Investment Management

An SMA is a portfolio of individual securities held directly in your name — not pooled with other investors inside a fund. You own the actual stocks or bonds, not shares of a vehicle that owns them. This matters for three reasons: tax control (you decide when to realize gains or losses), transparency (you can see every position, every day), and customization (positions can be excluded for ethical, legal, or concentration reasons).

For taxable accounts above a certain size, an SMA often produces meaningfully better after-tax returns than an equivalent ETF or mutual fund, because you are not inheriting the tax history of other investors or paying fund-level capital gains distributions.

At most wirehouses, your portfolio is built from a menu of approved products, weighted toward the firm’s own offerings or revenue-sharing partners. Your advisor often has limited flexibility to deviate from model portfolios, and the investment committee — not your advisor — makes most allocation decisions.

At Clexperus, there are no proprietary products and no product-based compensation. We build your portfolio from the full universe of available instruments, selected on merit. You have direct access to your advisor, written deliverables after every meeting, and a documented rationale for every position we hold.

Concentrated positions — a single employer stock, a large founder equity stake, or a post-IPO holdback — require a strategy, not just a sell order. Selling all at once creates a significant and often unnecessary tax event. We evaluate exchange funds, charitable structures, options overlays, installment sales, and direct indexing as tools to reduce concentration over time while managing the tax consequences.

The right approach depends on your cost basis, your timeline, whether you have a lockup or 10b5-1 plan, and your estate planning objectives. We coordinate with your tax advisor before making any recommendations.

Tax efficiency is built into the process, not added at year-end. We consider asset location (which accounts hold which assets), asset placement (tax-inefficient assets in tax-deferred accounts where possible), and ongoing tax-loss harvesting throughout the year. We also coordinate with your CPA on realized gain timing, estimated tax payments, and Roth conversion opportunities.

The goal is to maximize after-tax returns — not pre-tax performance that looks good on a statement but shrinks significantly when the IRS takes its share.

Yes — and it is one of our core strengths. We work with clients whose investment portfolios span multiple jurisdictions, currencies, and account types. This includes international families with U.S.-based accounts, U.S. persons with offshore holdings, and family offices managing assets across continents.

Cross-border investment management requires coordination across tax regimes, reporting requirements (FBAR, FATCA, PFIC rules), and custodian relationships. We work alongside qualified international tax counsel to ensure the investment strategy is coherent and compliant across all jurisdictions.

Performance is reported against a relevant benchmark — one that actually reflects your asset allocation, not a generic index that makes any result look acceptable. We review performance quarterly, explain what drove it, and distinguish between decisions within our control and market conditions that were not.

We also report on a consolidated basis — across all accounts and custodians — so you see your total portfolio picture, not a collection of separate statements that are difficult to synthesize.