I spent nearly two decades inside global institutional asset management. Fourteen years at AXA Investment Managers, where I led the multifactor investments, building the same quantitative models, factor portfolios, and risk systems that institutions sell to pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and the largest private clients. After that, I served as Chief Investment Officer of Radiant Global Investors.
I am grateful for that experience. It gave me a clear, unsentimental view of how the industry actually works, and where the model fails the people it claims to serve.
I’ll be direct about three things I came to believe.
Fees should reflect the work and expertise, not the brand and distribution costs.
A meaningful share of the “active management” sold by large institutions to wealth management clients delivers something that, after fees, looks a lot like an index. When a client pays well over one percent for that, the fee is no longer compensation for skill. It’s compensation for distribution. Clients deserve to know what they’re paying for, and they deserve a process where the price tag matches the effort and expertise.
Fee laddering is the quiet problem nobody discusses.
Many institutions charge an advisory fee at the top of the relationship, and then invest those same client assets into the firm’s own proprietary funds, which charge a second layer of fees underneath. The client sees one fee on the statement. The firm captures two. That’s not a service model. It’s a distribution model dressed up as advice.
At Rubric, we charge one transparent fee. We do not run proprietary funds. We do not receive commissions. We do not accept referral compensation from product issuers. The fee you see is the fee you pay. Read more on how fee laddering works.
The best tools shouldn’t require a billion-dollar mandate.
Portfolio construction. Direct indexing. Tax-loss harvesting. Options overlays for income and downside risk management. Access to private markets. We built such strategies for the largest clients in the world. For most of my career, they sat behind institutional minimums of twenty-five million, fifty million, or more.
That’s no longer a necessity. The infrastructure has matured. Technology stack has matured. Custody platforms have matured. The barrier today is mostly business-model preference. Many firms keep these gates in place, because gating is profitable.
We don’t. Rubric brings institutional-grade portfolio construction to clients starting at much lower thresholds than the firms I came from, at a fraction of the all-in cost.
What this looks like in practice.
We are a fee-only, fiduciary Registered Investment Adviser. Our advisory fee schedule steps down with assets. We do not charge performance fees. We do not sell proprietary products. We use independent custodians. We disclose every conflict of interest, real or potential, in writing.
Every portfolio decision is run through the same lens: what is the after-tax outcome for this client, given their goals and constraints? Markets are uncertain; we don’t pretend otherwise. What we control is process, cost, and tax, and we work hard at all three.
I have a conviction that markets reward discipline far more reliably than they reward narrative. That conviction hasn’t changed. Rubric is what it looks like when someone with an institutional toolkit decides to use it for clients directly, without the layers, the cross-selling, or the gatekeeping.
If that resonates, I’d welcome a conversation.