Sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t.
If your scope is narrow, an advisor probably isn’t worth the fee. Paying 0.5% a year to have someone manage a portfolio of California municipal bonds is a good example — an index of California munis will likely serve you just as well for less. Markets are efficient.
But if the question is “I have a principal residence, an investment property, two mortgages, a 401(k), and a brokerage account, how do I allocate all of it so I can stop working in three years?” then an advisor earns the fee, or you should be ready for extensive work and the mistakes that may come with it.
The broader the scope of your capital, the more we’re worth to you.
Three things: trust, knowledge and experience, and an advisor who is turned toward you.
Trust. Meet in person or by videoconference and use all your perceptive self to judge it. Check the regulatory record, which is where any complaint would be exposed. Ours is public on FINRA BrokerCheck under CRD #122278. If you feel like you may not trust us, keep looking. Trust is essential.
Knowledge and experience. Check the degrees and the years. Marc has 30 years in the market; Alex has 10. Market cycles are long, and an advisor who hasn’t lived through a crash doesn’t have a full deck. You want someone who can explain clearly how they proceed, because clear communication is part of an advisor’s knowledge, not separate from it.
Turned toward you. Anselme Capital is a fee-only fiduciary. That means a legal obligation to serve your interest first, to disclose any conflict of interest, and advice untainted by commission or payment of any kind other than a percentage of assets under management.
In our experience the best way to judge all three is a referral from a friend who knows us. And it matters that you like your advisor. The conversation has to be easy and pleasant, because communication and understanding are the most important part of the job.
First, do nothing risky. Put it somewhere safe. A savings account is fine. There’s no prize for hurrying.
Then meet several advisors, not one. Look for trust, knowledge, and someone turned toward you. Most of all, find someone who takes the time to make you understand the reasoning behind the advice, not just the advice. An informed investor is always a better investor.
Once you’ve chosen, move your capital over gradually. You need time to learn how comfortable you are with what you’re hearing.
Less than you’d think.
Marc works from the San Francisco Bay Area, Alex works from Seattle, and we have clients in Rhode Island, New York, Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, Michigan, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii, including U.S. tax residents living abroad. We visit both coasts regularly.
What matters more is that you like your advisor. The conversation has to be easy, useful, and worth having, because communication and understanding are the most important part of the job. You can judge that over a video conference in twenty minutes. Don’t pick an office. Pick a person.
0.90% per year on the first $2 million we manage, 0.75% from $2 to 4 million, and 0.50% above $4 million. The tiers are marginal, so each rate applies only to the assets in that band. We bill quarterly in advance on your quarter-end balance, after you receive a receipt showing precisely how the fee was computed. You have nothing to do to pay us, and every tool to check our math.
We always want to be good value. Our fees are well below the typical traditional advisory fee structure, offering greater discounts as assets grow.
It’s our only fee. It covers our advice about your mortgages and your overall capital, even capital in accounts we don’t manage, and planning exercises carry no extra charge. Fee-only means no commissions and no product revenue, and you can cancel anytime with any prepaid, unearned fee refunded.
Yes, two, and neither one is paid to us.
You pay for your trades, which tend to cost very little. And you pay the operating costs of the funds and ETFs in your portfolio, which run between 0.084% and 0.4%. We choose inexpensive ETFs on purpose.
That’s the entire list.
In practice, no minimum.
We do require that we fit your needs. From our conversations, we have to feel like we’re in a position to help you achieve what you’re after with your capital. If we’re not, we’ll say so. Children of clients are welcome at any account size.
For context, as of July 2026 Anselme Capital manages about $96 million for 81 paying clients. That’s an average of $1.18 million per client and a median of $791,000.
Read the site, contact us, and then read our ADV.
That’s the regulatory document containing everything the regulators want you to know about Anselme Capital, Marc, and Alex. It’s public. You’ll find it on the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure site, and our full regulatory history is on FINRA BrokerCheck under CRD #122278.
Your money is held in accounts in your own name at Charles Schwab or Interactive Brokers. We never take ownership of your capital.
Anselme Capital holds a limited power of attorney over those accounts. We can trade in them in your name, but we cannot take your money and run away. The broker makes sure of that. The only capital we’re allowed to draw is our fee, and the broker enforces a ceiling on it.
This arrangement is standard for our industry: a broker holds your assets, reports every transaction to you, and provides your tax documents, while your advisor places trades and can only extract the agreed fee. You can see everything, always.
Yes, for every client, always. We are a fee-only registered investment advisor: legally and economically structured to act in your interest. We disclose any conflict if one arises, and we earn nothing from the funds we use.
And if you feel like you may not trust us, keep looking. Trust is essential.
A fair question for a two-person firm, and part of why the structure matters. Your assets are held in your own name at Charles Schwab or Interactive Brokers. They never sit with us, so they don’t depend on us being here.
Marc and Alex each know every client relationship and can step in for the other. And we maintain a written business-continuity and succession plan, so that if neither of us could continue, your accounts would be managed or transitioned in an orderly way, never stranded. Ask us and we’ll walk you through it.
Passive, definitely. 80% or more of a portfolio, depending on the model, sits in passive asset classes, and that allocation shifts about twice a year.
The rest goes to a dozen or so individual stocks chosen for durable strategic strength, mostly in artificial intelligence and infrastructure, and we intend to hold them for some time.
Two reasons we lean passive. It’s more tax efficient, and our clients tend to be in high tax brackets. And the behavior of these asset classes over the past, which we’ve tracked monthly since June 1998, lets us design portfolios with controlled volatility. Anselme Capital focuses on volatility as much as on return.
Two parts.
80% or more: asset classes. The choice and composition come out of our mean variance optimization process, which puts the portfolio on the efficient frontier. We know the monthly performance of every asset class we use since June 1998. This part is meant to bring systematic diversification and predictable volatility. It’s based on the past.
20% or less, depending on the model: individual stocks. We’re in a time of rapid and profound technological change, and to capture it we invest in a dozen or so stocks that capitalize on those shifts, mainly artificial intelligence and infrastructure. We look for sustainable strategic advantage. This is stock picking with tax efficiency in mind.
Our most efficient portfolio family, produced by a mean-variance optimization over monthly market data going back to June 1998, with modest leverage treated as an asset class. Named after the sudden spring storms of the Alps, and designed, in back-testing, for relative calm through chaotic markets.
Leverage cuts both ways. It can amplify losses as well as gains. Used our way it’s modest, and applied to a very stable, broadly diversified portfolio.
The ability to use modest leverage can be a very effective way to gain tax efficiency and temporary access to liquidity.
Four things.
We push you to fill your tax shelters. 401(k), SEP IRA, IRA, Roth IRA, mega Roth. We guide you through the forest of possibilities while keeping a safe level of liquidity available to you. Later in your financial life, we make sure you distribute out of them in a tax efficient way, using Roth conversions if needed.
We manage the portfolio for taxes. Passive investing tends to delay capital gains, and tax loss harvesting offsets them. A safe level of margin can delay them further, though leverage cuts both ways and we size it accordingly.
We look at everything you own. Borrowing against an investment property could increase your tax deductions and improve your liquidity, all at once. Tax efficiency lives in your portfolio management but also in the other assets you own. The broader our view, the more efficiencies we can suggest.
We plan the handoff. Substantial efficiency comes from transmitting capital to a charitable cause or to your heirs, and we work with your estate or trust attorney to make sure generational transfer is done well.
Yes, and it’s one of the most common situations we handle, particularly in high tech. It usually arrives through an RSU program or an employee stock purchase plan.
Our general advice is to avoid cumulating employment risk and capital exposure risk. If your employer’s business goes down, you might get fired and lose capital on the single-stock position you’ve accumulated, both at once. That risk bundling has to be diversified away.
To do it well we need a list of your positions with their respective cost basis, and a clear idea of your taxation. From there we map vesting and lockups, plan sales to spread the tax impact, and move methodically from concentrated employer stock toward a portfolio built for your whole life. If your company recently IPO’d or ran a tender offer, that conversation is worth having early.
Yes, and a substantial number of our clients live in it.
Marc started a tech company, was a member of an angel investment club, and volunteered with SCORE advising startups. Tech investing is what brought Marc to investing to begin with. Alex grew up in the Bay Area and did internships for tech startups.
If you work for a startup, or started one yourself, we speak your language.
It fits well, and several of our clients run both.
Financial assets provide a welcome diversification away from real estate, which tends to be local. They also provide the liquidity real estate lacks. And real estate leverage can provide both a tax deduction and increased liquidity.
The point is to manage one investment mix rather than two separate piles, and we have the tools to help you do that.
If you’re a U.S. tax resident, yes. Cross-border complexity is familiar ground for us, and we work in English and French.
We cannot manage money for Canadian or EU tax residents, or solicit clients outside the U.S. But we do serve U.S. tax residents wherever they live, including Americans living abroad — the question of what an American overseas does about a U.S. portfolio is one almost no advisor answers well.
Three parts, and the third is the one people underestimate.
The technical part. Setting up a trust, revocable or not, or a will. We’re happy to work with the estate attorney of your choice, or we can connect you with one of the estate services vetted by Schwab for our clients.
The tax part. The cost basis of your assets resets at your death, which means the assets carrying the largest unrealized gains are usually the ones best left to your heirs rather than sold or given away during your lifetime. Those gains disappear at the reset. That’s why we build wealth transfer into your tax planning rather than treating it as a separate exercise.
The cultural part. If you don’t prepare your heirs to handle the assets you intend to transmit, you’re most likely not maximizing the impact of your transfer. We invite you to bring your heirs into a conversation with us. In fact, we invite your heirs to become our clients, so they can familiarize themselves with the management of assets before they inherit yours. Investment knowledge is key, and we’re happy to provide it.
Enthusiastically. Teaching the next generation to hold wealth is, in our view, part of managing yours. Clients’ children can come to us with any money question at any account size.
Yes. We’re a two-person family firm, and clients reach Marc or Alex directly, including evenings and weekends. Big financial questions rarely schedule themselves for Tuesday at 10am.