Supported by
A pixelated image of the Modus Family Office Allocation Index. Illustration by Modus.
This week’s newsletter is late and short because I was traveling and have been sick. The original journalism you expect will resume next week.
The Modus Family Office Allocation Index finally got the overhaul it needed.
The index was the first and only of its kind when it was first published a year ago. It was popular, and since then people have unsurprisingly polluted LinkedIn with lazily whipped-up AI versions of something similar, and CNBC has created a more diligent copycat using data provided by Addepar.
Everybody—family-office principals and beneficiaries, their chief investment officers and staff, asset managers, consultants, investment bankers, philanthropists, journalists, aspirants, lookie-loos and others—wants to know how single-family offices invest, how that’s evolving, and why. Strategic asset allocations rarely change much year over year, but there’s still a lot to learn, analyze, discuss and debate about family-office portfolios.
Knowing strategic asset allocations, cash flow, and other data captured by the software that family offices use has value. But those are snapshots of portfolios and activity in that moment. Widely shared and cited family-office reports based on surveys have limitations, but they reveal portfolios as they are and how family offices plan to shape them in the future—that’s what everyone I mentioned above is most interested in, and what the Modus index captures.
The latest index uses data aggregated from four reports. It also matches the refreshed Modus brand and, borrowing heavily from the Goldman Sachs report, is now a bar chart (they are superior to pie charts and Modus regrets its previous choice).
Something the new index has that others don’t: question marks. Family-office reports are not analogous enough for the index to break down specific asset classes further. For example, some divide a private-equity allocation into buyout, growth and venture capital while others segment the asset class by fund or direct investments.
Check out the Modus Family Office Allocation Index here. (Or keep reading; there’s a link to the index further down, too.)
A message from Orbis
When everyone agrees, we ask why
At Orbis, we believe compelling long-term opportunities are rarely found where everyone else is already looking. For more than 35 years, the courage to question consensus, conventional wisdom and our own assumptions has shaped how we invest.
As defined in applicable securities law, this information is intended for qualified purchasers in the United States.
More News
Onur Erzan, president of AllianceBernstein, will be president and CEO of the firm beginning April 1, 2027. He succeeds Seth Bernstein, who will retire in the spring after nearly a decade leading the firm.
Leadership at UBS has revived discussions about ways to move the bank out from under its Swiss regulators, including through a combination with a foreign bank, Semafor reported, and Morgan Stanley, Standard Chartered and Deutsche Bank could be in play.
University of Pennsylvania’s endowment crushed it, returning 27.4% and boosting its assets to a record $31 billion. However, it is also facing a higher tax on realized gains; its rate rose to 4% from 1.4% under the One Big Beautiful Bill, Bloomberg reported.
Alvarez & Marsal Private Wealth Partners (AMPWP), the wealth management business affiliated with the namesake consulting firm, has created what it calls the A² Lab to conduct “original research to develop proprietary decision-support methodologies, scenario models, and sensitivity analyses for clients. Its work visualizes trade-offs and helps planning, investment, tax, legal, and fiduciary professionals coordinate around a common set of facts.”
Jonathan Fitzgerald, the AMPWP co-founder who previously led domestic wealth planning at Citi Private Bank and Wilmington Trust’s Emerald Family Office, started the lab, which Miloš Janičić, a quant researcher at the firm, will lead.
The lab will also collaborate with other parts of Alvarez & Marsal, including A&M Tax.
“Investment portfolios have benefited from decades of increasingly sophisticated optimization techniques. Yet families and their wealth advisors must also make consequential decisions about when and how much to fund planning vehicles, how to sequence entity formation and capital movement, how to maintain liquidity across interconnected instruments, and how governance choices affect future flexibility. These decisions are often evaluated in silos and with limited quantitative analysis. The A² Lab helps close that analytical gap,” the company said.Bessemer Venture Partners is raising a fresh $5.75 billion ($4 billion for growth-stage and $1.75 billion for early-stage). Partner Byron Deeter told Bloomberg that opportunities are now in private markets. “The AI wave is amplifying it all,” Deeter said. “Companies are staying private longer, and it’s a permanent structural shift.”
The Boston College Investment Committee recently asked alumnus and Sequoia Partner Pat Grady for his thoughts on AI. He made a 15-minute video for them and also posted it to X.
“I recorded a test run yesterday morning and then shared it with my partners, who encouraged me to share it more broadly... so here you go!” he wrote.Katherine Travell, CEO of Stryde Search, cautioned that some family-office recruiting scams are making the rounds. Fraudsters have always portrayed themselves as recruiters or hiring managers online, usually to convince would-be candidates to share personal information. Scammers then use that information to steal a person’s identity or more, or even extort them. AI has supercharged this nefarious activity (writing bespoke phishing messages is that much easier), but beyond odd email addresses, Travell said outsized compensation for open jobs was a giveaway. “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!” she wrote this week.
Why Are You Afraid of a Mediocre Life? “On our obsession with legacy, our fear of being forgotten, and why meaning may have nothing to do with being remembered.”
As promised, the new Modus Family Office Allocation Index.
Jobs
Arthrex, the private company founded by billionaire Reinhold D. Schmieding, is hiring a manager for its family office public equity and debt portfolio in Naples, Florida. This person will “lead activities related to the allocation and investment in liquid public securities, bonds, ETFs, derivatives, and mutual funds. Monitor and report on overall investment performance. Maximize risk-adjusted financial return for liquid securities portfolio.” The office wants someone with 10+ years of similar experience managing at least a $100 million portfolio.
The Friedkin Group, which includes one of the world’s largest independent Toyota distributors, hospitality companies, soccer teams, the film distribution studio NEON, and more, is hiring a senior manager of investments and asset management in Houston. This person will report to Breyn Quinn, manager of the family office (a role TFG was trying to fill this spring).
Unlimited.ai, a startup software platform used by investors to manage their private assets, is hiring a founding account executive, an implementation specialist and a full-stack engineer. They would like these people to be based in Houston or Austin, but will consider remote workers on a case-by-case basis.
Other Stuff
Have a news tip?
Share information in confidence by replying to this email, or messaging me on Signal using a personal device that your employer cannot access: +1 330-962-6441.
Want to reach Modus’s sought-after readers, align your brand with a highly trusted one, and support independent journalism? Sponsor the newsletter. Fill out this form to receive the media kit.
I’ll be in…
On my couch, getting over this cold, watching the new season of “The Traitors.”
Akron in October.
