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Alternative Thinking
Total Portfolio Approach
May 19, 2026
Total portfolio approach (TPA) is a broad philosophy for institutional portfolio management that has become increasingly popular over the last few years. We explore potential benefits and risks of TPA when compared to traditional strategic asset allocation, and offer practical demonstrations of how TPA might help investors achieve their goals.
Quick Takes
Active Extension
April 27, 2026
This Quick Take explores Active Extension, a long-short equity approach that maintains full market exposure while allowing managers to express investment ideas more clearly. By relaxing the long-only constraint, the framework may improve diversification, enhance return potential, and increase portfolio efficiency.
White Paper
Active Extension
November 24, 2025
This paper explores how Active Extension (AE)—a long-short framework—may enhance portfolio performance. By allowing skilled managers to short unattractive stocks and overweight more attractive ones, AE offers a liquid, capital-efficient path to improved active returns and long-term wealth outcomes.
White Paper
Portable Alpha: Why Now?
February 20, 2025
As stock market valuations continue to rise and expected returns correspondingly fall, many investors are hoping to rely more on alpha from active management to make up for a potential future return gap. Unfortunately, long-only active management has struggled during recent history. We review why portable alpha may be an attractive alternative solution in today’s market environment. We also discuss what aspects of a portable alpha solution are important for investors to consider when selecting between implementations.
Quick Takes
Exploring Portable Alpha
September 23, 2024
Long-only active management has been challenging. Portable alpha provides investors with more ways to incorporate alpha into their equity exposure.
White Paper
Portable Alpha: Still A Great Solution For Improving Return Outcomes
July 30, 2024
In the face of lower-than-average expected returns for equities, some investors may be considering adding active management to their equity allocations. However, the evidence supporting active long-only equities has long been underwhelming. We review an alternative approach – portable alpha.
Journal Article
Levering Up to Do Good: Direct Long-Short Investing and Charitable Giving
April 23, 2024
We use historical strategy simulations to evaluate the advantages of donating appreciated stock in the context of tax-aware long-short factor strategies. We find long-short strategies exhibit several advantages over long-only investments.
Journal Article
Loss Harvesting or Gain Deferral? A Surprising Source of Tax Benefits of Tax-Aware Long-Short Strategies
Summer 2024
We explore the mechanism for how tax-aware long-short factor strategies, within their first three years since inception, can realize cumulative net capital losses exceeding 100% of initially invested capital, all while generating a significant pre-tax alpha – a result shown in previous research. Surprisingly, we find in these strategies that net capital losses arise not from an increased realization of capital losses but rather from the deferral of capital gains, especially short-term gains on long positions.
Journal Article
Beyond Direct Indexing: Dynamic Direct Long-Short Investing
May 3, 2023
On average, net losses realized by direct indexing loss-harvesting strategies taper off within the first few years after their inception, and these strategies also exhibit a high dispersion of net loss outcomes. We show that long-short strategies motivated by factor investing can significantly outperform direct indexing strategies from both a pre-tax and tax perspective.
Journal Article
Tax-Efficient Portfolio Transition: A Tax-Aware Relaxed-Constraint Approach to Switching Equity Managers
March 2, 2020
For a taxable investor with a highly appreciated equity portfolio, replacing the portfolio manager is likely to trigger substantial tax liabilities. We find that a tax-aware relaxed-constraint post-transition strategy significantly outperforms a traditional tax-agnostic long-only strategy in its ability to preserve and grow the investors after-tax wealth over the long term.