Wealth Management / Private Bank Options

[shri]

Split it into trading bucket and medium-long term bucket. She has control over one and the rest is a family decision based in what an advisor gives you?

In understand the dynamics of a certain generation that wants the privilege / status of a PB and does not trust younger folks.

[shri]

One more random observation before I disconnect.

If your geared towards reading financial documents / fact sheets etc, PBs can throw some ridiculous things at you (because of internal incentives and commitments) which are some how shaped at your risk levels but incomprehensible to most people. The problem is many older generations have some sort of respect for PBers and the buzzwords that they throw around.

(I randomly looked for an old article about accumulators)

If you find yourself attracted by the desire to be a member of the private club that gets exclusive access to these special deals, you would be best served by remembering Grouch Marx's words of wisdom: "I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bad-inv...-accumulators/

[huja]

topic-adjacent . . .
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ho...le_top_stories

[ayang]

You may want to optimise your choice of equity ETFs to reduce the withholding tax on dividends. I refer you to:

https://www.hkex.com.hk/-/media/HKEX..._Hong-Kong.pdf.

[jdf21st]

Ask your Jade RM to put you in contact with HSPC’s PB. Other PB to try would be UBS’s (#1 w-w, HSBC PB (“PBRS”) is # 2). Have huge resources to call upon, especially for research. Also look at JPM or RBC.
Disagree with comment that $5-10m won’t get their attention.
As @shri says you probs need tax advice (if Brit may also benefit from Pensions Advisory?)
Do NOT go to just any IFA. There’s wealth in the family - surely family’s network could help source quality recommendations based on positive experience.
Yes, all yields are sh*t. 4% with no guarantee ain’t so bad (if less risk tolerant) but could be better with out all their costs. Advisory vs discretionary depends largely on how much you want to be directly involved. Most big PB’s (NB: they are banks - more anon) do just custody only services. Do NOT give your assets to any broker or securities firm: they are all very (very, very!) thinly capitalised (And almost never guaranteed by a big parent) and will most likely hold on their books (not their nominee) especially is securitised, in which case you are f*ck*d if they go bust (as they sometimes do!) Banks will more likely act as advisory with proper custodian role with your assets in your name (perhaps via their nominee name) segregated from theirs, in which case easier to extract if (however rare) they go bust.
Assess your risk tolerance level, and give yourself a reality check on likely returns: everyone who’s had a big win at Happy Valley has lost loads getting there.
Good luck and perhaps report back here...?

[DellthinkHK]

I'd go for PB - just to stop your mother from doing something disastrous!

after all you don't have to buy any of their funds/product etc if you dont want to.

[tck]

@shri haha yeah, I remember the "I-kill-you-later" accumulators. I definitely knew a few people who were enticed by the strike prices and seemingly in-the-moneyness of the terms. But when you broke it down to it's component options, you're really giving a ton of value to the bank.

I've been talking to some banks about the services and the ability to exclude certain products from the mandate. Specifically things like ELNs and Accumulators. While I understand the concern with giving the bank a mandate, I'm also concerned with an advisory account as this leaves my mother the main gatekeeper of entering products and she can potentially be blinded with jargon and cherry-picked data and performance.
@DellthinkHK Even at PB, if it was an advisory account, they could still recommend products that we could disagree over which is the conflict we're trying to avoid. Purchasing the products or not, we would be paying an all-in custody fee on AUM anyway.

The issue is if we allocated towards ETFs in the PB account, it feels silly to pay this AUM fee when it's such a vanilla product. If we go for more exotic alternatives, I think we're more out of our depth plus we'll be paying extra load to 3rd party funds.
@jdf21st Good point about the capitalization of brokerages. This probably should have been something more considered by me as my alternative to PB is just ETF basket held in some place like Interactive Brokers.

For now we're still talking to banks, but for me, as risky as this is, I'm leaning towards a discretionary mandate that is heavily restricted in terms of turnover and available products as opposed to advisory account. The problem with the advisory account is that my mother might be the main point of contact and it's been tiring to explain to her why certain products aren't desirable or misleading in their value. Case in point the ELNs and accumulators. This family debate of finances is something I'd like to avoid.

So for now, the value proposition of a clear mandate and discretionary account at PB over my default auto-rebalance ETF approach is:
1. Less family discussion about finances.
2. Access to alts, like private equity, distressed, etc (unconvinced of value)
3. Potential timing expertise of a market to rotate in and out of funds (again. unconvinced of value)

But yeah. We'll see how it goes. At this point I'm pretty eager to keep the peace and I'm getting more and more willing to sacrifice value and optimal finance management for that goal.

[seirin]

So for now, the value proposition of a clear mandate and discretionary account at PB over my default auto-rebalance ETF approach is:
1. Less family discussion about finances.
2. Access to alts, like private equity, distressed, etc (unconvinced of value)
3. Potential timing expertise of a market to rotate in and out of funds (again. unconvinced of value)

Sounds like you got this and know what you're getting yourself into. I would say for point #2, there are certain markets where active managers have a much better chance of being their target index - even net of fees - due to the markets being much less efficient than the US (Japan is one that comes to mind). But this also depends on the fees the PB charges.

[shri]

Shutting this down, as it seems the IFAs have discovered this thread.