Sectors
Wealth arrives in six recognisable shapes, and each one brings its own constraint: a window, a cliff, a trustee, a spending rule, a business that appears on no statement. The allocation engine is the same for all of them. Everything around it is not.
The allocation engine does not care where the money came from. Everything around it — sequencing, tax, liquidity, who is allowed to say yes — cares enormously. These are the six situations we are set up for.
Liquidity arrives all at once, taxed unevenly, usually while you are exhausted and everyone you have ever met has a suggestion. The first six months are about not making a permanent decision with temporary information — cash is parked deliberately, not idly, and the policy is written before the wire clears.
The largest holding is the business, it is illiquid, and it appears on no statement. We model it as a position anyway — with its own correlation to your industry — so the liquid portfolio is built to offset it rather than to quietly double it.
Capital accounts, deferred compensation, a partnership loan and a retirement date that is a cliff rather than a slope. The work is sequencing: what funds what, in which year, at which marginal rate, without touching the capital account early.
Four entities, three states, two generations that disagree, and a trustee who has to be able to defend every decision. One model, one policy per entity, one reconciliation — and a governance record that survives the person who wrote it.
A spending rule that must survive a bad decade, a board that changes every three years, and an audit that asks for evidence rather than confidence. Policy, minutes and performance are produced in the format the auditor already accepts.
Vesting schedules, blackout windows and a 10b5-1 plan that has to be set months before you know whether you will want the money. Diversification is a calendar problem here before it is an allocation problem, and the calendar is not negotiable.
Almost everyone who arrives here arrives concentrated. A single line — the company you built, the stock you were paid in, the fund you seeded — carries the majority of what you are worth. That is not a portfolio. It is a bet with a lifestyle attached to it.
Unwinding it badly costs more than holding it. So the unwind is engineered like everything else: a tax budget agreed before the first sale, tranches sized to liquidity rather than to impatience, hedges used only where the cost is genuinely earned, and a written stop on how slow is too slow.
Single-line exposure, intake to policy ceiling
Three situations we turn away often enough to publish. Reading one of these and recognising yourself saves you a call and saves us a client who was never going to be happy.
We do not run money against a quarterly scoreboard, and a firm that tells you it can is selling you the scoreboard. Our composite has lost to its benchmark in two of the last ten years, on purpose, in years where losing to it was the point.
Discretion runs to the policy, and the policy changes at committee, in writing, with a reason attached. If you want to trade your own account on a view, keep an account for it — separate, funded to a number, and outside the mandate.
We would be the wrong price. The instrumentation, the custody arrangements and the reporting cost what they cost, and below that number a low-cost index platform will do more for you than we will. We will name two on the call.
Forty minutes, under NDA. We will model the constraint before we say a word about allocation — and if you are one of the three we turn away, we will say that instead.