Many family offices run like mom-and-pop shops need to embrace best-in-class management and oganizational standards. Blackman Kallick's Mark Blumenthal presents a case study of a small family office that put more formalized processes in place in this "Worth" magazine article.
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Over the past several months, private investors and their advisors have been pondering the wisdom of accelerating long-term capital gains in the 2012 tax year. This paper looks at why.
Every investor knows about Yale University and the extraordinary success of its endowment portfolio. Indeed, many families have tried to emulate Yale’s approach to asset management, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, fewer people are aware of of the Norway Government Pension Fund. While there are certainly aspects of the Yale Model that are useful to private investors, the Norway Model seems to speak much more directly to families and, equally important, seems to be implementable by all but the smallest family investors.
This paper reviews the expanded federal gift exemption that is set to expire at the end of 2012 and the tax differences that are set to occur on gifts given before and after December 31, 2012. Hemenway & Barnes also reviews various trust instruments, including a generation-skipping trust and a grantor trust.
SmartLife Funding dynamically manages life insurance by aligning the funding strategy with the insureds health profile to target the optimum period of coverage.
The “Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance & Job Creation Act of 2010” (TRA 2010) reunified the gift and estate tax systems and increased the amount a person can transfer to children and future generations during lifetime or at death to $5,000,000. As of the beginning of 2012, indexing puts that number at $5,120,000. The window on this opportunity to fully fund a generational legacy of over $10 million per couple will close on December 31, 2012. Beginning January 1, 2013, the amount passing free of gift and estate tax is back to an indexed $1,000,000.
Emerging markets have been recognized for quite a while as a place where investors can earn greater returns than in developed economies due to higher economic growth, strong balance sheets and more attractive demographics. Although investing in emerging markets remains an area of opportunity for investors, navigating an emerging market economy is challenging.
This paper examines several factors impacting investors' commodities exposure and the current sentiment on downside risks.
This paper identifies four channels through which the shock of a Greek default could spread across the Eurozone and the global economy.
Market turmoil has brought the topic of Minimum Variance Portfolios (MVP) to the forefront. But examined within a broad U.S. universe alongside the closely related Low Volatility Portfolio (LVP) counterpart are investors who employ an MVP strategy appropriately compensated for the relative risk they assume?