The best way to avoid seasickness in today’s choppy markets is by keeping your eye on the investment horizon, a portfolio manager told advisors Thursday at a forum hosted by Manulife Mutual Funds in Toronto.

“Don’t let fear and greed manage your portfolio,” said David Ragan, director and portfolio manager at Mawer Investment Management Ltd., and co-manager of the Manulife World Investment Class.

The two-hour session at Toronto’s Carlu had portfolio managers answer advisor questions and outline investment strategies for dealing with current volatile markets.

Ragan said portfolio diversification is key to taking advantage of global opportunities. He said his team is bullish on infrastructure, and has made some choices in that area that may seem counter-intuitive — such as a commercial construction company in Ireland and a dyke-building engineering firm in the Netherlands.

Tim Keefe, executive vp and chief equity officer at MFC Global Investment Management in Boston, continued along this counter-intuitive theme. He advised moving away from the comfort of money and fixed assets and toward companies that will have pricing power in the future. “In the short run you’ll have to live with some volatility,” he said. “But in the long run you are protecting your purchasing power.”

Living with volatility weighs heavily on investors minds these days. Pat McHugh, a Toronto-based vp and senior portfolio manager at MFC, says it’s vital to either educate clients about it or reassess the asset mix. He points to investors who stuck with markets after the dot-com crash as an example. “It took 39 months to recover that drop, but the stock market compounded at a 20% rate,” he said. “So people that were invested doubled their money.”

Risk management control is something advisors should consider closely when looking at portfolio managers, added Shauna Sexsmith, also a vp and senior portfolio manager at MFC. “We make very calculated and intended risks, and we have a number of ways of identifying the unintended risks in our portfolio and we try to minimize them,” she said.

The decoupling of the rest of the world’s economy from the United States is a theme that Ragan says is continuing. Emerging markets, particularly the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — are seeing increasing demand for infrastructure, pumped up consumer spending and an easing of monetary policy that are affecting markets worldwide. “We think the Chinese and Indian economies will help buttress the Asian pillar,” he said, thereby creating a strong regional economy to balance things out globally during the U.S. slowdown.

As a result, the slowdown in the U.S. will have less of an impact in the emerging markets, according to Ragan.

Keynote speaker Steve Forbes, however, disagreed with the waning influence of the U.S. economy, in his speech at the end of the forum. “Decoupling — don’t believe it,” he said. “We’re in fact tighter around the world in terms of economies.”

McHugh told advisors to look a little closer to home. “It is an outstanding time to be looking at Canadian equities,” he said. “The price-to-book ratio of our marketplace is now down at levels we haven’t seen since mid-2005, when the ROE was 14%. It’s currently 16% and it’s going higher.”

What about the financial services sector that is at the root of much of the current volatility? Sexsmith expects to see companies de-leveraging and de-risking as well as preparing for likely new regulatory requirements. This is “going to have an effect on earnings growth, dividend growth and ROE growth going forward,” she said. “We’re still going to hold financial services stock and we think investors should, but there’s going to be greater selectivity involved in picking those companies that have strong balance sheets, have a good growth profile without taking excessive risk.”