It was a year that delivered more ups than downs in the end. Still, Canadian financial advisors spent much of 2025 calming jangled nerves and promoting a long-term view. Would U.S. President Donald Trump tank the global economy? Would the AI bubble burst? Clients who listened to their advisor did well. Those who didn’t learned about the value of professional financial advice, even if it was the hard way.
Advisor-client relationships were strained by a host of economic and political factors. Those who knew their clients and had a solid investment philosophy they could refer to consistently were best able to keep their customers on course.
Ian Stock, a financial advisor with Edward Jones in Belleville, Ont., said it was a year in which all-weather portfolios showed their value.
“This year has taught us to stay calm and keep invested — not timing the markets, but time in the markets,” he said. “Focusing too much on politics would mean missing the real story like profitable businesses, strong sectors like technology and materials, and resilient growth, [which] have driven this year’s returns far more than any policy announcement.”
Kiefer West, an investment advisor at iA Private Wealth in Nanaimo, B.C., shared a similar view.
“It’s been a good year,” he said. “I would say part of that [is attributed to] the process that myself and my business partner use for our clients — staying diversified, staying the course and focusing on their goals, rather than what’s going on in this immediate moment.”
West said 2025 was “difficult because even if the clients trust the process and they trust you, some clients were thinking about making a change and moving to cash and potentially making a mistake with their investments.”
Liji Varghese, a senior financial planner with TD Wealth Financial Planning in Coquitlam, B.C., said the tariff policies announced this spring put the greatest strain on his practice.
“This has been a very tumultuous year,” Varghese said. “We had a major scare in April, and I didn’t know how it would transpire, but it was just a quick scare. But from a market perspective, we had a very good return … and that’s kept the clients very satisfied.”
Five days after Trump’s Liberation Day tariff announcement, the S&P/TSX composite index recorded an intraday low of 22,227.70. By month-end, Canada’s benchmark index had closed at 24,841.68, down just 0.3% for the month. Fast forward to market close this Monday and the index finished at 32,000.10.
A rollercoaster
Evan Hoffele is a financial advisor with McLaughlin Financial Group, which operates under Worldsource Financial Management Inc. in Harriston, Ont. He’s a relatively fresh face in the financial services industry, having been at it four years — including just three years as a wealth advisor.
Hoffele described 2025 as a rollercoaster. “The markets have rebounded back to all-time highs,” he said, which has clients wondering, “Are we going to have a crack now?”
As a seasoned advisor, Vanessa Laine had more personal experiences with volatile markets to draw on. The senior wealth advisor with Canaccord Genuity in Calgary said this year pales in comparison to market conditions brought on by the Covid pandemic and 2008–2009 financial crisis — both “scary” given their unprecedented nature.
“This year was an absolute cakewalk compared to some of the other ones,” Laine said.
Advisors had to put on their behavioural coaching hats.
Hoffele spent a good chunk of time discussing uncertainty with clients this year, especially with some “repeat offenders” who want to regularly discuss geopolitical or economic developments and how they’ll impact their investments.
“Three to four days a week, you’re going to have a conversation with somebody, or have an internal conversation where we’re kind of deciding how we’re going to talk about these things and how we’re going to react with our clients when they ask questions,” he said.
“It’s time consuming. It makes our job a little bit harder.”
Hoffele communicates proactively with clients about major developments that could impact markets, to manage their expectations.
“We stay up to date with geopolitical and economic news, and then we put out a blast or try to start that conversation before it’s a worry,” he said. He also points to historical charts when speaking with clients, to “set a standard that there’s going to be bad days in the investment market.”
Laine has a similar approach.
“We look at the performance charts over the last nine years, and I remind them that in those nine years, we’ve had three major market events,” she said.
More experienced clients worry less, she said. They’ve “gotten almost used to having those major market events very consistently and very close together.” Liberation Day, for example, was “nothing new” in their eyes.
Varghese had concerned clients, whom he reassured with the same line graphs. His more conservative clients felt 2025 was “a breeze” compared to 2022, one of the worst years on record for fixed-income investors.
West said he had eager clients wanting to change the course of their investments, but he urged them to stay on course.
“We know it’ll get better; we know markets will recover,” West said. “A lot of clients said we sound like a broken record. But when the markets came back, they were so glad they stuck with it.”
Stock said 2025 reinforced a valuable career lesson, which is that clients who stay focused on their personal financial goals and work closely with their advisor can navigate uncertainty with greater confidence than those who try to time the market based on headlines.
“Advisors help clients understand that elections, policy changes and headlines create short-term volatility, but the key is not to overreact,” he said. “Instead, we reassess their strategies together and stay focused on what they can control: their own financial plan.”
Roland Inacay is a research journalist and Noushin Ziafati is associate editor of Investment Executive.