Disseminated on behalf of: ArcStone Securities and Investments Corp.
- The third annual ArcStone Kingswood Growth Summit will be held on Wednesday, September 16, 2026, at the Sheraton Centre Toronto, in the heart of the country’s financial district.
- The invitation-led event builds on a 2025 edition that drew more than 600 attendees, 26 sponsors, 32 presenting and featured companies, and more than 540 one-on-one meetings. Organizers are targeting roughly 1,000 attendees and about 60 companies this year.
- The audience is expected to split roughly evenly among institutional investors, family offices, and retail wealth advisors, with a speaker program expected to include PearTree Securities’ Jesse Pearlstein, veteran Bay Street advisor Steve Kaszas, and Kingswood U.S. CEO Michael Nessim. The event also draws capital markets professionals and generalist small-cap investors who support public issuers.
One day, on Bay Street, by design
For one Wednesday in September, the centre of gravity for North American growth capital will sit on Queen Street West.
The ArcStone Kingswood Growth Summit 2026 takes place September 16 at the Sheraton Centre Toronto, a few minutes’ walk from the towers that anchor Canada’s financial district. It is a single day, invitation-led, and built on a premise that has become quietly unusual in small-cap capital markets: that the people who need to meet should not have to get on a plane to do it.
That premise belongs to Michael Astone, CPA, CA, CEO of ArcStone Group of Companies and a former Managing Director and equity partner at Cantor Fitzgerald. Having spent two decades on Bay Street before building a cross-border firm, he had a particular reason for wanting its first conference day held in Toronto.
Canadian capital markets are flush with capital on the back of the commodity cycle, and investors are looking for new names to put that capital to work. That’s the premise of the ArcStone Kingswood Growth Summit: to put companies across mining, biotech, energy transition, and tech in front of the institutions and retail capital that can actually fund them. ArcStone’s DNA is cross-border. We were built to marry Bay Street and Wall Street.
Michael Astone, CEO, ArcStone Securities and Investments Corp.
The date was chosen with the same care. Mid-September lands after Labour Day, when the industry is back at its desks and focused on the final two quarters of the year. It is a narrow window, Astone notes, in a calendar otherwise broken up by summer travel and the holidays.
The logistics follow from that. Where a good deal of small-cap conference programming has migrated offshore, the Summit asks little of attendees beyond a short walk.
“People have travelled all summer. By September, everyone just wants to get back to work,” Astone says. “You can walk over from Yorkville or come up from Bay Street. No flight, no hotel, no three days out of the office.”
For those flying in, he encourages building a wider trip around the day: market on Tuesday, present Wednesday, take further meetings Thursday. The Summit, in his framing, is less a destination than a reason to be in the city.
A platform built for the cross-border trade
The Summit is best understood as the most visible expression of a firm that spent several years assembling an unusual set of parts.
ArcStone Group of Companies is a global financial services firm. Its U.S. broker-dealer traces back to Arcview Capital Inc., established in New York in 2019. ArcStone took an initial stake in September 2023, then spent roughly two years working through FINRA and SEC approvals before securing control in August 2025 and rebranding it along the way to ArcStone Securities, LLC.
By then, the firm already had a history with Kingswood U.S., a New York-based wealth network that includes an SEC-registered RIA and a FINRA-licensed broker-dealer and, with its parent company, represents more than US$8 billion in assets under management. The two announced a strategic partnership in March 2024 and went on to stage the Growth Summit together for two straight years in Toronto.
What drew Astone to Kingswood was the U.S. retail reach of what the firm had already built: a national retail wealth footprint of a kind that is difficult and expensive to assemble from scratch.
Kingswood had the platform. They had built something with real reach in the U.S., and the two businesses fit together almost perfectly, their wealth network alongside our institutional desk and capital markets team.
— Michael Astone, CEO, ArcStone Securities and Investments Corp.
In December 2025, the two sides deepened that alliance, with Kingswood U.S. announcing the acquisition of an equity stake in ArcStone Securities, LLC. ArcStone Kingswood now operates as a division of Kingswood U.S. What the combination created was a structure Astone had watched work in Canada for two decades: institutional coverage paired with a genuine retail wealth desk.
Less than a year on, he frames 2026 as the firm’s coming-out year, with the desk now completing mandates for high-profile issuers and building global connectivity.
Why metals and mining takes centre stage
If last year’s Summit reflected a broader mix of cleantech, medtech, and wellness issuers, this year’s programming is tilted decisively toward metals and mining, the result of a house call made well before the sector re-rated.
“We took the view early that central bank gold buying was structural, not a trade, and that the build-out of data centres would put sustained pressure on copper demand,” Astone says. “Watching the long end of the curve, we didn’t think rate relief was coming quickly. That led us to commit the desk to commodities.”
That view now shapes the client roster, which spans gold, silver, copper, and specialty materials, with biotech, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and special situations rounding out the mix. The exchange conversation runs across the NYSE, Nasdaq, OTC Markets, TSX, and CSE.
The more interesting structural argument Astone makes is about who is doing the buying. U.S. retail brokers, he notes, historically did not participate in exploration and development-stage mining, which was long a TSX and TSXV phenomenon. As more of those issuers list on U.S. exchanges, that is changing.
“U.S. advisors are engaging with this sector in a way they simply weren’t a few years ago,” he says. “A retail wealth network in the United States, a commodity cycle with real legs, and a firm with genuine connectivity into both Bay Street and Wall Street. That is the bridge we are trying to be.”
It is also, he argues, the reason U.S. resource issuers should be looking north rather than assuming their capital has to come from home.
“Canada has spent generations building real depth in resource investing,” Astone says. “There are brokers here who understand what a drill program means, analysts who have covered these companies through multiple cycles, and an investor base that actively wants the exposure. For a copper or silver company, that combination is hard to find anywhere else.”
Who is in the room
The Summit’s value proposition rests on the composition of its audience, and Astone expects it to land at roughly a third institutional investors, a third family offices, and a third retail brokers and advisors, a mix spanning small-cap funds, private capital, and the wealth channels that actually place retail orders.
Some of that demand is inbound. The firm’s investor communications platform, ArcStone Financial Pulse, distributes issuer updates and market commentary to a subscriber base he puts at more than 100,000. Readers, he says, have begun requesting invitations directly.
The speaker program is being assembled along similar lines. Those expected to take part include Jesse Pearlstein, Managing Director and Head of PearTree Securities, whose firm runs a market-leading flow-through donation financing program and is a significant force in Canadian exploration capital; Steve Kaszas, who spent more than four decades as an investment advisor on Bay Street, beginning at Burns Fry in 1983 and later co-leading The Kaszas Altberg Group at BMO Nesbitt Burns; and Michael Nessim, CEO and Managing Partner of Kingswood U.S. They are joined by senior small-cap legal practitioners, exchange representatives from the CSE, and CEOs from across the commodity, biotech, AI, and quantum names on the roster.
“We’re trying to bring together the who’s who and get the energy back on Bay Street,” says Astone.
The format itself is built for throughput. Ballroom presentations run to rooms holding 300 to 400 people at a time. Curated one-on-one meetings are booked through MeetMax software in pre-scheduled 15-minute slots, with issuers typically taking five to seven sessions across the day. Networking runs through breakfast, lunch, coffee breaks, and a closing cocktail reception. An invitation-only VIP dinner the evening prior brings select issuers and capital partners together before the main program begins.
Astone is candid that the event is not a profit centre, and that this is the point.
“A lot of mid-market banks run their conferences as a profit centre. That was never the intention here,” he says. “We’re an investment bank, not an events business. We support our clients, and they support us in return. It’s a partnership. The Summit is one tool in the quiver, and it is judged on the relationships it builds.”
What separates a good day from a wasted one
For CEOs weighing whether to present, Astone’s advice is unglamorous and specific: focus on building the audience, getting the story out, and finding new sources of capital. The market is a market of windows, and issuers need to be ready.
“Know what catalyst you have coming,” he says. “If there is something material on the horizon, think about how it lines up with the date. Walking into the room with news behind you changes the conversation.” A mid-September date, he adds, leaves a long runway into the prime October marketing season.
He is equally clear about what a single day can and cannot do. The Summit opens relationships rather than closing them, and the capital in the room, he says, is backing people rather than assets.
We’re betting on the jockey, not the horse. When we back a company, we are backing a management team to take the capital, execute the plan, and deliver what they said they would deliver.
— Michael Astone, CEO, ArcStone Securities and Investments Corp.
That, more than the ballroom or the catering, is what the day is built to surface. For investors, a single September Wednesday on Queen Street West offers a compressed look at a roster of management teams they would otherwise spend months chasing. For those teams, it offers a rare shot at the audience that can move their share register.
To learn more about the ArcStone Kingswood Growth Summit 2026, or to request an invitation, visit the event page.
Learn more at arcstoneglobalsecurities.com.
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