Animal Spirits Podcast - Talk Your Book: After-Tax Alpha

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

On this episode of Animal Spirits: Talk Your Book, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠��⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ben Carlson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ are joined by Erkko Etula, CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Brooklyn Investment Group, to discuss tax advantaged long/short SMAs. Find complete show notes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠A Wealth of Common Sense⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Michael Batnick’s ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Irrelevant Investor⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Feel free to shoot us an email at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation. Check out the latest in financial blogger fashion at The Compound shop: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://idontshop.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. See our disclosures here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ritholtz Wealth Management⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits Talk, your book is brought to by Brooklyn Investment Group, powered by Nuveen. Go to nivine.com to learn more about how Brooklyn Investment Group can help with a long, short, tax advantage, SMA. That's nubene.com to learn more. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Redhol's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Britholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, when direct indexing really came on board, I guess early 2020s, a lot of the ETF crowd. And, you know, there's ETF analysts and people that follow this stuff kind of said, I don't get it. Why would you ever do direct indexing when ETFs exist? They're already pretty tax-advantaged, tax-efficient, low-cost, simple liquid. Owning all the individual names doesn't make any sense. And you and I have seen how this works in concert with wealth management for a number of years now. And sometimes when you see what this stuff can do, you almost kind of go, this doesn't seem like it should be legal or fair.

That you can harvest so many losses. And now the thing that is happening is turning the dial all the way up and adding an overlay of a long, short portfolio, right? A 1.30, a 175, whatever the number is, right? You can crank up the dial and you're adding margin and leverage because using that leverage allows you to just lock in more opportunity for losses. And if you have a huge gain in a client portfolio because they sold a business or they sold a piece of real estate or they just have a concentrated stock position they want to get out of, it's kind of crazy how magical these things are in terms of offset. gains. This is another example of people with money have access to all sorts of solutions that advantage them. And that is just, that's the system. That's the way it is. But, but it's not a free lunch. It's not too good to be true. There's no alchemy. We get into why on the show. But it's a

great solution, but it's not like a rip the bandit off short term solution where it's like, all right, I'm going to jump in and I'm just going to hop out and do something else. Like, it doesn't work like that. And if you think that's how it works, you're, you're, you're, you're in for root awakening because your advisor is not informing you. Even with like a 351 exchange fund or whatever, all you're doing is pushing the taxes off until later when you actually sell. Right. That's the beauty of it is that you're deferring taxes and allowing your money to continue to grow.

And I think that's the, yeah, that's the, that's the, that, you're right. It's not, there's no magic here. You're not eliminating taxes. You're pushing them off into the future. But it's still, instead of paying the gains now, most people would rather wait to pay them until later. Correct. Correct. Today's show, we have Urko Atula.

the CEO and chief investment officer of Brooklyn Investment Group. They were purchased by Nouveen a couple years ago. And we talked to Erko about how they implement a 130-30 fund, how they use leverage, how they use long-short funds to harvest more losses for their advisors and for their advisors' clients. I think this is an important topic because this stuff is just becoming more and more prevalent in the wealth management space. Prevalent? Yes. So here's our talk with Erko. Erko, welcome to the show. Thanks for having you. All right, today we're going to talking about tax advantage, long, short SMAs, so hot right now in the wealth management industry. Before we get into that, if you wouldn't mind a brief introduction on Brooklyn Investment Group,

who are you guys? Very good. Well, I founded the company 2021. We are a tech-powered asset manager. We serve both as a technology company as well as a sub-advisor to investment-ed. advisors. So we largely serve the independent space. Fast forward from 2021 to to 2023, we started working with Nouveen and a number of other asset managers. And then in 25, Newvin acquired us. So we're today wholly on subsidiary of NUVIN. Congrats. Thank you.

That was pretty quick. What changed about your organization after the merger? Anything? It's same organization, bigger, more resources? What happened? So as you know in any asset management business, there is the investing and the product side of the things, specifically for technology company like Brooklyn. We have an advisor portal. We have portfolio managers, portals. So these are the services that we provide to our client. And then there's obviously the distribution side of things and client service specifically.

So it is very hard for a small company to build distribution and really bring. quality client service, which is so critical in this industry to the market. And NUVine has both of those. So we've been able to really leverage the Nouveen capabilities on those sides for a couple of years now. And so today going forward, we continue as a wholly own subsidiary of Nouveen. And that just means that we can focus what we're really good at, which is the systematic investing tax management and continuing to scale the platform. These long short extensions that we're going to talk about today, I imagine that's not where you started the company with. And if so, when did you start offering that to clients?

Yeah, good question. Well, so just taking a step back, I think the tax-advantaged long-short strategies are probably one of the greatest innovations in the wealth management space since the invention of the ETF. and so and they're combining a couple of sort of old, old ingredients together. So long short investing in one hand to with the tax managed single stock trading basically or direct indexing on the other hand. Some of the first products or strategies in this space started to come into the retail SMA space really just a few years ago. So I was a Goldman Sachs for over 10 years still sitting there in the 2018, 2019 era when

some folks started writing about the idea of combining what we knew as the sort of the traditional direct indexing where you're managing individual stocks rather than buying, say, an ETF. But rather than holding everything long, you would then basically relax the long only constraint and go to say 1.3030. And I always found that it was a very interesting idea. And so I've had it in my mind for a long time. That was not the first product we went to market with after I founded a company in 21. In fact, the first product that we launched was a balanced solution of equities and fixed income all in a single account.

And that was really to address the demand from RIAs that were really looking for operational scale. So how do you tax manage and personalize that scale across the whole portfolio? Really, the original reason for a found in Brooklyn was really to provide that what we call operational alpha or for advisors combining the stocks, bonds, personalized tax managed in a single account. And that's how Nouveen came into the picture as well. But Longshort was always in the back of our minds as the sort of the next step. And so when we built the platform, we built the platform for scale to really allow for the daily risk management and other aspects of investing that are

so important in the Longshort space. It was always in the back of our mind, but it was not the first thing we launched. I want to get into the details of the strategy and how you actually pull it off. But I'm curious how receptive advisors and clients are to this, because it is an added layer of complexity, right? The whole long, short thing. For some people, some advisors, they're just not used to it because it involves, you know, margin and borrowing money and going short, and that sounds like a hedge fund. And so I'm curious how that hurdle is with advisors. Obviously, once you explain it, I think it probably makes more sense to people, but is there a barrier there where some advisors go, no, no, wait, we want to keep things very simple. This is too

much for us. Like, how does that work with you? Yeah. So I think just like in any investing, whenever you're introducing any additional complexity in the portfolio, you've got to do it for a good reason, right? And so there are a number of sort of pressing use cases that are driving advisors into this space. And whenever we work with advisors, we make sure that they're doing it for the right reasons. So the main use cases are, say, liquidated events. So someone that has, say, sells the company or sells real estate or has private equity distributions in a given year, how do you rapidly generate realized tax losses to help offset some of those gains and defer them for the future. A second use case is concentrated stock diversification. So many, many advisors have clients

with NVDA or other tech stocks that they would like to diversify out of into, say, like an SMP 500 or other types of portfolios. So how do they do that in a tax neutral, a gain neutral way? So that's another important use case. And then frankly, as advisors are acquiring new clients, perhaps those clients' portfolios were managed in a way that was different from what the advisor was looking to advise them. And so migrating the older portfolios into the sort of the management of the advisor, long short strategies can be helpful in that sort of portfolio migration process as well.

So I think those are the sort of the main use cases. And again, we work with advisors very closely to sort of you understand the additional risks that stem from the long short strategies because that is the most important thing in any investment management activity, and then the potential tax benefits, and then also the potential for sort of some pre-tax outperformance as the third component. So we've been, we agree with you. We've been using custom indexing since 2019. It's a big part of our business.

And the long, short extensions make a lot of sense to us, and we'll get into why. The tension between scale and customizability has been flattened by companies like yours and others that are allowing that are enabling advisors to accomplish both things. What was hard? I'm curious. Was it coming up with the investment solutions, whether, I mean, obviously the indexing part is pretty straightforward, but maybe there's some active overlay. I don't know.

Versus the tech part of it allowing advisors and their operational teams to integrate, connected with the custodians and all the vendors and streamlining everything and restrictions and glide paths to the tax stuff. It's a lot. There's a lot of moving parts. Yeah. So if you kind of think about the different components of these tax fund, this long short strategies, there is the tax management piece, which has sort of existed in different

shapes and forms since the 1990s, where you're just doing taxis harvesting at an individual stock level. Then there's the other component, which is the long short investing. So as we know, like the first hedge fund called the hedged fund at a time, was 19, 49 by A.W. Jones. So long short investing has also been around for some time. So we're kind of now putting the two things together. But what that sort of creates is the idea that every portfolio is going to be different. And particularly when you have short positions in the portfolio, you've got to be risk management everything, risk managing everything on a daily basis. Right.

And so imagine running tens of thousands of accounts. Now all of a sudden the investment process is actually meeting software engineering, right? How do you build scalable systems across tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of accounts, where each portfolio gets the attention that it deserves? So that's where I would argue, the answer to your question is that there are some custodial changes

that sort of happened that allowed retail SMAs to short stocks, and then those were combined with basically the technology that enables this sort of daily monitoring and tax management whenever an account needs to be traded. And that's what we spend a lot of time on. So I would argue that the toughest part was to build the technology itself and to make sure that it really scales. And every portfolio is not only risk managed but also tax managed.

And then the pre-tax, I'll call the stock selection component, which is an important part of those strategies, we've taken the approach of sort of letting the advisor choose whether they want to go sort of a more factor-based route or whether they want to use our proprietary alpha signals for stock selection, which again come from our investment team that has the experience managing these long-short portfolio.

So those are the two components, how they came together. But I would argue that having a robust technology platform, that was certainly the sort of the, tougher ask in many respects. You got a little bit to my next question, but so it sounds like you have your own models, but if an advisor comes to you and has a model that they use or a portfolio they use, they can also implement that as well? Or is it just your models that you can use on the platform? The benchmark or the target allocation. So if you kind of think about a long, short strategy,

there's two things there. There's what is the benchmark, right? You know, traditionally was something like the S&P 500 or Russell 3,000 or blend of the above. And then there's the other part which is like, how do you do the stock selection for the long short extension? So advisors can bring their own models for the sort of the beta part or the core part of the portfolio. Many advisory firms run their, say, own active models, right? So the core of the portfolio could be a tracking, say, a dividend growth model or any other sort of advisor-led model. So, you know, we're kind of nicely combined, the kind of the idea of a rep as a PM in terms of the stock selection work. with the management of the portfolio that we do.

So the advisor can bring their own model to serve as part of the asset allocation of the core of the portfolio. Now, in terms of the stock selection, it is possible for the advisor to bring their own long, short stock selection signals as well, but that just means that they really have to have views on about 3,000 stocks in the US stock universe

because what is really important about those long, short extensions is that you have plenty of replacement securities, as you're trading in and out of these portfolios. Those replacement securities are very, very liquid. So you've got to have to look at the sort of the $2,700 or so most liquid stocks in the U.S. stock universe. And then you're going to have signals actually worth and are not sort of correlated to what everybody else is trading. So there's sort of a balance there. Now, some advisors had said, like, look, we just want to have an overlay that goes along high quality stocks and short junk stocks.

So those types of like simple factor-based extensions, those can be implemented per the advisor demand. But where our advisors tend to be gravitating is sort of more uncorrelated stocks reduction signals that traditionally come more from the hedge fund space. Ben, are you still short Berkshire Hathaway? Well, I mean, the shorting piece is the one that obviously people probably have the hardest time with. But I guess maybe you could kind of talk about how that overlay works.

And maybe I don't know how much you can quantify it, but the difference between, you know, a lot of people listening are probably familiar with direct indexing and the tax loss harvesting that you can get there. But how much more of a premium in terms of the taxes are you getting by adding the long short piece? So that 1.3030, you know, you're going long and extra 30 percent to short so your net is still 100. But like, what's the difference between just a long only tax loss harvesting system? So if you think for simplicity, just the first year of investing. So suppose you have an advisor with a client that has, say, $10 million liquidated event, right? And they deployed that in, say, like a U.S. large gap benchmark. Your traditional, so long only direct indexing strategy probably generates on average about 10% in terms of realized losses over the first year, right?

So about 10% of the initial investment. Now, when you go to 1.3030, you're talking about number. numbers that are around 25%. And so what the interesting thing about that is like, obviously, you can then scale the leverage higher if you need more realized losses based on the amount of gains that you realized, right? And then the other thing is that suppose the initial investment is not cash, but maybe it is some legacy portfolio. You know, you can take that legacy low basis stock portfolio as collateral and we can then

create the extension around that. So that's a way to kind of use existing legacy assets and basically turn them into sort of productive members of the household, right, by introducing the long short extension on top of them. So then you're kind of removing the long only portion and then you're just generating the lawsuits by the extension, which is about 15% in the first year for the 1330. So you just mentioned it, the 1.3030, is that the only levels that you have available or are there more that go, I don't know, 200, 100? And I guess a follow-up, are you always running at net 100? No, we are very flexible in terms of the continuum of different levels of leverage that we can provide as well as the beta exposure, which goes to your second question about are you always running net of all. 100 in exposure. So talking about the first part first. So on the low end, frankly, we have clients who are just like dipping the toe in the water and they're running a 110-10 type of portfolios. That's totally fine as well. Then at the other extreme, there we're really limited

by the custodian requirements. So going up to 325, 225, that's sort of the range. That is just sort of doable in the sort of the retail SMAs at the main custodians. Now, in terms of the beta exposure... Wait, Erica, can we... Actually, I should have broken this question up. Let's get to the beta in a second. But can you talk about the spectrum of 1-10-10-get-out-of-here? All the way up to 325...

225. Okay. So if some is good, surely more is better. But like, what are the risks? What happens when you start pushing the limits of all right, now we're like... We're pretty levered up here, even if the net is 100. First of all, whenever you go beyond rec T, so 200% of gross notion, now you're living in the world of portfolio margin, right? And that's just the way for the brokers to assess the risk in the portfolio, right?

Now, what are the tangible risks? Well, obviously, when you scale the leverage, tracking error relative to whatever you're tracking is going up, roughly linearly, right? So if a 130-30 strategy is running with a tracking error of, say, one and a half to two percent, then a 250-150 would be running at a tracking error of 7 to 8 percent, for example, right? What is tracking error mean? Yeah, so the tracking error the way to think about is like what is the expected deviation in return relative to your benchmark in a given yield?

So say a 2% tracking error means that, say, if you're tracking the S&P 500, in any given year, sort of two-thirds of the time. So the one standard deviation that we learn at school, two-thirds of the time you are within 2% of the benchmark return. Now, obviously, you can have a two-standard deviation or three-standard deviation events. So I typically sort of when talking to advisors emphasize that the client should prepare for at least sort of two-standard deviation events in either direction. So thinking about, say, the 130-30 strategy, that means that you could sort of outperform

or underperform sort of plus minus 4 percent, right, in a given year. And then always you could have free standard deviation. I think of the financial crisis. We talked about a four standard deviation event. So that's one way to think about the risk in sort of just how far you are from the benchmark, right? All right. So that's obviously like, now listen, risk cuts both ways.

I mean, you could have positive experience where you outperform by. two or three standard deviations, and you're like, oh, my God, more, more, more. That was amazing. And of course, we understand it cuts both ways. Why even do that? Like, what is the, and you're welcome for the, I know this is a softball question, but why do people even do this? What are they trying to achieve to say nothing of potentially outperforming?

The main thing in these strategies is basically split into the stock selection. So the active component of the alpha, right? And then there is the tax alpha, right? So we talked about the potential tax benefit that can accrue from these strategies. And we talked about some of the numbers and how you can really boost the realized loss generation for your clients. So the reason to go into the long, short space is really an urgency to create tax losses to help offset gains somewhere else. The clock is ticking. Like you sold the business in September.

you've got whatever 90 days not even to really do what you got to do. Is that a common use case? In my own use case and for many of my colleagues at Brooklyn, the transaction with moving closed in July. So end of July actually. So we basically had five months left in the year to go. And obviously I eat my own cooking, so I went full tilt. And you said, give me 900, 800, 800.

Well, I actually went 275 long, 275 shorts. So that's a great segue. Talk about that. Why did you do that? Yeah. And now we're getting into the second part of this story, like, what is the beta that you want to select your portfolio? So we talked a little bit about the leverage going from like, say, 11010 to 325, 225.

So you notice that the upper end of the spectrum there is about 500 and 50% of notion exposure, right? Rather than tracking the equity index, so having beta, one, we could also run a market neutral strategy, right, or frankly, anywhere in between. So that's what I did for myself. So my strategy was, again, it was 550% of notional, but it was split evenly between the long and the short side of the portfolio. So 275 long, 275 short. So you've got this pile of cash. You obviously owe a lot of that to the government.

and you say, I'm not looking for a 30% drawdown potentially in the indexes because obviously there's only so much positive, there's only so much alpha that you could harvest. So in the event that you have an adverse experience in the year that you owe taxes, you just said beta zero, just let's juice up the tax alpha and then I'll revisit my asset allocation, whatever, in the following year. That's absolutely right. And so the focus for the remainder of the 2025 was to use the stock selection that we have, to pick the longs and the short so that the whole portfolio is neutral to any industry sector factor.

And frankly, we do have our proprietary stock selection processes to drive the longs and the shorts. And then the side product of that, as you apply the tax overlay on it, is that you can harvest the losses that are basically stemming from the roughly for the 500 long positions, for the 500 short positions. Right. So whenever you have fluctuations in individual stock prices, you have an opportunity to realize a loss and to replace that stock with other securities. And then as you pointed out, come 2026, and this is exactly what I'm doing currently, I am now sort of transforming the pure long only portfolio, meaning beta zero portfolio into my long term target equity exposure, which is roughly 70% equities and 30% in fixed income. So you can sort of think about it in two stages. And at the same time, I'm de-leveraging the portfolio because my need for tax losses in 2025. I'm not going to be anywhere close to what I had in 2025. In 2026, what I had in 2025.

So do people even care about the rules for the long and the short part of it? Because for most people, I assume it's just the margin effect that there's more opportunities to harvest losses because there's more stocks, right? You said maybe go long, high quality, short, low-quality, or whatever. Do those, does that component matter all that much in terms of the rules you use? It is important to have economic substance in whatever long, short strategy you're running, right? And again, that just basically means that you're going to be running these strategies for reasons that are beyond just the tax house harvesting. So there are different stock selection process. And in plain language, that just means like, look, we should be willing to run these long short portfolios without the tax management component. There are obviously different ways to pick stocks.

I mean, we see all the active and only managers out there and that price has been growing dramatically, right? So this is very similar question to, okay, well, for your client, what type of stock selection process would you like? Some clients prefer transparency, and they're the sort of the simple factor tilts that I mentioned, like high quality versus low quality, work very well. But then the downside of that is that those factors tend to be pretty crowded. So any one of us can just buy a high-quality ETF, for example.

If you go the factor-based direction, make sure that you're aware that there's some crowding risk there. And something similar to that, we saw, say, in 2007, quant crash, which a lot of people have forgotten by now. So you've got to be wary of crowded trades. That's why what we tend to focus on is more what we would call pure stock selection alpha, which is uncorrelated those factors. And that can sort of help protect our investors against sort of those kind of crowded effects, crowding effects as well. Obviously, no strategy

or no stock collection works all the time. But that's another avenue, which we're very focused on right now, also with our new global equities colleagues at Nouveed. Let's try and quantify this a little bit. And of course, we don't have to be precise. When advisors are considering working with you or they are working with you. And they say, okay, here's a situation. If we do this on this date, how much tax alpha or how much of the portfolio can we expect to generate in losses? And I know that there's a lot of moving parts that depends. But are you at least able to provide people with some sort of range of an outcome based on whatever strategy they're choosing? Yeah. So let's talk about kind of the ranges. So I think I mentioned that for cash funded,

130 strategy, you're looking at around 25% of realized losses in the first year on average. Obviously, there's a distribution around that, but that's a pretty good mean. And then for a 250, 150 type of strategy, you're looking roughly about 85% of realized losses in the first year as a percentage of the in neutral portfolio value. Wait, can we pause there for a second? you mentioned in the opening remarks of the show what an incredible advancement this is and I could not agree more. It almost seems too good to be true.

I know it's not. It really is incredible. I don't even have a question. It's just I'm agreeing with you. It's amazing that this type of technological solution, it's not alchemy. I mean, there's, you know, there's risk involved and there's, you know, some nuisances with the margin setups and all that sort of stuff. But it really is a huge leapful.

in asset management? Absolutely. It is. And look, I studied my career, well, first at the New York Fed, but then I worked at Golden Sachs on the asset allocation side of the wealth management business. And when you talk about adding value to our client, the horizon would typically be measured in number of years, whereas here you can really address very acute needs for the client's estate planning with the tax-old harvesting strategy.

Oh, I have one thing that is a very important part of this equation as advisors are thinking about doing this. Once you're in these strategies, you're not stuck. It's not like, you know, private equity where you can't get your money back. But if you think that you are going to take all of these losses and then pick your money up and go someplace else or do something different, that's the part of it where like the magic falls apart. I mean, there's no alchemy there. So can you talk about what happens as a result of harvesting these losses, talk about your basis and what happens if you decided to rip the bandit off 12 months later? Yeah, that is a conversation that we have us, even as we onboard clients and advisors,

because what is basically the end game? Right. And so typically a client comes in, they have a need for tax losses in a given year. They ramp up the leverage and then come the following year, we basically start this de-leveraging process to take the client back to where they want to be. over the long term. That could be a significantly lower level of leverage. That could be a different asset allocation. But that is typically the process. Now, what you're pointing toward is that when you're harvesting a loss, you're in turn embedding a gain in another part of the portfolio.

So ultimately, all of these strategies are tax deferral strategies. We're not canceling taxes. We're deferring taxes. Till death do you part. Correct. So unless you get a step up on basis, these are tax deferral strategies. And obviously, but the advantage is that you've got the client owns each individual security long and short in the portfolio. So particularly for the long side of the portfolio, these are also great sort of planning tools if you're donating securities to charity, for example. You can pick the most appreciated stocks from that part of the portfolio. Now, to address your question specifically, you harvest losses in 2025, aggressively.

If you unwind the portfolio in early 2026, you're going to realize the gains and then you have a tax bill in 2026. What we typically do with clients is generate basically a gain mutual de-leveraging plan. So rather than, again, in 2026, rather than accumulating losses and continuing to bank those losses, we're now using those losses to gradually reduce the leverage in the client portfolio. And that sort of process can take someone from the, oh, for myself, for example, the 275 long, 275 short, to something that looks more like a hundred long and a hundred short, and then I can embed that equity market exposure

on the long side as well. So very, very important point. So if financial advisors are listening and want to learn more about what you guys do, where do we send them? Send them to Brooklyn Investment Group. Send them to our colleagues at Nuveen, powered by Brooklyn.

We love to work with advisors. Again, as you pointed out in the beginning of the show as well, these are complex strategies, which means that we as the asset manager really have the duty to work with each individual advisor to make sure that they understand the nuances of these strategies and to be able to also manage expectations of their inclines. Perfect. All right. Thanks very much. Thank you.

All right. Thank you to Urko member. Check out Nuveen.com. To learn more about the Brooklyn Investment Group, email us, Animal Spirits at the compound news.com.