Firm Brochure

Our main service is asset management, where we craft for you an investment strategy that attempts to achieve the highest expected returns after fees and taxes, given your goals and constraints.

Our service begins with a series of consultations where we explore your goals, finances, behavioral makeup, time horizon, and so on. We pay close attention to how much money you can lose without derailing you from your goals (risk capacity), how capable you are of experiencing losses with equanimity (risk tolerance), and how much you care about keeping your returns close to that of common benchmarks (tracking error tolerance).

We attempt to identify major risks to your financial and human capital, and recommend ways to mitigate them, including buying insurance, selling down concentrated equity holdings, and matching assets to liabilities.

Our goal is to be as helpful as possible in all matters related to money and risk.

We include financial planning gratis as we believe it is unwise to expend extraordinary efforts trying to beat the market (an uncertain and difficult endeavor) while neglecting simple, surefire ways to make money. We also manage a pooled investment fund, the SVRN Multi-Strategy Fund, that we make available to certain qualified clients.

We are not estate, tax or insurance specialists; we will work with your existing providers or help you find them.

We restrict ourselves to selecting individual stocks and bonds, certificates of deposit, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, closed-end funds, and hedge funds.

Our service is customized to account for your behavioral makeup, investment knowledge, health, family structure, human capital, tax situation, spending needs, liquidity needs, and financial assets and liabilities. You may impose restrictions on investing in certain securities or types of securities.

We act as a fiduciary to all clients. For retirement plan accounts and IRAs, we are fiduciaries under ERISA and the Internal Revenue Code, as applicable, and are required to act in your best interest. Because our fees are based on assets under management, we earn more as your portfolio grows, which aligns our long-term interests with yours.

We do not participate in wrap programs.

As of February 12, 2026, we had approximately $162,879,521 in discretionary assets under management, and $68,582,421 in non-discretionary assets under management.

First, we believe an asset's true worth is determined by the cash you can pull out of it, discounted by the appropriate interest rate. Over the long run, price converges on intrinsic value. Because valuation is so important, for every asset we invest in we try to come up with our best guess for its expected long-run real return.

Second, we believe most investors should diversify as much as possible. We are blind to what the future holds, so we want to maximize the protection diversification affords. We spend a lot of time thinking about a client's concentrated risks. An obvious one is a big equity position in a single company. A less obvious but important source of risk is one's job. For example, a client whose income is tightly linked to a particular industry should usually be underweight assets linked to it, because his human capital is already concentrated in that sector. Once we've identified these big risks, we seek to mitigate them to the extent that's desirable and possible, and then we build our portfolios around them.

Taking the logic of diversification to its extreme, we believe investors should not only diversify across stocks, industries, geographies, and asset classes, but also across strategies. You should hold a concentrated portfolio only if you've done a good job of researching your investments and are justifiably confident you know something the market doesn't.

Third, we believe risk and reward are usually, but not always, positively related. Stocks are usually priced to offer higher expected returns than bonds, and bonds higher than cash. History and economic reasoning show that equities are the best way to build long-term wealth. The drawback is equities occasionally suffer sickening losses and, when bought at inappropriately high prices, may not recoup them in a reasonable time frame.

Despite equities' attractive historical returns, stock investors have managed to destroy fortunes by buying high and selling low. To avoid this, we scale your equity exposure to your behavioral makeup, time horizon and goals. Are you an aggressive, pro-cyclical investor who wants to buy when things look good and sell when things look bad? If so, we will recommend lower equity holdings to work against your impulses.

Finally, we're confident that the market makes errors, but exploiting them is hard—so hard that most investors who make active bets and incur high costs will underperform a passive portfolio that incurs minimal fees and taxes. While we believe skilled managers exist, the obviously talented managers are either inaccessible or charge high-enough fees to consume most of their expected outperformance. We are willing to pay up for good managers, but we set the hurdle high, demanding exceptional quality of thought, reasonable fees in relation to expected outperformance, and high integrity. We require managers to display credible evidence of skill that can't be replicated by mechanical implementations of their strategies. For example, a value-oriented stock-picker who can't outperform a simple stock-selection strategy that buys statistically cheap stocks would fail our test.

These principles have led us to adopt a style of analysis that places factors at the center of many of our investment decisions. A factor is a characteristic or group of related characteristics that explains asset returns. Factor research provides a framework for assessing active managers, constructing portfolios with superior risk-adjusted returns, and identifying and managing risks.

Researchers have identified a handful of important risk factors that generate expected returns as compensation. An investor who owns equities or junk bonds bears economic growth risk and, if the market is functioning properly, is expected (not guaranteed) to earn a return for bearing that risk. It is often called market risk. Understanding an asset's factor exposures is more important than its label. Investors who diversify by asset class without paying attention to factor exposures may end up taking on more risk than they had expected—a lesson many learned too late when the financial crisis shredded the returns of supposedly uncorrelated strategies and asset classes.

In addition, researchers have identified a handful of dynamic investment factors, or styles, that explain away much of the excess returns active managers have produced. The most famous are value and momentum. Historically, value assets have outperformed growth assets and high momentum assets have outperformed low momentum assets. Many managers who seemingly outperform their benchmarks do not outperform after their factor exposures are accounted for.

We think the most interesting investment factors are value, momentum, trend, quality and low beta, and seek exposure to them through the most efficient means possible. We use both active and passive investing strategies. By active, we mean a strategy that deviates from its market-weighted benchmark. By passive, we mean a strategy that closely tracks its market-weighted benchmark.

Our most basic strategy is strategic asset allocation. For each client we tailor a benchmark portfolio of passive funds allocated among U.S. stocks, foreign stocks, high-quality bonds, and cash. The portfolio is simple, cheap and conventional by design. The goal is to find a conventional allocation that will produce the highest risk-adjusted returns given your financial and emotional capacities to withstand losses. The passive portfolio measures the effectiveness of our active investment decisions. Ideally, we will only change the passive benchmark portfolio when your risk tolerance changes.

The benefits of a passive benchmark-style portfolio include low expenses, low turnover, tax efficiency, simplicity, transparency, and robustness to human error. However, such a strategy may exclude useful information such as current valuations, and is largely reliant on equities to generate real returns. Barring the past three decades, fiat-currency-based bonds have provided miserly after-inflation, after-tax returns—they are mostly added to soften the volatility of equities. While high quality bonds do well during disinflationary recessions, when both economic growth and inflation fall, they do poorly during inflationary recessions (or stagflations), when economic growth falters and inflation rises. The conventional stock-bond portfolio is exquisitely tuned to inflict pain when stagflation strikes.

We typically overlay active views on the passive portfolio. The magnitude and complexity of these active bets are scaled to your understanding of them, your tolerance for complexity, and your ability to tolerate being out of step with the benchmark.

There are three active strategies we pursue in combination.

Our valuation-based strategic asset allocation strategy slowly tilts to assets with higher risk-adjusted expected returns based on fundamental measures of expected return including price-to-earnings ratio, price-to-book ratio, yield, and so on. Because asset class prices do not reliably revert to historical valuations, we are cautious in tilting to seemingly cheap assets.

Regime shifts can up-end long-standing historical relationships. One of the biggest regime shifts occurred in the early 1980s, when interest rates and inflation switched from experiencing a secular rise to a secular decline. An investor who had tried to time the market over this period based on historical valuations would have ended up underinvested through a multi-decade bull market. The threat of a long-lived regime shift is perhaps the biggest risk to our valuation-conscious strategic allocation strategy.

Our momentum-based tactical asset allocation strategy exploits momentum, arguably the most powerful and pervasive anomaly found in financial markets. Momentum is the tendency for price changes to persist and can be measured in many ways. Absolute momentum (also known as trend-following) compares an asset's price against itself or against a fixed benchmark, like the 3-month Treasury-bill return. Relative momentum compares an asset's returns against other assets. However, momentum-chasing is a high-turnover strategy that is most suitable in tax-deferred accounts and in liquid assets with low transaction costs. The main risk is trendless, “whipsaw” markets, which can inflict substantial losses on momentum-chasers.

Our manager selection strategy attempts to identify exceptional managers with superior prospective returns. This is a hard task—much of what passes off as skill is either the product of dumb luck or mechanically replicable tilts. In order to distinguish luck from skill, we look for evidence of sustainable edge. The best such edge is the quality of people. We look for managers with plenty of brains, creativity, and independent thinking. Just as important, we will only deal with managers who treat their clients as partners, not adversaries. This means reasonable fees in relation to expected outperformance, skin in the game, transparency, critical self-assessment, and a clean regulatory record. In general, asset managers directly controlled by publicly traded financial institutions have failed to meet our criteria, but there are some notable exceptions. In addition to asset-class specific risks, some of our chosen managers will use leverage and derivatives to obtain their target exposures, which may add to the complexity and riskiness of the portfolio. Active managers pose additional due diligence challenges, such as the possibility of fraud and hidden conflicts of interest.

Because we believe diversification is important, we integrate all these approaches into a single portfolio.

Investing is risky. As an investor, you are paid to bear the possibility that something terrible will happen to your portfolio. Though we take steps to mitigate risk, you cannot avoid it. You are all but guaranteed to suffer losses at some point, perhaps gut-wrenching losses.

Because beating the market is difficult, we strive to minimize your taxes, which can be the biggest drag on your portfolio.

To do this, we reject the mindless application of model portfolios and instead customize your portfolio to your circumstances, taking into account:

1. your marginal tax rate (now and in the future),
2. existing holdings with unrealized gains,
3. tax-advantaged accounts (e.g., IRAs, 401(k)s, HSAs, etc.), and
4. estate planning considerations.

Some of our main tax-minimizing strategies include:

Tax-efficient asset selection, preferring exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and other efficient vehicles for plain vanilla stock and bond exposure. Many ETFs are tax-advantaged due to their ability to avoid distributing capital gains.

Tax-loss harvesting, which involves selling taxable assets with losses and immediately replacing them with suitable equivalents. Doing this allows you to deduct a portion of your losses against your ordinary income, and, more importantly, allows you to offset realized gains. In rare circumstances, we will do tax-gain harvesting, realizing modest gains to use up your lowest tax brackets if you have little to no income in a particular year.

Deferring capital gains. We try to avoid realizing large capital gains. Often, this will involve building your portfolio around a legacy position that has big gains. For example, if a client has a large Apple AAPL stock position with large gains, we will treat it as large-cap US stock growth equivalent and avoid adding assets that increase your concentration in that asset class.

Tax location, which involves allocating tax-inefficient assets in tax-advantaged accounts (such as IRAs, 401(k)s, HSAs, etc.) and tax-efficient assets in taxable accounts. We treat all your accounts as one large portfolio and place low-yield stocks in taxable accounts and bonds, REITs and high-turnover active funds in tax-advantaged accounts. Doing this can yield large savings over the more common approach of treating each account as a distinct portfolio.

The biggest downside of tax-efficient investing is tracking error to our ideal target portfolio. For example, a big, concentrated position with large gains may drastically underperform the market. Another downside is behavioral: some clients may feel uncomfortable with the account-level concentration that naturally arises from tax location (e.g., your IRA may be stuffed with almost all fixed income and your taxable account may be mostly stock). However, in expectation, a tax-efficient portfolio strategy will likely result in better long-term growth.

Risks related to the pooled investment fund are detailed in the fund documents available upon request.

Certain service providers utilized by the Firm to service client accounts have artificial intelligence components. The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning includes increased risk of data inaccuracies and security vulnerabilities. Due to the rapid advancement of machine learning technologies, future risks related to artificial intelligence are unpredictable. As a measure to mitigate these risks to our clients, the Firm performs periodic due diligence of our service providers for assurance that the service providers have appropriate controls in place to protect our clients' information and to limit data inaccuracies when artificial intelligence is used by the service provider.

We maintain a Code of Ethics covering our fiduciary duties, personal securities trading, insider trading, and disciplinary procedures. Clients may request a copy from the Chief Compliance Officer.

Individuals associated with SVRN are permitted to buy or sell securities for their personal accounts identical to or different than those recommended to clients. However, no person employed by SVRN is allowed to favor his or her own interest over that of a client or make personal investment decisions based on the investment decisions of advisory clients.

To address potential conflicts of interest, we require that associated persons with access to advisory recommendations provide annual securities holdings reports and quarterly transaction reports to the Chief Compliance Officer. We also require prior approval from the Chief Compliance Officer for investing in any IPOs or private placements (limited offerings).

We may recommend that clients invest in the Militia Long/Short Equity ETF (ticker: ORR), which is sub-advised by Militia Investments. See Item 10 for a full description of the affiliate relationships, associated conflicts, and SVRN's fee waiver policy.

We do not maintain custody of client assets. We require all client assets be maintained in an account at a non-affiliated qualified custodian, generally a broker-dealer or bank. The custodian will hold your assets in a brokerage account and buy and sell securities on your behalf.

While we may recommend that you use a particular custodian/broker, you will ultimately decide whether to do so and will open your account by entering into an account agreement directly with the custodian/broker. We cannot open accounts for you, but we can help you opening an account at whatever custodian/broker you decide to use.

We recommend Charles Schwab & Co. as your broker and custodian. While SVRN and Schwab have an existing relationship, we are not affiliated.

Our clients receive various services directly from our custodians. For our clients' accounts that they maintain, the custodian generally does not charge separately for custody services but instead is compensated by charging commissions or other fees on trades and by earning interest on cash held in the brokerage (which earns de minimis interest for clients). However, we try to minimize the amount of low-yielding cash in client accounts.

Since custodians often charge a fee for each trade executed by a different broker-dealer, we generally have the custodian execute most trades for your account to minimize trading costs. We have determined that this is consistent with our duty to seek best execution—meaning the most favorable terms for a transaction based on all relevant factors.

Our custodians make available to us various products and services that benefit us but may not directly benefit you. We use Schwab's rebalancing software, but do not use any of its research or get any referrals from them. This may give us an incentive to recommend Schwab based on our interests rather than yours, which is a potential conflict of interest. We believe, however, that our recommendation of Schwab is in the best interests of our clients, and is primarily supported by the scope, quality, and price of their services.

We may, from time to time, aggregate client orders into blocks in order to facilitate more efficient execution. When aggregating orders, an average price is given to all participants in the block, or other measures are taken, to treat all accounts fairly.

With your written authorization, we may instruct your custodian to deduct our advisory fees directly from your account. Your custodian sends you statements at least quarterly showing all account activity and deductions. You should review those statements carefully and compare them to any invoice or report we provide. If you find discrepancies, contact us and your custodian immediately.

In some cases, clients authorize us to direct their custodian to send funds to a designated third party (for example, to pay a bill or transfer to another account in your name). Where such standing letters of authorization are in place, we rely on the SEC's conditions for this arrangement: the client provides written authorization to the custodian, the client may change or revoke the instruction, the custodian sends transaction confirmations to the client, and disbursements go only to parties and accounts designated by the client. We do not have authority to designate new recipients or change the amount without updated client instructions.

SVRN's principal serves as the managing member of the SVRN Multi-Strategy Fund, which gives SVRN deemed custody of the fund's assets under SEC Rule 206(4)-2. To comply with the custody rule, the fund is subject to an annual audit by an independent public accountant registered with the PCAOB, and audited financial statements are distributed to fund investors within 180 days of the fund's fiscal year end.