Episode summary
The Death of the 60/40 Portfolio (And What Comes Next)
How I Invest With David Weisburd
· · 41 min · Hosts: David Weisburd · Guests: Chaya Slain
Summary
Chaya Slain argues that the real gap for affluent families is not access to standard public-market products, but the ability to source, diligence, and structure private and alternative investments well enough to hold them through cycles. She says a family office is often not cost-effective until assets are in the high hundreds of millions or around $1 billion, and that smaller families need institutional-grade help with estate planning, taxes, portfolio construction, and alternative access.
A major theme is that alternatives can improve after-tax and risk-adjusted outcomes, but only if investors understand price and fee layering. Chaya warns that FOMO pushes people into “sexy” private deals without knowing what they are paying, especially when SPVs and layered fees create hidden leverage and markups.
The episode’s core portfolio argument is that trend following deserves a larger role than bonds in many modern portfolios. Chaya says trend has historically delivered equity-like returns with far smaller drawdowns when combined with stocks, and she sees the strategy as especially valuable in crisis, inflationary, and rising-rate environments. She also emphasizes that structure and disciplined rebalancing matter because investors are too emotional to execute these ideas consistently on their own.
Key takeaways
- Chaya Slain says family offices are usually not cost-effective until assets are in the high hundreds of millions or about $1 billion.
- Chaya argues that the hardest part of alternatives is not finding deals but sourcing, diligence, and understanding layered fees and legal terms.
- Chaya says trend following can serve as a better diversifier than bonds because it has historically matched equity-like returns with much lower drawdowns when paired with stocks.
- Chaya says the 50% trend / 50% equity portfolio is attractive because rebalancing captures trend’s positive skew and equities’ long-run compounding.
- Chaya is selective on venture because top-tier managers are hard to access, outcomes are dispersed, and many investors cannot tolerate a 10- to 15-year wait for results.
Notable quotes
“Until your assets are in like the highund millions or a billion, it's it's actually not cost-effective to build out an office”
“Alternatives have the most impact or and will have the biggest impact on on outperformance”
“Trend following is actually similar to what it sounds like and it's exactly what you would think in terms of trend”
“If you invested half of your money in trend and half of your money in the over that 26-year period, and you rebalance your investment monthly, you actually would get a return that was 7.3%”
“I think it makes a lot more sense to invest in something that can actually mitigate the volatility without dragging on your returns”
How the episode opens
Hi, you worked at one of the top family offices in Cleveland before starting Vetera 5 and a half years ago. What hole did you see in the market?
It's actually very expensive to build out a family office. Until your assets are in like the highund millions or a billion, it's it's actually not cost-effective to build out an office, which is kind of crazy. But the truth is is that by the time you hit around $und00 million in assets, your needs are really different than the average person.
You're talking about generational wealth. You need to be thinking about estate planning, portfolio construction, taxes, and you really want to figure out how to source and invest in alternative investments and thinking about how to construct a portfolio including those in them. So I saw that there were a lot of families who really wanted access to alternative investments.
So that would include private equity, real estate and other alternatives. And um they weren't they didn't know how to source or vet these investment opportunities. And the thing that's actually most interesting about this hole in the market is that actually some of the best opportunities are actually in these smaller nichier strategies.
When I was at Parkwood, we would find sometimes a small fund and it's not actually going to make an impact if you can only get, let's say, $50 million in and you're a multi-billion dollar portfolio. But then conversely, if you're a small family, you may not know how to source these opportunities. So, we were really trying to say, we want to be an institutional quality firm that can source these smaller investments and provide this service for families that really it would be hard for them to build out the infrastructure themselves.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- 60/40 portfolio
- alternatives/private markets
- trend following
- fee drag in private deals
- behavioral discipline
Companies and tickers mentioned
- Virtera Partners LLC
Watch the episode
Watch “The Death of the 60/40 Portfolio (And What Comes Next)” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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