is one of the most powerful wealth-building strategies available.
The goal is not to find the investment everyone is talking about. It is to find the one quietly doing its job while everyone else is looking the other way.
What we look for instead
When we evaluate an investment for a client’s portfolio, we are not looking for the most exciting story. We are looking for consistent demand that does not depend on the economy being in perfect shape, a business model simple enough to understand and durable enough to hold through uncertainty, steady income that compounds over time, and low correlation to public markets so that when stocks get choppy, this part of the portfolio stays calm.
Those criteria do not produce headlines. They produce results.
Our favourite example: self-storage
Nothing illustrates boring-is-better quite like self-storage. It is not glamorous. There are no disruptive technologies, no founder origin stories, no viral moments. It is a shed and people rent it. That’s it.
Self-storage demand is driven by the kind of life events that happen regardless of what the economy is doing: people moving, downsizing, divorcing, inheriting belongings, running out of room. It performs well during recessions because difficult transitions drive demand just as much as good times do. When people lose a job they downsize their home. When they downsize their home, they need somewhere to put their stuff.
The Canadian market adds another layer of opportunity. It is highly fragmented, with the majority of facilities still run by independent operators who lack the capital and technology to compete at scale. That fragmentation creates a consolidation opportunity for well-resourced operators who can upgrade assets and improve profitability without needing the market to cooperate.
Mini Mall Storage Properties Trust — One of Our Favourites
One fund we genuinely love for eligible clients is Mini Mall Storage Properties Trust, managed by Avenue Living Asset Management. The Trust acquires legacy-run self-storage facilities across Canada and the United States, applies institutional-grade operations and technology, and generates returns through rental income and asset value growth.
Calendar returns1:
- 2021 = 13.21%
- 2022 = 12.86%
- 2023 = 12.03%
- 2024 = 9.30%
Since inception 11.07% (annualized return)
Note: Past returns do not guarantee future performance
One of the interesting aspects of the Mini Mall Storage Properties Trust performance history is how it behaved during the 2022 market downturn.
While broader public markets declined significantly in 2022 due to rising interest rates and inflation concerns, Mini Mall reported a positive return of +13.21% for the year.
You will not see it trending anywhere. You will not hear about it at a dinner party. That is exactly why we hold it.
The bottom line
We have don’t like chase the hottest investment trends because trends require perfect timing, carry outsized risk, and rarely deliver the steady compounding growth that serious wealth building actually needs.
Exciting investments give you stories. Boring ones give you options. If you would like to talk through what that looks like for your portfolio, reach out. We are always happy to walk through the thinking.
