Institutional methods, applied to one family's money.
For individuals who want inflation treated as the organizing principle of the portfolio rather than as a footnote in the annual review.
Start a conversationYou did not choose inflation risk
Investors consciously decide to take equity risk or interest rate risk. Nobody decides to take inflation risk; you are born with it, and avoiding it takes deliberate effort. Every future expense you have is denominated in a price level that nobody has hedged on your behalf.
The institutional approach to this is liability matching: work out what you will need to spend and when, then build a portfolio against that rather than against a benchmark. The method translates to individuals cleanly, and it is how we work.
How we work with individuals
Usually as a dedicated inflation sleeve alongside whatever else you hold, starting at around $250,000, run as a separate account with full transparency on positions. For some clients we manage the whole portfolio with inflation as the organizing principle. Both start with the same conversation about what your money actually has to do.
Common questions
What are the best investments for inflation protection in a stock and bond portfolio?
The honest answer is that it depends on your horizon. Over short horizons, instruments with direct price-level exposure protect best. Over very long horizons, equities have historically outpaced inflation but with severe interim drawdowns exactly when inflation spikes. The gap between those two facts is why a dedicated allocation exists.
Should I invest in inflation-linked bonds?
TIPS give you genuine inflation protection but carry real-rate duration, which is why they can lose money in a period when reported inflation is rising. They work well when your horizon matches their maturity and less well as a short-horizon hedge. Whether they suit you depends on when you need the money.
What ETFs are a good hedge against inflation?
TIPS ETFs, commodity ETFs and inflation-beneficiary equity funds each hedge part of the problem and each carry a specific weakness: duration, volatility, and equity correlation respectively. There is no single ETF that solves it, which is why dedicated strategies exist. Whether an ETF is adequate depends on your horizon and the size of the exposure.
What is the minimum to work with you?
Around $250,000 for a dedicated inflation sleeve. If you are below that, say so anyway. Part of an initial conversation is establishing whether a dedicated sleeve is the right structure at all, or whether a simpler implementation already covers the exposure.
Further reading
Published research
How institutional liability matching applies to one household's balance sheet, tested against the withdrawal-rate literature.
Why the inflation you experience and the inflation that gets reported are not the same number.
Commentary
Why the official inflation number often feels wrong, what hedonic adjustment actually does, and why it is not the thumb on the scale people assume.
Why holding both stocks and bonds stopped protecting portfolios the way it used to.
Floating-rate notes are widely sold as inflation protection. This explains, with the data, why they are only partly that.
The same specialization, a different liability.
Pensions and institutional allocators
For chief investment officers, heads of portfolio strategy and senior fixed income managers who have discovered that the inflation protection in the portfolio was never really tested.
Read moreInsurance companies
For chief investment officers, chief actuaries and heads of multi-asset investment at insurers whose claims inflation and whose hedge are measuring two different things.
Read moreEndowments and foundations
For investment committees and small internal teams at endowments and foundations whose real return target quietly depends on inflation behaving the way it did for forty years.
Read moreDefend Your Money.
Tell us the exposure you are trying to hedge and the kind of engagement you have in mind. We respond to every inquiry personally.
Start a conversation