Portfolio decisions for people who manage serious money themselves, with the tax and fee arithmetic left in.
Wealth explained
For a shareholder sitting on a single stock with almost no basis, there are four honest routes out. Each one trades tax, exposure, liquidity and cost in a different proportion.
The advisory fee is the only cost most clients ever see on a statement. Four more sit underneath it, and together they usually exceed the one on the invoice.
Which account a retiree draws from, and in which order, can change the life of a portfolio by a decade. The rule of thumb most people inherit is close to the worst available answer.
Two portfolios can earn exactly the same annualised return across thirty years and end in completely different places. What separates them is which of those years were the bad ones.
The same bond is cheap for one household and expensive for another, and the gap between them is wider than any plausible view on interest rates. Taxable equivalent yield is the only number worth comparing.
