Episode summary
The WealthStack Podcast: Beyond the Model & Scaling Personalized Portfolios with Joshua Allen
Summary
TCP Asset Management built its approach around what Joshua Allen calls true personalization: portfolios designed around a client’s goals, risk tolerance, time horizon, and constraints rather than a one-size-fits-all model. Allen said the firm serves high-level professionals, wealth creators, and business owners with planning, investment management, and tax planning, and that its growth has depended on making customization operationally workable at scale.
He argued that the biggest friction in the industry is between advisers’ desire to customize and legacy portfolio infrastructure that either pushes firms toward individual account trading or toward generic model portfolios. TCP’s answer was to hire a director of advisory services to oversee technology integration, then say no to most new tools and go deeper on existing systems. Allen said that strategy helped the firm reduce trade errors, improve API integration, and move from hours of manual work to roughly 30 minutes in some portfolio tasks.
Allen said PAVE became the platform that let TCP personalize efficiently through exclusions, direct indexing, and more tailored allocations. He also argued that AI may help with investment management, but not replace human judgment, and that firms focused only on investments will struggle as planning, legacy, tax, and family conversations become the differentiators.
Key takeaways
- Allen says TCP’s edge is bespoke portfolio construction that fits a client’s actual goals rather than forcing everyone into a model.
- He said hiring a director of advisory services improved technology coordination and helped the firm scale without creating an ops headache.
- Allen said the firm cut some portfolio-management work from about 18 hours to roughly 30 minutes by going deeper on existing technology instead of buying more tools.
- He said PAVE materially changed TCP’s ability to exclude securities, build direct indexing solutions, and serve high-net-worth clients more efficiently.
- Allen believes AI is useful for support work, but human advisers still need to own stock-picking judgment and broader wealth planning.
Notable quotes
“we had to put a huge investment into technology. And um, that's what's been allowing us to grow at the pace that we've been able to grow”
“we actually hired a director of advisory services and his fully functioning job is to go in and make sure that he runs all of our technology”
“we learned to say no to a lot of new technology and we learned to move forward and dive deeper into the current technology that we have”
“we can actually exclude certain certain stocks, things like that where our our investment management teams sitting there looking through a Bloomberg terminal trying to figure that out. It's done in like 30 seconds”
“AI can only do so much, but one of the things AI can do is AI can help you with investment management”
How the episode opens
You provide clients peace of mind, but who delivers it for you? PAVE enables advisers to seamlessly generate bespoke investment strategies and automate ongoing portfolio management and trading. Save up to 18 hours each week and feel secure with pay.
Welcome to the Wellstack podcast. I'm your host, Shen Rosik, the director of Wellstack Content Solutions, and today we're diving into one of the biggest tensions in wealth management right now. I know there's a lot of them, but specifically we're going to be talking about how firms deliver truly customized portfolios built around individual client goals, risk tolerance, time horizons without creating an operational nightmare behind the scenes.
Because personalization has always been the promise, but technology, automation, and scale are forcing firms to rethink how they're actually going to deliver on it. So, it's a lot to unpack today, but I brought in the expert, and I'm thrilled to be joined by someone who's actually living this day-to-day. We have Josh Allen, CEO of TCP Asset Management.
Josh, welcome to the show. Yes, there has to be some sort of uh quarterback Josh Allen joke in there somewhere.
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Uh, well, outside of of a potentially esteemed football career, I'm going to warm you up with what I promise will be the hardest question that you will get this entire conversation because I want to know, listeners want to know what makes Josh, well, Josh, both personally and professionally.
Well, like you said, unfortunately, I'm not the quarterback of the Buffalo Bills, even though that I have a naming right saying that I'm a little bit older than him. Uh, I like to tell people he's my son and I'm the two-time MVP, but that doesn't go very far. Uh, prof personally and professionally, uh, professionally, you know, I am, uh, the CEO of TCP Asset Management.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- portfolio personalization
- ria operations
- advisor technology
- direct indexing
- ai in portfolio management
Companies and tickers mentioned
- TCP Asset Management
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Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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