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In what feels like a distant memory, the first quarter of 2020 began on a positive note, with the S&P 500 rising to a record high on February 19. Markets quickly retreated as investors digested the impact of COVID-19 on the global economy. The S&P 500 plummeted, losing 34% in 23 trading days, the fastest decline of that magnitude in history. Global central banks and governing bodies responded quickly, injecting historic levels of monetary and fiscal stimulus which pared losses.

The unprecedented speed, intensity, and uncertainty of COVID-19 has created a host of new and complex challenges for wealthy families that are playing out across both financial and family dynamics. There's no doubt it is a financial and business challenge, but it is also a very human one. To assist family office leaders and the families they support see and solve the issues in the most effective ways, a set of discussion questions are provided to help leaders prioritize and address both the financial and logistical considerations, as well as the very human ones.

Liquidity risk is a critical issue for investors, and it has been heightened in the COVID-19 environment that has brought on the end of the bull market. We take a closer review of the factors that have changed market liquidity conditions over the past decade, how the “new liquidity reality” has impacted several markets during the recent market downturn, and the potential steps to take going forward.

April is setting up to be a transformational month for understanding how the global economy and financial markets will recover from the COVID-19 pandemic gripping the world. Investor’s patience are being tested, and low prices may tempt some investors to rush into equities. But are there still too many unknowns?

Predicting the future path of inflation is notoriously difficult; just ask any economist. The best protection against future uncertainty is a well-constructed portfolio, tailored to meet the asset owner’s risk tolerance, portfolio objectives, and spending needs. While there are trade-offs associated with all solutions to protect a portfolio against inflation, there are ten things that investors have come to appreciate.

Born out of the hard lessons learned from early 20th-century market crashes and the First World War, the concept of a diversified investment fund was formalized under the Securities Act of 1933 and Investment Company Act of 1940. Three types of funds were created, including the closed-end funds (CEFs). It can be psychologically difficult to stay invested in tough times and amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but that’s what it takes to unlock the value of closed-end funds.

Tax alpha is a measurement of tax efficiency that attempts to isolate the value of active tax management by comparing a manager versus a passive benchmark. This metric is preferred over alternative measures of tax efficiency because it shows the investor’s actual tax experience and uses a custom benchmark to put the results in perspective. The primary shortcoming of using alternative metrics such as turnover, unrealized gains, or loss carry forwards is that they can only indicate the investor’s potential tax experience—not their actual experience.

Taxable investors are right to be concerned with measuring performance on an after-tax basis. However, to put after-tax performance in perspective requires a benchmark, just as pretax performance measurement does. Yet unlike pretax performance, after-tax performance is unique to each investor’s tax situation and asset flow patterns.

With unprecedented health concerns and economic uncertainty at the forefront of everyone’s mind, Edward Marshall sat down with Richard Perez, to provide guidance on how to put these events into perspective. Edward shared tactics on how to weather environments like those we are experiencing such as:Putting uncertainty and market volatility into perspectiveImportance of proactive communicationHow to develop an action plan

Some advisors are clamoring for managers to harvest any and all available tax losses in their clients’ accounts. But harvesting all the losses in a portfolio creates risk—risk that can cost far more than the transaction will benefit the client.