The Family Office Book by Richard C. Wilson

Author:Richard C. Wilson [Wilson, Richard C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118233269
Published: 2012-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

FAMILY OFFICE INTERVIEW WITH LUKAS DOERIG OF MARCUARD FAMILY OFFICE

Our next multi-family office interview is with Lukas Doerig of Marcuard Family Office a top-50 family office based in Zurich, Switzerland. Lukas is senior portfolio manager at Marcuard and was kindly introduced to me by my existing contact at Marcuard Family Office, Samuel Hochuli, vice president, senior tax, legal and compliance officer.

Before moving to the Marcuard Family Office, Lukas was deputy CEO of GI Global Invest AG from 2002 to 2007. GI Global Invest AG is an investment boutique specializing in multi-manager mandates for Swiss pension funds. There, he helped with fund selection and portfolio management in many operational aspects of the group. This interview begins with Lukas sharing his background and where and how he gained his insights into the industry.

Lukas Doerig: After working at UBS in asset management and private banking, I joined GI Global Invest, where we would run multi-manager mandates for Swiss pension funds and really give them access to the best active managers available on a global scale and really with the idea of an open architecture. Unfortunately, manager selection is still very much biased by concerns and rationale about how profitable an allocation is, not for the client, but for those people who make the selection, basically the banks. It starts with the right theme of “you should be paid independently of your allocation.” And that is what I was able to do at GI Global Invest and I then joined Marcuard Family Office in 2008, because they had exactly the same concept, but it's the additional advantage of running large family moneys with less restrictions whereas in the pension funds world everything is rather slow and they have many restrictions.

Richard Wilson: Many people have said that their hands are tied at a larger trust or private bank, or that there are just conflicts of pushing clients into a fund when really they could go outside the bank and get a better quality manager, with better risk management, and better returns, and a better team. The problem, though, is that they don't have that option open to them because of where the assets are being held. It seems to be a very common reason for why people like yourself of talent move out to a place where they can add more value to their clients, right?

Lukas Doerig: Absolutely.

Richard Wilson: How does your family office typically split up the investment portfolio between individual securities, mutual funds, ETFs, real estate, and hard assets versus alterative managers like private equity and hedge funds?

Lukas Doerig: First of all, as a standing policy, we do not buy any single securities with the exception of single bonds, so we really subscribe to the idea of collective vehicles and collective management. However, in equities we are also kind of pragmatic; about half of the equity allocation goes into index products where the focus is cost and flexibility, and the other half goes into very active equity managers.

Richard Wilson: Are you also light

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