Ben Carlson (2:33)

Even with like a 351 exchange fund or whatever. All you're doing is pushing the taxes off until later when you actually sell.

Michael Batnik (2:38)

Right.

Ben Carlson (2:39)

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 you're right. It's not, there's, there's no magic here. You're not eliminating taxes, you know, 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?

Michael Batnik (2:55)

Correct.

Ben Carlson (2:56)

Today's show we have Erco Atula. He is a CEO and chief investment officer of Brooklyn Investment Group. They were purchased by Nuveen a couple of years ago and we talked to Erco about how they implement a 13030 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.

Michael Batnik (3:22)

Prevalent?

Ben Carlson (3:23)

Yes. So here's our talk with Erco.

Michael Batnik (3:28)

Erico, welcome to the show.

Erco Atula (3:30)

Thanks for having you.

Michael Batnik (3:31)

All right, today we're going to be talking about tax advantage. Long short SMEs 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. How are you guys?

Erco Atula (3:48)

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 advisors. So we largely serve the independent space. Fast forward from 2021 to 2023. We started working with Nuveen, a number of other asset managers and then in 25 Nuveen acquired us. So we're today a wholly owned subsidiary of Nuveen.

Michael Batnik (4:23)

Congrats.

Erco Atula (4:24)

Thank you.

Ben Carlson (4:24)

That was pretty quick. What changed about your organization after the merger? Anything? It's same organization, bigger, more resources, what happened?

Erco Atula (4:32)

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 clients and then there's obviously the distribution side of things and client service specifically. Right. 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 Nuveen has both of those. So we've been able to really leverage the Nuveen capabilities on those sides for a couple of years now. And so today going forward we continue as a wholly owned subsidiary of Nuveen. 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

Michael Batnik (5:31)

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?

Erco Atula (5:42)

Yeah, good question. Well, so just take it 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, and so and they're combining a couple of sort of old, old, old ingredients together. So long short investing in one hand too 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 at 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 130 30. 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 the 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 at scale across the whole portfolio? Really the original reason for a found in Brooklyn was, was really to provide that what we call operational alpha or Thor Advisors combining the stocks, bonds, personalized tax managed in a single account. And that's how Nuvin came into the picture as well. But long short was always in the back of our minds as the sort of the next step. And so we, 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 long short space. It was always in the back of my mind, but it was not the first thing we launched.

Ben Carlson (7:53)

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 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. I 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, no, wait, we want to keep things very simple. This is too much for us. Like how does, how does that work with you?

Erco Atula (8:27)

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, 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, for the right reasons. So the main use cases are say liquidity events. So someone has, say sells the company or, 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? The second use case is concentrated stock diversification. So many, many advisors have clients with Nvidia or other stack tech stocks that they would like to diversify out of into say like an S&P 500 or other types of portfolios. So how do they do that in a tax neutral, 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 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, any, any investment management activity. And then the potential tax benefits and then also the, the potential for sort of some pre tax outperformance as the sort of the third component.

Michael Batnik (10:23)

So we've been, we agree with you. We've been using custom indexing since 2019. It's, it's a big part of our business. And the long short extensions 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. Allow. 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, you know, the indexing part is pretty straightforward but, but maybe there's some, some active overlay, I don't know. Versus the, 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, to the tax stuff. Like it's, it's a lot, there's a lot of moving parts.

Erco Atula (11:17)

Yeah. So if you kind of think about the different components of these tax brandish 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 tax loss harvesting at individual stock level. Then there's the other component which is the long short investing. So as we know, the first hedge fund called the hedged fund at the time was 1949 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 got to be 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, 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 alpha, 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 experience managing these long short portfolios. 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.

Ben Carlson (13:41)

You got a little bit to my next question. So it sounds like you have your own models, but if an advisor comes to you and has a model that they use or or portfolio they use, they can also implement that as well. Or is it just your models that you can use on the platform, the

Erco Atula (13:51)

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 it was something like the S&P 500 or Russell 3000 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, where 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, of the portfolio that we do. So the advisor can then 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, you know, 3,000 stocks in the U.S. 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 2700 or so most liquid stocks in the US stock universe. And then you get to have signals that actually work 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 long, 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, where our advisors tend to be gravitating is sort of more uncorrelated stock selection signals that traditionally come more from the, the hedge fund space.

Michael Batnik (15:51)

Ben, do you still short Berkshire Hathaway?

Ben Carlson (15:54)

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 an extra 30% to short, so your net is still 100. But like what's the difference between just a long only tax loss harvesting system?

Erco Atula (16:26)

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 liquidity event and they deploy that in say like a US large cap 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 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, right? So that, that's a way to kind of use existing legacy assets and basically turn them into sort of productive members of the, 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, the losses by the extension, which is about 15% in the, in the first year for the, the 1 3030.

Michael Batnik (17:55)

So you just mentioned it, the 1 3030. Is that, 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?

Erco Atula (18:08)

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 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 1, 1010 type of portfolio. That's totally fine as well. Then at the other extreme there we really limited by the, the custodian requirements. So going up to 325, 225, that's sort of the, the range that is just sort of doable in the, in the, sort of the retail SMAs at the main, main custodians. Now, in terms of the beta exposure.

Michael Batnik (18:59)

Wait, Erica, can we actually, I should have, I should have broken this question up. Let's, 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 gross, even if the

Erco Atula (19:24)

net is 100, first of all, whenever you go beyond rect. So 200% of gross notional net. Now you're living in the world of portfolio margin, right? And that's just a 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 1, 30, 30 strategy is running with a tracking error of say one and a half to 2%, then a 250, 150 would be running at a tracking error of 7 to 8%, for example. Right.

Michael Batnik (20:04)

What does tracking error mean?

Erco Atula (20:05)

Yeah, so the tracking way to think about it is like, what is the expected deviation in return relative to your benchmark in a given year? 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, 2/3 of the time you are within 2% of the benchmark return. Now obviously you can have a 2 standard deviation or 3 standard deviation event. 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, the 13030 strategy, that means that you could sort of outperform or Underperform sort of plus minus 4%, right. In a given year. And then obviously you could have three standard deviation. And in 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're from the benchmark. Right.

Michael Batnik (21:09)

All right, so that, so that's obviously like. Now listen, risk cuts both ways. I mean you could have positive experience where you, you outperform by two or three standard deviations and you're like, oh my God, more and more and more. That was amazing. And of course we under, we understand it cuts both ways. Why even do that? Like what is the. And you're welcome for. 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?

Erco Atula (21:35)

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 output. 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, for your clients. So, so the reason to go into the long short space is really an urgency to create tax losses to help offset gains somewhere else.

Michael Batnik (22:10)

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. Like is that, is that a common use case?

Erco Atula (22:23)

In my own use case and for many of my colleagues at Brooklyn, the transaction with me being closed in July, so end of July actually. So we basically had five months left in the year to, to go. And, and obviously I, I eat my own cooking, so I, I went full

Michael Batnik (22:40)

tilt and you said give me 900, 800.

Erco Atula (22:44)

Well, I actually, I actually went 275 long, 275 short.

Michael Batnik (22:48)

Ah, so talk. So that's a great segue. Talk about that. Why did you do that?

Erco Atula (22:52)

Yeah, so, and, and now we're getting into the, the second part of this chart. Like what is the beta that you want to select for your portfolio? So we, we talked a little bit about the leverage going from like say 11010 to 3252 25. So you notice that the, the upper end of the spectrum there is about 550% of, of notional Exposure. Right. Rather than tracking the, the, the equity index. So having beta of 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 to 75 short.

Michael Batnik (23:35)

So you've got, 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, 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.

Erco Atula (24:00)

That's absolutely right. And so, so the, the focus for the remainder of the 2025 was to use the stock selection that we have to pick the longs and the shorts so that it, the whole portfolio is neutral to any industry sector factor. And, and frankly we do have our proprietary stock selection processes to drive the longs and the shorts. And, 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 four to 500 long positions. Four to 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 7%, 70% equities and, and 30% in fixed income. So you can sort of think about it in two stages. And at the same time I'm deleveraging the portfolio because my need for tax losses in 2025 are not going to be anywhere close to what I had in 2025 in 2026, what I had in 2025.

Ben Carlson (25:22)

So do, 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, the fact 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.

Erco Atula (25:41)

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 loss 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, we see all the active loan 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, any one of us can just buy a high quality etf. For example, if you go the fact based direction, make sure that, make sure that you're, you're aware that there's some crowding risk there. And something similar to that we saw say in you know, the 2007 Quant crash, which a lot of people have forgotten by now. So you 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 to 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 selection works all the time. But that's another avenue which we're very focused on right now. Also with our new global equities colleagues

Michael Batnik (27:23)

at, at Nuvy, 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 the 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 and it 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?

Erco Atula (27:54)

Yeah, so let's talk about kind of the ranges. So I think I mentioned that for cash funded 13030 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 initial portfolio value.

Michael Batnik (28:26)

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 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 leap forward in asset management.

Erco Atula (28:59)

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

Michael Batnik (29:27)

Oh, I have, I have one thing that is a very important part of this equation. As advisors are thinking about doing this. Once you are in these strategies, you are 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, 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?

Erco Atula (30:05)

Yeah, that is a conversation that we, we have as, 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 deleveraging process to take the climb 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 again 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

Michael Batnik (30:47)

till death do you part.

Erco Atula (30:49)

Correct. So unless you get a step up in places, 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 neutral deleveraging 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. Right. And that, that sort of process can take someone from that. For myself, for example, the 275 long, 275 short to something that looks more like 100 long and 100 short. And then I can embed that equity market exposure on the long side as well. So very, very important point.

Ben Carlson (32:04)

So if financial advisors are listening and want to learn more about what you guys do, where do we send them?

Erco Atula (32:08)

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 end clients.

Ben Carlson (32:36)

Perfect. All right, thanks very much.

Erco Atula (32:38)

Thank you.

Ben Carlson (32:41)

All right, thank you to ERCO. Remember, check out Nuveen.com to learn more about the Brooklyn Investment Group. Email us animalspiritscompoundnews.com.