Notes from the President

Sometimes we simply have to be able to laugh at ourselves and take things just a little less seriously. This is an attempt at that piece of advice…

This story takes place in 1996, when I was toiling as Senior Economist at BMO/Nesbitt Burns. I was asked by the Bank’s bond desk out of London to do a European marketing trip to institutional clients across Europe. The person leading the charge was Paul Petrashko, who was a top-drawer salesperson on the fixed-income side and was (and is) of high character and a fun traveling companion.

It was the summer of ‘81. And not one that I will ever forget. Not exactly the best days of my life. I had just completed my second year at the University of Toronto, doing my undergraduate degree in economics. As with anyone at the ripe young age of 21, I thought I knew it all.

At this time of year, in the lead-up to the High Holidays, I think back to my childhood when I used to sit next to my dear dad in the synagogue. As he stood to say the solemn prayers, I would be right beside him hiding under his prayer shawl (“tallit”) and hugging his leg. That intense feeling of safety and security has never gone away…

Jack was already a well-known and successful financial market executive by the time he accepted a position at Shearson Lehman in 1987 (the same year I started my career as a Street economist) as head of the firm’s fledgling Research department. And even that is being charitable, as Lehman’s Research area was at the bottom of the industry rankings for many years and was not to be taken seriously…

The pandemic has sharpened our focus on what’s important. That much is obvious. And on how precious life is and remembering the close friends and family members we lost. It is memory, after all, that separates us from animals (not the only thing)…

I wasn’t always a wine guy. I used to be a beer (and scotch) guy. But I began to develop a taste for the fermented grape when I started working at BMO-Nesbitt in 1994…

It was the summer of 1982, between third and fourth year university in Toronto, I was working at a family-run firm called Metro Weed Control, spraying weeds. As long as it wasn’t raining, I’d be given a list of a dozen houses to go to with my spraying apparatus where I’d walk up and down the front yard and then up and down the backyard in the blazing heat. That was the whole job…

Before my trip, the heads of sales and trading in the fixed income and equity departments in Toronto sat down with me and went over and over all the appropriate protocols and gave me lessons on Japanese culture…

I am not positioned the way the dominant “Roaring Twenties” crowd is, that much is for sure. But I have been here before. When I turned bearish on tech at the height of the bubble back in 2000, my partners at the time thought I was nuts…

It was the club’s annual Christmas party. What the association had to do with the Bank of Nova Scotia at the time, who knows? But Warren didn’t want to do it. He came to me in mid-December and said: “Dave, you’re about to give your first speech,” and handed it off to me…

So, even though I was steadily promoted and learning a lot while in Ottawa, what I really wanted to do was go to Toronto. I knew nothing about Bay Street, but that’s where I felt I’d fit in best; call it intuition. I applied to the economics departments at all the big banks…

A human resources guru once told me that almost everyone’s professional success can be attributed to one inflection point — a particular event — that often lasts no more than a few minutes. That definitely happened to me at the genesis of what would eventually become Breakfast with Dave. I remember exactly what transpired as if it were yesterday…