Best Practices in Institutional Family Office Investment Management
The Partners Capital Best Practices in Institutional Family Office Investment Management whitepaper was written for both individuals looking to set-up a family office as well as existing family offices who are interested in benchmarking their existing set-up with that of others. This topic is inherently complex given the many different iterations of family offices, their…
Read MoreA Practical Guide to Hedging Foreign Currency
The best risk-adjusted returns available to investors could be anywhere in the world and therefore an optimally invested, long-term portfolio will have exposure to foreign assets. Investors who own foreign assets and spend domestically have an asset liability mismatch; the currency exposure of their portfolio diverges from the currency exposure of their expenditure. In this…
Read MoreDo’s and Don’ts of Multigenerational Investing
These Do’s and Don’ts offer some basic guidance for managing family wealth over multiple generations. This ranges from simple wealth management where next generation knowledge and involvement may be useful, to multi-generational families with substantial family wealth planning resources and requirements. Some families may have already established a formal family office to administer wealth management,…
Read MoreHow do Veteran Private Equity Professionals Invest Their Personal Wealth
Partners of distinguished Private Equity firms are some of the most proficient investors in the world in leading their firms’ investment activities. Many are also proficient in managing their substantial wealth outside their firms. However, many are not. With just under half of Partners Capital’s assets under management owned by senior investment industry professionals, mostly…
Read MoreWhere are we in the transition from risk + return investing to risk + return + impact investing?
We are at dangerous cross-roads today with ESG and impact investing. The momentum from all corners — institutional asset owners, asset managers, and financial reporting regulators — has built to levels not anticipated, having been further boosted by the pandemic. This acute focus on the environment and social impact is a history-making socio-economic phenomenon. But…
Read MorePartners Capital Risk-Managed Endowment Approach
The Endowment Model of investing was conceived in the 1990’s at the Yale Investment Office by David Swensen. He subsequently enshrined the principles of the model in his seminal book Pioneering Portfolio Management, published in 2000. Over the last two decades, there have been seismic shifts in the investment landscape with substantial capital flowing into…
Read MoreFair Fees and Alignment – Building Long-Term Partnerships with Best-In-Class Asset Managers
In 2014 we wrote our first whitepaper on “the war on fees”. At the time the proliferation of low-cost passive investment options was challenging the traditional high-fee model of active management. Alignment was poor, and many asset managers generated significant personal wealth regardless of whether they delivered excess returns for their investors. Over the last…
Read MoreA Primer on Alternative Asset Classes
The earliest of financial investments, pre-dating traditional stocks and bonds, were investments in private companies, private property, privately negotiated debt (non-bank loans made to companies, individuals or governments) and commodities like gold, wheat and corn. These private investments came about in a widespread manner in the middle of the 19th century. In the last 100…
Read MoreRecession Playbook
Our Recession Playbook is our strategy for managing your portfolio through the coming few years in the face of a potential global recession. Given that almost all past bear markets have coincided with global recessions, we make little distinction between a strategy for investing through recessions or protracted market downturns. We see them as one…
Read MoreA Radical New Approach to the Endowment Model
Is there a more attractive alternative to the Endowment Model of Investing? Today? No. But we raise this question as the universe of high returning strategies that have little correlation with traditional financial market returns continues to expand. Five years into our pursuit of so-called ‘Alternative-Alternative’ strategies, we are close to having sufficient options to build…
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