This Week in Beyond Wealth
Which brokerages investors use and recommend.
Personal AI agents: the bots that lead adoption.
Tax treatment for private credit, hedge funds, and VC.
Navigating Wealth Podcast
What can an AI assistant take off your plate?
Long Angle’s co-founders spent this episode on the new wave of AI personal assistants: Instinct, Muse, Dots, Town, and GrokBot (see Life, Health, & Family section below). Sriram runs Instinct inside WhatsApp. Tad presses on where the line sits with payment details and bank accounts.
Listen on: YouTube · Apple Podcasts · Spotify
Money & Markets
How does my brokerage stack up against other options?
We surveyed 165 high-net-worth households asking which brokerages they hold accounts with and whether they'd recommend them.
Schwab and Fidelity are neck and neck for both market share and customer advocacy, and are head and shoulders above the competition.
Respondents praise Schwab and Fidelity for their depth of research, filtering, transactions, and security.
Vanguard is a distant third for usage and noticeably behind in recommendation rate.
The bottom 3 for recommendations: Merrill Lynch, E*TRADE, and Chase.
One interesting note on Robinhood is that multiple users said they only signed up for a transfer bonus, and expect to move back to Fidelity or Schwab.
Frec, a direct indexing platform, received unanimous approval from customers (though from a small sample).
Investors with the largest balances don’t choose any of the names above. These accounts sit where a banker picks up the phone: #1 and #2 are J.P Morgan Private Bank ($7.5M median brokerage balance) and Morgan Stanley ($6.5M).
Life, Health, & Family
Which AI assistants should I try?
A personal AI agent sits inside your messages or your inbox and acts for you: booking an appointment, chasing a refund, comparing prices before you buy. We polled 220 Long Angle members on which ones they use.
This poll draws the tech-savvy, so read it as a picture of early adopters.
Meta's Muse leads at a third of respondents, with Instinct close behind. About one in ten use Dots and GrokBot.
A fifth of respondents have even built their own agent on top of Claude or OpenAI.
In the discussion thread, several Long Angle members said they run three or more at once and give each one a job. A few examples include email, travel research, and price comparisons / quotes.
The stickiest agents are the ones that live inside iMessage or WhatSapp, compared to those with their own apps where usage tends to fade.
Someone asked a sharp question about access:
How do you minimize the risks associated with agents having access to your personal data and account passwords, while acting without consulting you first?
Private Market Perspectives
Where should private investments sit for taxes?
Asset location is holding each investment in the account type that taxes it the least.
Interest and short-term gains are taxed as ordinary income at up to 40.8% federal, while long-term gains and qualified dividends stop at 23.8%.
Private credit and multi-strategy hedge funds bite the hardest, because both generate taxable income every year instead of deferring the gain until you sell.
Private credit is taxed as interest.
Multi-strategy hedge funds are taxed as short-term gains.
That’s why both belong in a tax-deferred account, which in practice means a self-directed IRA, since a standard retirement account won’t hold a fund interest.
Private equity and venture capital, on the other hand, are taxed as long-term gains deferred until exit, so they’re fine held personally outside a retirement account. These shouldn’t be placed in a tax-deferred account since that would convert the 23.8% gain into ordinary income on withdrawal.
For educational purposes only. Not tax advice.
Around Long Angle
Top threads of the week
Here’s a look at what Long Angle members are discussing in the app this week:
AI Did My Taxes: Six Months Later
Does USAA Still Offer the Great Discounts They Claim?
Family Financial Communication
Ski Season Is Coming: Where Do You Plan to Ski?
Managing Discretionary Spend With a Partner
Seeking Suggestions for 7-Day Vacations
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Published by:
Chris Bendtsen
Insights Lead, Long Angle
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This material is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice regarding any security or investment strategy. Long Angle does not provide legal or tax advice, consult your attorney, CPA, or tax professional regarding your situation.
Long Angle Management, LLC (Long Angle), is an SEC registered investment adviser firm. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or endorsement. Investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results.