WholeATX · Austin metro · Investment Management
Every investment management business in the Austin metro — ranked by how well their website works for customers and AI search. Looking for one? Start below. Run one? Find your score and what to fix.
3 businesses with no website we could locate — every one is a customer searching and finding nothing. Not scored, listed as opportunity. Is one of these yours? Get online →
The firms, funds and institutions that set the terms in investment management — context, not local listings; never scored.
The regulated surface and the highest-stakes pillar: composite construction, firm definition, verification, required disclosures, the 2020 GIPS edition's separate provisions for firms, asset owners and verifiers, and how a compliant presentation is actually assembled. Institutions screen on this before they screen on strategy.
What Rule 206(4)-1 permits and forbids in advertising: net-of-fee requirements alongside gross, the limits on hypothetical, extracted, predecessor and backtested performance, testimonial and endorsement conditions, third-party ratings, and the books-and-records obligations behind every claim on a website.
How institutional mandates are actually won: consultant databases and screens, RFI/RFP mechanics, finals presentations, investment due diligence versus operational due diligence, reference calls, and the documentation an allocator's file must contain to satisfy a board.
The fastest-moving structural change in the allocator market — discretionary outsourcing of some or all of a portfolio, when it fits a mid-size institution, how OCIO search and benchmarking work, fee models, conflicts when a consultant also manages, and what a fiduciary retains versus delegates.
Investment policy statements, strategic versus tactical allocation, rebalancing discipline, risk budgeting, factor and style exposure, the endowment model versus liability-aware construction, and how allocation policy — not manager selection — drives most of the outcome.
Governance by trustee boards, actuarial funded status and discount-rate assumptions, contribution policy, liability-driven investing, transparency and open-records obligations, and the political economy that shapes how state and municipal systems invest.
Spending policy and intergenerational equity, UPMIFA duties, the NACUBO-Commonfund study as the peer benchmark, illiquidity budgets, gift and donor-restriction constraints, and the staffing question every mid-size endowment faces.
Private equity, venture, private credit, real estate, infrastructure and natural resources as allocations rather than as asset classes in the abstract: pacing models, commitment versus exposure, the denominator effect, co-investment, and the diligence a first-time allocator underestimates.
Separate accounts, commingled funds, collective investment trusts, mutual funds, ETFs and active ETFs, interval and tender-offer funds, BDCs, limited partnerships and 3(c)(1)/3(c)(7) exemptions — and which structure a given investor type can actually use.
Management fees and carried interest, hurdle rates, high-water marks, clawbacks, waterfall mechanics, fee offsets, side letters and most-favored-nation clauses, ILPA reporting templates, and where terms have and have not moved.
Lockups, gates, redemption terms, the slow distribution environment, GP-led and LP-led secondaries, continuation vehicles, NAV lending and subscription lines — the whole apparatus institutions now use to manage liquidity in a portfolio they cannot sell quickly.
Custodians and asset servicing, fund administration, the custody rule, valuation policy and pricing sources, NAV oversight, cash and collateral management, securities lending, transition management and best execution.
Order and portfolio management systems, risk and analytics platforms, portfolio accounting, allocator CRM and research management, manager databases, private-capital data, and the reporting stack that turns all of it into board materials.
Consultant relations, database coverage and screen visibility, the RFP function, gatekeepers and platform access, DC and DCIO channels, and how a boutique manager becomes visible to allocators without a household-name brand.
The Advisers Act, Form ADV and Form PF, ERISA fiduciary standards and prohibited transactions, the vacated private-fund rules and what survived them, cybersecurity and business-continuity expectations, and examination priorities.
The Central Texas concentration of institutional capital — UTIMCO, TRS, ERS, the Texas Permanent School Fund and the Texas Treasury Safekeeping Trust Company — plus Dimensional's Austin headquarters, CFA Society Austin, state procurement and open-records rules, and what a manager needs to know to compete for Texas mandates.
explain that the GIPS standards govern how performance is calculated and presented firm-wide, not whether the returns are good; compliance is claimed at the firm level and requires that every fee-paying discretionary portfolio sit in a composite
verification tests firm-wide policies and composite construction; it does not certify the accuracy of any specific composite's returns, and describing it as though it did is exactly the claim that draws examiner attention
define it as all portfolios managed to a stated strategy, and explain that its value is in preventing cherry-picking -- which is why the composite definition and the list of composites are the first things a diligent buyer asks for
explain what each deducts, and that under the SEC Marketing Rule gross performance may not be presented in an advertisement without net performance shown with equal prominence over the same period
Rule 206(4)-1 governs advertisements by SEC-registered investment advisers, including a website; cover the general prohibitions, the performance conditions and the testimonial and endorsement conditions
explain that hypothetical performance may only be shown where the adviser has policies to ensure relevance to the likely recipient's objectives -- which is very hard to satisfy for a public website -- and that this has produced a steady run of enforcement
define each and be blunt about what each hides: TVPI includes unrealised marks, DPI is the only one made of cash, and IRR is sensitive to timing and to subscription-line use
explain money-weighted versus time-weighted, GP control of drawdown timing, and public-market-equivalent methods as the honest comparison
define discretionary outsourcing of some or all of a portfolio, and be precise about what the fiduciary delegates and what it can never delegate
explain directly originated, mostly floating-rate, unquoted loans, and that the absence of a market price is the reason valuation and manager selection carry so much of the risk
cover ownership, customisation, liquidity, cost and who may invest, and note that retirement-plan platforms still lean toward funds and CITs
describe moving an asset into a new fund backed by new capital while existing LPs choose cash or rollover, and state the structural conflict plainly -- the GP is on both sides of the price
explain borrowing against the whole portfolio, and the core objection -- using leverage to fund distributions creates DPI without a realisation and pushes risk to later years
frame it as a governance question first -- decision speed, staff capacity, private-markets access -- and be honest that the answer depends on board appetite for delegation more than on portfolio size
explain the real difficulty -- OCIO records are not standardised the way manager composites are, and each mandate has a different policy portfolio -- and give the comparison that does work: performance against the client's own policy benchmark, with attribution between allocation and selection
describe the structural conflict honestly and the mitigations -- disclosure, an independent search specialist, walling the advisory team -- without asserting that any particular firm is or is not conflicted
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