Change is never easy, especially with the challenge of mainstreaming impact investing. But when change is fun, it is easier for those faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges to begin to see opportunities. For the past three years in Davos, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has designed and implemented elaborate and highly competitive interactions with investors, social entrepreneurs and government officials.
Resource Search
Doubts about the strength of the global expansion continue to preoccupy investors, most recently causing a meaningful but relatively normal market correction.Although the global economy has been growing for nearly six years, investors have been buffeted by a seemingly never-ending series of events, from Greece and Puerto Rico to China. Each round of news seems to bait investors to stockpile their savings under a mattress. The latest series of events recently culminated with a notable more-than-10-percent peak-to-trough correction.
Jeff Mortimer’s latest Investment Update discusses what branch of the road the market may take, how the market correction served to reset investors’ views on risk and return and how we’re managing the opportunities and/or risks.
Conventional advice may be harmful if you’ve accumulated significant wealth. Avoiding critical mistakes in asset allocation and family communication, as well as working with a trusted advisor in a collaborative environment are key best practices for ultra-high net worth individuals to pursue. This article provides some of the most common errors high-net-worth investors make when they apply conventional wisdom to their unconventional wealth.
Challenging conventional thinking: Investors are typically taught that diversification of portfolio assets is the prudent approach to preserving and growing wealth. Yet the majority of the families we serve appreciate that this tenet doesn’t necessarily apply at the advisory level. In other words, diversifying across multiple advisors without integrating their strategies may result in unintended consequences. This article explains those consequences and how it can hinder your investment strategy.
Impact investing has become a popular topic of discussion, not only with the mainstream media but also with mainstream investors. Yet while impact investing has entered the mainstream mindset, many investors with the enthusiasm and means to engage meaningfully in impact investing lack the informational resources to do so. For most investors today, impact investing still needs to be translated from a compelling concept into a sound strategy. This situation is especially true for family offices.
There are two reasons for including hedge funds in a traditional asset portfolio. First, their betas with respect to the S&P 500 are often substantially less than unity, which makes them attractive diversifiers. Second, they may provide an additional source of return and risk after adjusting for their exposure to the U.S. equity market, which has been called a structural, or allocation, alpha.
Trusts have gained enormous popularity over the last 20 years. The top 1 percent of the wealthy have 38 percent of their investment assets in trusts, and the next 4 percent have 43 percent of their investment assets in trusts.1 This powerful trend is largely due to the fact that the modern trust can provide a family not only with powerful tax and asset protection advantages, but also with the flexibility and control of several key nontax trust functions, including investment management.
As a matter of Federalism, Congress cannot require the several states to adopt laws regulating investment advisers, but it can prohibit “small” investment advisers from registering with the SEC unless they have a sufficient amount of RAUM. For the last two decades, Congress has been slowly but continuously removing “small” investment advisers from the SEC’s jurisdiction.
This white paper addresses one of today’s most discussed and divisive topics involving investors, investment advisers and brokers: What legal standard of responsibility and conduct should apply to firms and individuals who provide advisory services to investors?This question is receiving a lot of attention from the SEC, the Department of Labor, the President and organizations that would be affected by changes to the existing standards of conduct applicable to investment advisers and brokers. It also was addressed in a recent Supreme Court decision.