March 16, 2020—Amid a turbulent global and market environment, we remain committed to our clients and colleagues.
Private Clients
We help families of institutional scale build portfolios to meet their investment goals and fulfill their legacies.
Our private clients’ investment portfolios are an integral part of their financial enterprise. Because no two families are alike, we work closely with each investor to build a portfolio based on his or her unique investment objectives, tax considerations, risk tolerance, and other unique factors. We are also practiced at collaborating with other financial advisors to create a seamless partnership.
Our expert investment teams work with families at various stages of the investment lifecycle. We aim to build long-term relationships with our private clients, helping them to prepare for generational wealth transfers, establish governance processes, and educate family members on how to preserve and grow their wealth.
The relationships we build are grounded in an alignment of interests with our clients. We don’t generate fees from investment products or have financial relationships with managers for recommending their products. Our clients can trust that the investment decisions we make for their portfolios are meant to achieve their financial objectives, not our own.
* Cambridge Associates typically works with families, family offices, and individuals with a minimum portfolio size of $100 million.
Our Latest Insights
In periods of market stress, it can be difficult to rebalance, much less overweight risky assets like equities. In this paper, we review our approach using multiple lenses: magnitude and duration of drawdowns relative to history, cheapness of valuations, and presence of pre-conditions for markets to begin their ascent. Such an approach can help investors tune out the emotion and dial in on the hard data and most probable outcomes even in the face of great uncertainty. While opportunities are developing across many markets, investors should hold off on broad overweights to risky assets at this time.
Investors are now grappling with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has sent global equities into bear market territory as the threat of a severe recession weighs on the global economy. These are challenging, uncertain times for equity markets. As investors work to ensure their portfolios will be robust through this downturn and are positioned for the eventual rebound, we offer a review of the critical benefits of global equity diversification and examine considerations related to home bias, rebalancing strategies, and currency impacts.
Families of wealth face three key questions about intergenerational wealth planning: how best to invest to sustain future generations; how best to engage the next generation; and how best to ensure family unity endures. Often each question is addressed independently. We find that a conversation across generations about the impact of a meaningful venture capital allocation can help address all three questions in an integrated manner.
Every day, CREO and Cambridge Associates encounter wealth owners, families, and family office professionals who are starting down the path of sustainability investing. This paper details the typical path these investors take, the questions many of them face, and the way that many of them successfully develop a winning strategy that generates both returns and impact.
Families with multigenerational wealth may be particularly well positioned to consider allocating 40% or more of their assets to private investments. Assuming these families have the requisite long-term time horizon, patience, and ability to act quickly, they stand to benefit not only from the potential for higher returns but also from the tax-advantaged nature of private investments. Life could get better after 40%!
Thoughtful decisions during chaotic environments are what separate the top-performing investors from everyone else. In this series, we review five important topics that should inform any plan to manage portfolios through equity market downturns.
