Thank you very much for the opportunity to present today. The Investment Industry Association was encouraged to put forward a member to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing the investment climate and our industry today. I appreciate that opportunity to join you from Calgary.
I'm the president of a small investment dealer that finances businesses from a variety of industries. The primary challenge we face in the post 2008-09 investment climate is a reduction in access to capital for smaller Canadian businesses. There are a variety of reasons for this, from demographics to risk aversion on the back of that financial crisis. Our industry association has seen a reduction of 25 boutique investment dealers through mergers or just ceasing business, and most of these dealers were focused on financing the smaller businesses.
The IIAC has been a proponent of a capital gains rollover to encourage investment, and there are investors that would be highly likely to be encouraged to put more money to work in smaller businesses. I've included a powerpoint presentation to give you a sense of what we do. We're a smaller dealer, and we use public disclosure financial statements to identify good companies and to finance them. Our view is that any inducement to encourage more public company investment increases the pool of potential opportunities for us to take it to the next level, and that translates to more jobs.
I touched earlier on investors being increasingly more risk averse; focusing on bonds, dividend-paying stocks, and cash; and avoiding the riskier and smaller speculative companies. These are the businesses that produce many of the jobs in our country.
I've also included, for illustrative purposes, three businesses where access to capital is not a problem, to give you a sense of how our business works. They are Alaris, Black Diamond, and Stella-Jones. I will walk through each one of them, but basically the story is the same. At a stage of somewhere around $100-million market capitalization, a dealer such as ourselves starts to get interested, to trade in the shares, to introduce it to institutional and retail investors. After that, a number of other brokerage firms will get involved. However, the point that's telling is that below that level, there are very few institutional or large retail investors that are prepared to finance these businesses.
I touched on how we finance these companies. We have retail brokers. We talk to their clients, institutional investors. If we're not prepared to finance a company, there are very few dealers in the country that will. We're one of the smallest brokerage firms out there. That highlights the gap we see as existing; it's generally below $100-million market capitalization.
That concludes my remarks. Thank you.