Strategic Tax-Efficient Investing
Investment Philosophy
Our investment philosophy focuses on the factors within an investor’s control to optimize risk-adjusted returns and tax efficiency. Since every client is unique, we tailor each portfolio to the client’s preferences and objectives.
How do I optimally construct my portfolio?
A Quantitative Approach to Investing
We make investment decisions based on time-tested empirical evidence supported by academic and industry-driven research. Through education and guidance, we empower clients to avoid behavioral mistakes that can be detrimental to achieving financial goals.
Our portfolios emphasize diversification across asset classes, geographies, and styles to reduce concentration risk. While diversification cannot eliminate the risk of market loss, sufficient diversification does mitigate unique risks incurred by a single company, sector, country, or risk factor.
Tax Efficiency
We implement several strategies to optimize clients’ tax efficiency. These include tax-loss harvesting, fixed income optimization, and asset location.
Some examples of less tax-efficient assets that we prioritize in tax-deferred accounts include:
- High-yielding bond and debt investment strategies, except for tax-exempt municipal bonds.
- Commodity funds that hold futures distribute gains more frequently due to the unique marked-to-market tax treatment of futures contracts.
- Precious metal funds are often subject to higher tax rates on collectibles.
- Mutual funds that issue considerable capital gains and ordinary income distributions.
Direct Indexing
We offer a tax-managed solution that can help higher-income clients reduce tax liability. Index funds are comprised of many individual companies, some of which may trade at a loss even when the index is on the rise. Mutual funds and ETFs cannot pass through these tax losses to end investors, but our customized solution offers the potential to overcome this limitation. Replicating the index utilizing individual stocks in a separately managed account (with a small degree of tracking error, positive or negative) allows the client to take advantage of harvesting losses at the individual stock level.
Some use-cases for this strategy for high-income investors include:
- Offset current-year and future-year capital gains from other investments.
- Reducing the tax impact of diversifying concentrated stock positions, ETFs, or mutual funds the client wishes to sell.
- Building a custom index that more closely aligns with the client’s values provides the ability to screen out stocks based on environmental or social concerns.