Fund Management

I am not a fund manager, a placement agent or an investment adviser. I do not manage, market or place funds, I do not hold client capital, and I have no discretion over anyone’s portfolio. There is nothing here for me to sell you.

So this page can start where a manager’s cannot: most families who raise fund access with me should not allocate. Where a family genuinely qualifies and wants this, I introduce them to a dedicated specialist private-capital practice whose regulated partners handle the mandate, and I stay on the real-estate and citizenship side of the file.

This is the section that costs me business, and the reasons repeat. The capital is not genuinely surplus — it is quietly earmarked for a property, a business, school fees or a relocation whose timing nobody has fixed, and it is about to be locked away for years. Or the allocation is standing in for a plan: nobody has settled where the family is actually tax-resident, what holds the assets, or where the cash lives, and a private fund is being asked to do work an asset-protection structure does far better and far more cheaply. Or the appeal is access itself, which is not an investment thesis, and an industry built on scarcity knows how to sell it. So the answer is frequently no, or not yet, or not this one.

For an American there is one more reason to slow down. The United States taxes its citizens on worldwide income regardless of where they live, where a fund is domiciled or which second passport they hold, and a non-US fund can trigger passive-foreign-investment-company treatment punitive enough to change whether the investment makes sense at all. That conversation belongs with your CPA and inside international tax planning, not with the manager’s sales desk.

The sections below are the anatomy of that no.

The qualified and accredited investor tests get misread as a velvet rope. They substitute for what a private vehicle does not carry: no prospectus, no daily price, no market to sell into, and no regulator reviewing what you were told before you wired.

This region argues for that gate better than any regulator could. Some of the largest investment frauds of the past few decades ran through Caribbean jurisdictions, and a striking number were sold as real-estate developments — the history I set out in the biggest Ponzi schemes in the Caribbean. Eligibility rules did not stop a single one of them. The same patterns recur across every collapse, and they are visible long before the end: an auditor nobody has heard of, a founder whose personal credibility is doing the work audited numbers should be doing, and friction when investors try to withdraw. That last one is the most reliable late signal of the lot.

The suitability questionnaire gets treated as paperwork. Read properly it asks what a family in a hurry skips: what proportion of your net worth this is, when you need the money back, and whether losing all of it would change how you live.

Concentration is where I press hardest. A family already sitting in one operating business, one property market and one currency does not diversify by adding an illiquid position it cannot exit; it concentrates differently. That is a wealth management conversation before it is a fund one, and the ground I cover in why family fortunes actually disappear.

Illiquidity is the mechanism, not a defect. A manager who cannot be forced to sell can hold through a bad year, and the premium you hope to earn is the compensation for surrendering your ability to leave.

In practice that means capital called down over years rather than invested on day one, lock-ups measured in years, redemption windows quarterly at best, and gates a manager can close precisely when everyone wants out at once. Liquidity is demand, not infrastructure — the conclusion I reach about tokenized fractional real estate, where a token nobody wants is as illiquid as a share certificate nobody wants. Fix the date you could realistically have the money back before you subscribe, then assume it will be later.

Nothing is introduced on the strength of a deck. What the manager returned across a full cycle rather than a favorable stretch, who audits the vehicle and who actually holds the assets in custody all get checked first — the same instinct behind the off-plan due diligence I run before a client wires a deposit on a property. On fees, one question goes in writing to everyone in the chain, including whoever introduced you: who is paid what, by whom, for my participation.

What my team and I do is establish what the money is actually for, make sure a multi-year commitment does not collide with a property closing, a citizenship timetable or the banking underneath it, and say so when the answer is that you should not be doing this at all. Where a family qualifies, the introduction goes to regulated partners who handle suitability and subscription — the same route the rest of the private client advisory work takes. Access is the easiest part to arrange, and the last thing that should decide it.