Asset Management
A Collaborative Partner in Growing Your Wealth
Managing substantial wealth for multigenerational families, family offices, foundations, and endowments is an enormous responsibility. It requires deep insight, specialized knowledge, and precisely crafted solutions. As your Chief Investment Officer, we listen carefully first, then construct and implement comprehensive solutions tailored to your goals and objectives.
Our highly customized, institutional-quality investment solutions deliver results designed to reflect your needs and goals.
The Abbot Downing Difference
SINGULAR FOCUS
Managing institutionally sized portfolios for families, family offices, foundations, and endowments has been our singular focus for more than 45 years.
UNIQUE ACCESS
Our experienced due diligence team selects from a global opportunity set, providing access to extensively researched and thoroughly vetted institutional solutions not widely available to the public.
OBJECTIVE AND TRANSPARENT
Our process centers around you and your family. We are structured to ensure transparent and objective advice, and to avoid any conflicts of interest. We do not pursue or receive remission payments or fee sharing arrangements typical in the industry.
EXPERIENCED TEAM
We draw upon a broadly diversified team of internal professionals and external partners with decades of technical experience and real world competence in the construction and management of complex portfolios.
Emphasis on net real return
We invest for total net real return, paying strict attention to taxes, fees, turnover, and other costs that can affect the ability of portfolios to thrive for the long term.

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Investment programs require continuous oversight and careful maintenance. Our Chief Investment Officer model provides continuity and allows for timely, holistic, and effective decision making. Our focus is on understanding the entire spectrum of your investments and integrating that knowledge with the specific needs, goals, and constraints you have for your assets now and in the future. Our investment process rests on four core pillars of activity:
- Quantitatively underpinned multifactor models to assess secular, cyclical, and short-term market health
- The creation, adjustment, and maintenance of core capital market assumptions
- Research and integration of secular and cyclical themes
- The establishment of strategic targets and a dynamic rebalancing framework customized for multigenerational, institutionally sized portfolios
- Fundamental bottom-up research of asset classes and specific managers
- Custom access to hedge funds, private capital, private real estate, and private natural resources managers not widely available to most individual investors
- Rigorous, ongoing manager due diligence
- Research efforts that combine technically adept fundamental teams with experienced portfolio managers
- Core beta approach looks for cost-effective solutions in areas of the markets with the tightest dispersion of potential returns
- We are comfortable making contrarian moves when fundamentals are out of sync with valuation or overarching investor sentiment becomes extreme
- We actively research niche ideas that can add value (alpha) and represent an appropriate allocation on an after-tax, after-fee basis
- Proprietary modeling incorporates inputs from asset allocation and manager research to help identify a range of potential outcomes and attendant risks
- A culture of acting from a fiduciary mindset helping ensure the client’s best interests are at the center of every decision
- A thorough understanding of the entity’s unique cash flow, liquidity, and other constraints of each client and client family
- Ongoing risk-adjusted, after-fee performance review and assessment
- Dynamic, tax-sensitive rebalancing to reflect changing market or personal circumstances, and to help ensure risk profile integrity
- Ongoing extensive monitoring of manager progress and performance to ensure adherence to style and intent
- Ongoing review of account governance and compliance requirements by Abbot Downing and Wells Fargo
DISCLOSURES
These aforementioned investments and strategies may carry specific investor qualifications which can include high income and net-worth requirements as well as relatively high investment minimums. Typically, these investments and strategies are open to qualified investors only and carry high costs, substantial risks, and may be highly volatile. There is often limited (or even non-existent) liquidity and a lack of transparency regarding the underlying assets. The investment returns may fluctuate and are subject to market volatility, so that when redeemed or sold, they may be worth more or less than their original cost. An investor may lose their entire investment. There can be no assurances that a manager’s strategy (hedging or otherwise) will be successful or that a manager will use these strategies with respect to all or any portion of a portfolio. They do not represent a complete investment program.
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