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.
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 in...
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 a...
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?
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 su...
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...
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...
The Alternatives Landscape provides a broad overview of the current environment for the primary alternative asset classes: hedge funds, private equity, private credit, real assets, and real estate. The landscape begins with a look at the broad hedge fund universe, which saw managers in higher beta-oriented strategies generating the best returns.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused investors around the globe to ditch risky assets in favor of safer alternatives. Many have looked to gold as the place to park capital in hopes that the commodity will gain value during the current market rout. Gold is viewed as a safe haven, expected to deliver a degree of protection when equity markets become more...
In periods of market stress and heightened uncertainty, it can be difficult enough to take the plunge and rebalance, much less overweight risky assets like equities. In this webinar, Margaret Chen moderates a discussion with Celia Dallas and Kevin Rosenbaum addressing when the right time to rebalance is, and our approach to using multiple lenses to...
Investors have seemingly been concerned about Brexit since day one, and equity performance may have suffered because of it. This brings to light an important consideration for passive investors: the exact contents of their chosen benchmarks, which can make for a poor investment portfolio in many asset classes due to high levels of concentration.
The pandemic that was the dominant news story of 2020 will continue to hold its position for much of 2021. Between hopes for a COVID-19 vaccine and expectations for the Biden administration, how should investors think about the year ahead?
Real estate has always been a tax-advantaged investment class, especially in the U.S. where rules allow you to shelter income or cashflow through depreciable losses and other mechanisms. For the investors who want deeper insights into all aspects of their real estate investments, they see how technology is transforming their abi...
This organizing session at the 2012 FOX Fall Forum marked the launch of a new investment community, the FOX Deal Exchange. FOX CEO and FDX Chairman Sara Hamilton provided an overview of this venture, which was followed by a panel discussion with three leading private equity teams, each dedicated to deploying one family’s private capital in str...
One of the trends we’ve seen in response to the volatility of the markets in recent years has been for private investors to rethink how they define investment objectives through a goals-based lens. Families are actively articulating and measuring their investment profile in terms of their personal financial goals, rather than in terms of market ben...