Triad Wealth Partners, an institutional RIA that runs a TAMP program and serves as a sub-advisor for independent RIA practitioners, has had a strong run since its founding in 2023. Over about two years, the firm, an affiliate of Triad Partners, grew its AUM to over $1 billion. It now employs over a dozen investment and financial planning professionals.

The firm’s arsenal includes multiple model portfolios and SMAs, as well as investing advice from alternative asset manager BlackRock. But its investment approach has precluded it from participating in some of the most popular trends of the past few years, according to Triad Chief Investment Officer Brent Coggins. It has no allocations to crypto ETFs, largely due to the asset class’s high volatility. It limits its alternatives exposure to hedge funds and helps advisors move clients’ real estate holdings into DSTs. “We are not trying to hit home runs,” Coggins noted. 

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Wealth Management spoke to Coggins about Triad Wealth’s recent move toward greater exposure to international equities, where he sees growth going forward and how the firm plans to help advisors navigate volatility if the price of oil stays above $90 a barrel for the long haul. 

This Q&A has been edited for length, style and clarity.

WealthManagement.com: What is the profile of the clients the advisors you work with serve? Who are your investment strategies geared toward?

Brent Coggins: It really does run the gamut across the spectrum of investable assets. We’ve got primarily mass affluent as our client base, so clients with over $500,000 to $1 million in investable assets. We have several relationships that are far north of that, but our bread and butter is that mass affluent [segment] cresting toward high-net-worth investors.

WM: What are the cornerstones of your investment philosophy?

BC: Within our models, we keep things fairly down the middle. We always strive toward making sure we have global diversification, that we apply professional management, that we keep costs low, and that we are as tax-efficient as possible. We’ve got quite a few models and different options to keep from, both in terms of strategy and intent behind the model portfolio—if it’s growth, if it’s income, if it’s clients who mostly need a tax-efficient mix of the two—we have a lot of tools in our toolkit to be able to execute on that.

Part of that, since we have so many model portfolios that we are managing, is that we intentionally keep tracking error pretty tight. We manage pretty closely to our global equity/U.S. fixed income benchmark. Any trades that you see or any changes we make are pretty benign. We are not trying to hit home runs. 

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WM: We are obviously in a very volatile environment. What are you most worried about? Do you see any opportunities in the market today?

BC: I saw a fascinating stat the other day that showed that for the last 40 years, the S&P 500 had actually done better in years when the price of oil had gone up vs. when the price of oil went down. It makes sense when you think about it. Usually, when you have a demand-driven shock to the price of oil, it’s likely because the economy is doing well. That’s the norm.

This is the exception. We now have a supply-driven shock akin to the 1970s and the oil embargo and the stagflation that resulted there, a little bit of what happened in 2022 as well. So, more than anything, I am looking at the duration that it goes on, and if the price of oil is just going to stay in this elevated $90-plus levels. I know they did a petroleum reserve release. It’s too early to tell what effect it’s going to have. The biggest wild card is just time—the longer this goes on and the longer oil stays above its recent two-year average, the worst it could foreboded for equity market returns.

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That’s another thing we recently looked at. It’s one thing for oil to spike and fall. It’s when you see this long, drawn-out, sustained elevated price in oil, when you see all the spillover effects into supply, into retail, into people curbing consumption. That’s where these could grind to a halt. I don’t think we are there yet, but every day that this conflict goes on, that probability just increases. I can’t put a number on how much it is increasing, I just know it’s going up. So, the way we are coaching our advisors to talk to their clients about it is, “Right now, things seem relatively contained. The stock and bond markets are smart. I know stocks have been weaker for the past few days. If they thought this would be a prolonged conflict, they would probably be a lot weaker than they are now.” We are just not seeing that yet.

WM: For your average mass affluent client portfolio, what are your allocations?

BC: If you think about our tactical portfolios, since we’ve been running them, we’ve always held a structural overweight to U.S. equities. That’s driven by a couple of different factors. Some of them are behavioral—we are pretty much only dealing with U.S.-based investors that want to express a home-country bias. Not bias just for bias’s sake—there are fundamental reasons you should be a little more allocated to the U.S. than international markets. Earnings power is a big reason behind that. Another one would just be thematic. Right now, you look at some of these structural tailwinds driving risk assets, namely AI. In our view, most of the major players and most major beneficiaries, both on the supply side and on the demand side, [are in the U.S.]

Some of the other constituents—the S&P 500, financials—we view them as potentially huge beneficiaries of the rollout of AI. So, across behavioral, fundamental and thematic factors, we believe in and maintain that U.S. equity overweight.

We recently reduced that a little bit. We’ve gotten a little bit closer to a benchmark in our U.S./international mix. We are not exactly calling a recession right now. We want to introduce a little more cyclicality, maybe a little more of a value tilt in the portfolio. So, that’s a very recent change that we’ve made.

In terms of private assets, our business is maybe a little unique in that we are mostly sub-advising for advisors and financial planners who not only utilize traditional wealth management, but are also insurance agents, especially fixed index annuities. These are things that have liquidity elements to them, but contracts aren’t always the most liquid things in the world. So, my team and I are laser-focused on ensuring that, as well as we can, we have daily liquidity in our portfolios. We have not introduced any private assets aside from a few more planning-focused alternative strategies, particularly in real estate.

Most of what we allocate to is ETFs, individual stocks and mutual funds. I view alternatives a little differently. Within these walls, it’s not private equity, venture capital, private credit or things like that. We are also very well-known for the use of structured products, and we use that as our alternative proxy.

This may be a little hypocritical to what I just said, but we have been utilizing a little bit more in the way of liquid alternatives, so hedge funds. Specifically, market-neutral strategies and multi-strategies. With how markets have been reacting, 2026 has a lot of implied and explicit volatility. We view liquid alts as a way to take advantage of that volatility and capture alpha when traditional assets may not. 

WM: In terms of your international allocations, which markets are you in and what is your reasoning?

BC: Our primary reason for at least maintaining our allocation there is stronger valuations than what we get in the U.S., and the differences in terms of income. The dividend yield on developed markets is more than twice that of U.S. markets. Also, it’s a bit of a currency hedge. When you look at the dollar, historically, it ebbs and flows in terms of strength and weakness, and we believe it’s just coming out of one of its longest periods of relative strength, especially to developed market currencies like the yen or the British pound. So, capturing developed market exposure as a U.S. investor when we may be on the cusp of a season of dollar weakness is a strong way to generate some outperformance.

Within emerging markets, they’ve had two interesting super cycles going on. They are obviously at the forefront of a lot of this infrastructure buildout on the supply side, especially around semiconductors. But also, they are in a traditional commodities super cycle that we may be experiencing with the electrification of the world. You’ve seen this run-off in precious metals, agriculture. Emerging markets tend to benefit when there is a commodities super cycle. We feel like we may be on the cusp of another one of those alongside the AI play.

So, we allocated more to developed markets for valuations and currency, and to emerging markets as more of a thematic play.

WM: How often do you tweak the allocations in these models?

BC: Not that frequently. We want to rebalance and make trade updates four or five times a year at most. It’s relatively infrequent that we will introduce a trade. We are going through one right now that is, like I said, about right-sizing that U.S./international tilt that we’ve had for a couple of years. We are not looking to be a high-frequency shop; we are looking to be uber tactical.

And we also leverage a partner for a lot of this. Yes, we do have a suite of model portfolios here at Triad Wealth, but we have also engaged with third-party investment consultants, most predominantly BlackRock to assist with our model portfolio management. A lot of the trade updates you see are a combination of us and the global team at BlackRock.

WM: What is your selection process for the managers you will invest with?

BC: We have a few key criteria around the duration of the management in place, the AUM, the liquidity. We are looking for high value and low cost, in that order. We do have what could be considered maybe more expensive bonds within our portfolios, but they are there because we create a lot of value from introducing those into our allocations. The liquid alts are a prime example of that.

And then we focus on all the people, the philosophy, the process, the performance. Just making sure that we are comfortable being able to explain it to clients and that it’s rational on how this strategy is constructed, how it’s being run and where it fits in a portfolio.

We keep it simple, but I always come back to the fact that we focus on value first. How valuable is this allocation, this manager, and this approach? We don’t have a lot of active management within our model portfolios. A lot of what we do is passive and factor-based, as you can see in our allocations. Most of the active stuff within our models is in the more inefficient markets—mostly fixed income, alternatives, the hedge funds I mentioned and every once in a while, international. That’s where we believe you can get value, there is more dispersion, by going with an active manager.

WM: You mentioned at the start that you are focused on being as tax-efficient as possible. What are some ways you try to achieve that goal?

BC: The biggest tool we use there is direct indexing. These are just tax-managed SMAs. We have a couple of partners there who are looking for loss-harvesting opportunities daily. We really coach our advisors on the concept of asset location, as much as asset allocation, meaning that once you go through the risk tolerance exercise with your client and engage how much of their overall financial picture needs to be in growth assets vs. income or protective assets, where would growth make the most sense? Well, it’s most likely the taxable account because within that you could tap into this added benefit of harvesting losses in down markets.

We are big proponents of direct indexing. We think it makes a ton of sense for investors who have non-qualified assets to plug into one of those SMAs. The other piece of it gets back to our partnership with BlackRock. Every model portfolio that we run with them has automated tax loss harvesting built into it.

A third piece of how we manage things more tax efficiently is the primary focus on ETFs as opposed to mutual funds. We are custodial here at Triad Wealth, ETFs are just cleaner from that perspective, it’s a lot easier for our trade desk to transact on that. They are also just inherently more tax-efficient than other investment wrappers.