E262: The 50-30-20 Portfolio: How Institutions Are Rebuilding 60/40

Episode 262

How do you build portfolios that survive liquidity crises, inflation shocks, and the most volatile market regimes in modern history? In this episode, I talk with Alfred Lee, Deputy Chief Investment Officer at Q Wealth Partners and one of Canada’s most experienced multi-asset portfolio architects. Alfred previously managed over $75 billion across equities, fixed income, commodities, factor strategies, and thematic ETFs at BMO—while also spending a year at the Bank of Canada running part of its quantitative easing program during the pandemic. He shares what he learned from overseeing $25B in fixed income and $50B in equities, how ETFs transformed the public markets, why alpha is harder to generate than ever, and why alternatives, real assets, CTAs, and discretionary macro strategies must anchor the next generation of portfolios.

Highlights:

Lessons from overseeing $75B across fixed income, equities & commodities
What Alfred learned managing QE operations at the Bank of Canada
Why generating alpha in public markets is harder than at any point in history
How Q Wealth Partners serves as Canada’s version of a modern RIA aggregator
Building model portfolios using open architecture while staying within regulatory guardrails
The “debasement regime”: why inflation will appear in bursts for years
Why CPI understates real-world cost of living and what that means for investors
How to allocate to Bitcoin, gold, and real assets through one-ticket solutions
60/40 is outdated: Alfred’s 50/30/20 framework for the next decade
Behavioral finance as the biggest driver of investor outcomes
Why illiquidity is a feature, not a bug—and the “virtue of staying invested”
How to evaluate private credit, private equity, and alternative strategies
Why liquidity collapses cause correlations to spike across asset classes
How to run “portfolio war games”: preparing for the next crisis
The single greatest lesson Alfred learned from 2008 and 2020: never assume liquidity

Guest Bio:

Alfred Lee is the Deputy Chief Investment Officer at Q Wealth Partners, where he oversees portfolio construction, asset allocation, and investment platform design for one of Canada’s fastest-growing wealth platforms. Before joining Q Wealth, Alfred spent over a decade at BMO, where he helped grow its ETF franchise to $100 billion in assets and managed more than $75 billion across fixed income, equities, commodities, and factor strategies. He previously completed a one-year secondment at the Bank of Canada, where he ran part of the central bank’s quantitative easing program during the pandemic, helping restore liquidity and functionality to the provincial bond and funding markets.

Our Podcast now receives more than 300,000 downloads a month. Are you interested in sponsoring an episode? Please email David Weisburd at david@weisburdcapital.com.

#venturecapital #vc #startupsuccess #openlp #assetmanagement

Stay Connected with David Weisburd:

X/Twitter: @dweisburd LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dweisburd/ Weisburd Capital: https://www.weisburdcapital.com/

Stay Connected with Alfred Lee:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfred-lee-cfa-cmt-dms-b329025/ Q Wealth Partners: https://www.qwealth.com/

Questions or topics you want us to discuss on How I Invest? Email us at david@weisburdcapital.com.

Disclaimer:

This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, financial, legal, or tax advice. Nothing in this ep

Published on 3 days, 8 hours ago