Founder & Editor @ModusNewsletter, weekly independent journalism for family-office professionals. Prev @iimag. Send tips & quips: michael.thrasher@modus.news
Articles by Michael Thrasher
A New Family-Office Tech Map: Nearly 100 Companies and More Categories
A darkened, pixelated version of the Modus Family Office Technology Map. Illustration by Modus. Like the recently improved Modus Family Office Allocation Index, the Modus Family Office Technology Map badly needed an update. That process began in earnest this week. The market map of software and service providers used by single-family offices now matches Modus’s refreshed brand, has more categories, and includes dozens of added companies.
Texas Family Office Settles Case Against Its Former CIO
The settlement agreement between Jean Christine Thompson, Thompson Petroleum Corporation, Michael Mann, and Anchor Capital. Illustration by Modus. An inheritor of an oil and gas fortune and her family office in Texas have settled a lawsuit against their former chief investment officer, ending a rare public court battle between the two.
Overhauled: The Modus Family Office Allocation Index
A pixelated image of the Modus Family Office Allocation Index. Illustration by Modus. This week’s newsletter is late and short because I was traveling and have been sick. The original journalism you expect will resume next week. The Modus Family Office Allocation Index finally got the overhaul it needed. The index was the first and only of its kind when it was first published a year ago.
There Are 65,000 Centimillionaires. Where Are All the Family Offices?
A silhouette of the U.S. with dollar signs across it. Illustration by Modus. This week, ESPN and a longtime broadcaster signed a deal that passionate armchair fans will dream about. Joe Buck, the “Monday Night Football” commentator, agreed to a six-year extension for $108 million. It's a nice pay bump; his previous contract, ending after this season, was for five years and $75 million. If he didn’t have one already, surely Buck will start his own family office now, right?
A new political season
In some cases, resignations were forced as councillors simultaneously won mayoral contests; in others, candidates were disqualified for being elected to authorities by whom they were employed, or being subsequently found to be otherwise ineligible. The latter was the case in the recent Frome West by-election in Somerset. The Green share of the vote was marginally down this time, on a much lower turnout, but nonetheless the seat was retained quite comfortably. The Greens also made two gains.
New Modus Loading...
Hello readers, A few weeks have passed since the previous Modus newsletter. We had a tragic death in my family and I haven't been working much. Thank you to everyone for the many kind messages and support. I'm excited to share that Modus will be even better going forward. Next week, if all goes according to plan, Modus is launching a new website, and you'll notice refinements to the brand everywhere you see it.
first magazine for councillors
Nine vacancies arose because of the requirement that councillors elected to the expanded Welsh Senedd should vacate their seat. A further five contests were in seats won by the Green Party last May, after winning candidates fell foul of the rules governing eligibility. Reform UK continues to have appeal among local voters, with six gains, three each from Labour and Independents.
Does AI Need a Dedicated Line Item at the Family Office?
In 2025, wealth management firms continued to experiment with and leverage artificial intelligence, and the total costs associated with it were not readily clear. Among dozens of top firms representing trillions of dollars of wealth surveyed by F2 Strategy, a consultant to wealth and asset managers and family offices, only 14% had a dedicated line item for AI in their technology budgets. That suddenly changed this year.
iPaladin Gets a New Patent and a Favorable Court Ruling in Its Lawsuit Against Orca
The 2026 US Open Tennis Championships are only a month away—do you have your seat yet? Privée Odyssey, a private brokerage for unique goods, services and experiences, helps clients make the tournament unforgettable every year. Privée is a white-glove point of contact for a distinct network and, with the utmost discretion, works with ultra-wealthy individuals, their family offices and financial advisors.
Casey Whalen Leaves Lazard for BDT & MSD
Privée Odyssey, a private brokerage for unique experiences, services and goods, is helping a client who can no longer attend the World Cup final sell access to their suite. Privée works directly with ultra-wealthy individuals and often their family offices and financial advisors; it has a distinct network and operates with the utmost discretion.
The New Arch CTO Has an Explicit Mandate: Unlock AI Insights for Its Customers
Arch, a software used by big banks, wealth management firms and single-family offices to manage their private investments, named Keith Soura its new chief technology officer this week and his primary goal is one that is proliferating in the industry: to use artificial intelligence to turn reams of information into insights for customers.
Multi-party politics merry-go-round
Reform UK gained three seats from the Conservatives, but two others moved in the opposite direction. The Liberal Democrats and Greens each inflicted defeat on the Conservatives, but the outcomes of those contests point to local rather than national circumstance. More parties are contesting local elections, but the withdrawal of Independents is also affecting the distribution of electoral support.
Novel Insurance Policy for Nefarious Trustees Hits the Market
The jig was up for Edward Miller. In 2014, the then 58-year-old attorney in New York was named the trustee of a trust belonging to someone known only as “M.P.” in court documents. Inside the trust were real estate assets, including a commercial building in New Canaan, Connecticut, that M.P. instructed Miller to manage. With his new legal authority, Miller did as he was told, collected rent from tenants, oversaw the building's maintenance, paid bills, and distributed funds accordingly.
A Surge in New Family Offices—Fueled by Mega IPOs—Will Spark a Total Software War
The SpaceX IPO and the anticipated initial public offerings of Anthropic and OpenAI will make thousands of their employees and investors dramatically wealthier, leading to a surge in new single-family offices in the near future, and intensifying the already fierce competition among software companies that court them as customers. For the venture- and private-equity-backed software companies, the opportunity to grow is greater, but the stakes are higher, founders, executives and consultants say.
A Family-Office Website Has a New Mystery Operator
Programming note: Today’s newsletter is short because I was out of the office for much of this week. New subscribers—welcome! Check out the Modus newsletter archive, technology map and allocation index. And reply to this email to say hello, send tips, and share what you want to read more journalism about.
A Paradox at Goldman Sachs’s Apex Family Office Symposium
Tuesday this week, 200 single-family offices gathered for the annual Goldman Sachs Apex Global Family Office Symposium, the one-day gathering at the bank’s headquarters in New York. It is always a hot ticket because, in addition to each other, family offices get to hear from and mingle with sought-after speakers and bank leaders, including Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon.
A new electoral politics
Before the 2025 local contests, Conservative and Labour councillors together represented some 70 per cent of local electors. Two electoral cycles later, that figure has plunged to less than 45 per cent. Reform UK, whose councillors could once be numbered on the fingers of one hand, now represent nearly 20 per cent of the electorate. There is a similarly stark fragmentation at local authority level.
Allocation Alterations, Dollar Fears and Fewer Direct Investments: The Aberrant Findings in UBS’s 2026 Global Family Office Report
Worries about geopolitics, the solvency of the United States and the strength of its currency, and missing out on the returns of rising markets have single-family offices acting unusually. Half of the wealthiest private investors think we’re headed toward harder times, and more of them than ever before are planning changes to their strategic asset allocations, yet portfolios generally remain “risk-on,” according to UBS’s 2026 Global Family Office Report.
Addepar’s AI Is Already a Hit. The Cost Will Get Sorted Out Later.
Addison, Addepar’s own artificial intelligence tool that debuted in March, is already a hit, leaders at the software company said Thursday at its annual AddeConf gathering in New York City. Now, the firm is focused on improving Addison’s capabilities, creating AI agents and making it central to operations at family offices, institutional investors and wealth management firms. How the costs associated with that are shared will be determined later.
Chicago Booth’s Family-Office Ambitions
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business took steps this week toward its goal of becoming the preeminent academic institution for single-family offices. On Monday, the Booth School appointed Robert A. Stover Jr. as the inaugural executive director of its Family Office Initiative, an effort started in 2024 to provide more education, research, and networking opportunities to current and future leaders at family offices.
Rallings & Thrasher: How Labour fell to historic defeat
Reform almost doubled the number of seats it captured last year while the Green party made a net gain of 440 seats, write psephologists Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher. The local election results provide further evidence of party system fragmentation as the two main parties struggle against challengers from across the political spectrum. After 11.4 million votes were counted, the combined seat totals for Labour and Conservative fell short of the number acquired by Reform and the Greens.
Two Skills That Could Land You That Family-Office Job
The gap between single-family offices hiring and the pool of qualified job candidates is wide and hard to close. But the finance professionals with contrasting and increasingly important skills will stick out in the crowd.
Labour Party on course to suffer one of its worst-ever electoral defeats
The extent of Labour's eventual losses will not be explained away by simply asserting all governments experience setbacks at the parliamentary mid-term. Labour's argument that many of its supporters stayed at home sits uneasily with the fact that turnout has increased. The big gainers are Reform, once again. Follow our live election coverage here Having devastated the Conservatives last year, Reform UK has marched into Labour's heartland areas and inflicted heavy losses.
Labour Party on course to suffer one of its worst-ever electoral defeats
The extent of Labour's eventual losses will not be explained away by simply asserting all governments experience setbacks at the parliamentary mid-term. Labour's argument that many of its supporters stayed at home sits uneasily with the fact that turnout has increased. The big gainers are Reform, once again. Follow our live election coverage here Having devastated the Conservatives last year, Reform UK has marched into Labour's heartland areas and inflicted heavy losses.
How to follow the election results - an expert guide
The circumstances that saw both main parties take heavy seat losses in the May 2025 county council elections continue. Current polling shows a collapse in support for both Labour and the Conservatives, relative to 2021 and 2022 when most of the council seats up this time were last contested. Council by-elections too show Labour defeated in almost four out of every five seats, with the Conservatives doing little better, losing two in three vacancies.
Justin Baer Spent Years Reporting on Fidelity Investments. A Book Became Overdue.
Note to subscribers: Modus occasionally sends newsletters in addition to its weekly Friday dispatch. When you think of Fidelity Investments, what comes to mind first? For some, it might still be Gerald Tsai Jr. or Peter Lynch, the firm’s star portfolio managers of the past. To others, Fidelity is a custodian, a vital partner to their own investment firm.
Back in a CIO Seat, What Stamp Will Beata Kirr Put on Northern Trust’s Global Family Office?
You quit your job at a hedge fund in 2010 to start Santangel's Review. Why? I noticed a gap in the market that I couldn't stop thinking about: the best investors are sometimes the ones least focused on raising capital, meaning they end up running small, under-the-radar funds that allocators never hear about. At the same time, family offices, endowments, and foundations are drowning in pitches from funds that are often better at marketing than investing.
Multi-party politics makes results difficult to call
The fact that 63 of 136 councils have all-out elections also makes it more likely that new leadership teams could emerge. As in 2025, both Labour and the Conservatives could lose seats and council control, with a range of parties (and Independents) on both the left and right poised to take advantage.
Winners and losers
The first quarter of 2026 reveals a new record – 68 per cent were lost with all parties featuring among the winners and losers. Labour and the Conservative are bearing the brunt of losses as the two-party establishment erodes. Since last May’s local elections, Labour has lost almost eight in 10 of its by-election defences; the Conservatives are faring better but still losing two in every three of theirs.
A New Foundation Has One Mission: Close The Yawning Cybersecurity Gap at Family Offices
When Ynez Arce arrived to work at her first single-family office in 2007, there wasn’t much talk about ransomware and spear phishing. At the time, most people had email and were familiar with worms, viruses and hacks sometimes done only for bragging rights in the dark corners of the internet. But those things didn’t seem to happen often, including at family offices.
A Lesson for Single-Family Offices From Wealth Management Firms: Discipline
Programming note: This week’s newsletter is short because I’m on vacation. Modus will be back to normal next Friday. The shortcomings of private wealth management firms are part of the tribal lore of single-family offices. After all, that’s why most offices exist in the first place: to meet genuine needs—and perhaps satisfy some unreasonable wants—that commercial organizations can’t or won’t. While family offices pooh-pooh wealth management firms, they can still learn at least one lesson from them.
A Family-Office Recruiter’s AI Experiment Has Not Gone As Planned
After a decade leading Palo Alto Staffing, an executive search firm in Silicon Valley, David Chie decided in 2024 to start a new company alongside it called Maple Drive, an “AI-first” platform that would be better for recruiters, candidates and clients alike.
The Funeral Home of New York's Celebrities and Ultrarich Has a Message for Family Offices
It’s 8 a.m., and the principal of your family office doesn’t come down for breakfast or show up at work. The worst has happened; they died unexpectedly. What do you do? That’s the first question that William Villanova, president of Frank E. Campbell, the New York City funeral home favored for a century by celebrities and the ultrawealthy, asks when he meets with people from a family office. And after he asks them, there is often a long, uncomfortable pause. They don’t know the answer.
The Investment Bank Hiring Family-Office ‘Apprentices’
Over the past 20 years of his investment banking career, including nearly a decade at J.P. Morgan, Nader Afshar has seen progressive specialization. Groups of bankers focused on one sector have grown, been split into more subsectors, and further divided into product experts and sub-product experts. The evolution might be beneficial to clients and banks alike, but once bankers start down their chosen—or designated—path, they, “unfortunately, just see part of the whole equation,” Afshar told Modus.
Goldman Sachs’ Top Family-Office Whisperer Leaves Apex Group for Ayco
Sara Naison-Tarajano, the Goldman Sachs partner who formalized and led Apex, the group of investment bankers dedicated to large single-family offices, has a new job at the bank.
Comparing retention rates
Reform took control of Durham County Council at last May’s elections, winning 65 seats with an overall vote share of 37 per cent. Shortly afterwards, it faced by-elections, following resignations of two of its newly elected councillors. The first seat was lost to the Liberal Democrats, but the other was held. Following another resignation, Reform selected Theo Bell as its candidate this time, with Labour returning to Julie Griffiths, the defeated councillor last time.
In the Epstein Files, a Pointed Email About How Family Offices Invest
In 2024, Deloitte published what remains the most-cited report on single-family offices. From 47 pages of research, the consultancy highlighted eyebrow-raising estimates: There were 8,030 family offices worldwide, up from roughly 6,130 in 2019, and there would be more than 10,720 by 2030. The firm also estimated at the time that offices managed a total of $3.1 trillion in assets and projected that number would reach $5.4 trillion by 2030.
The Next Chapter of Tamarind Learning
Tamarind Learning, the online education platform affiliated with the family-office consultancy Tamarind Partners, is offering a limited number of lifetime subscriptions and has begun raising a $5 million round of capital to continue its growth and develop an artificial intelligence platform. In 2006, Kirby Rosplock’s wealthy family sold the gargantuan Florida ranch they had owned and operated for nearly a century, and she and her husband founded Tamarind Partners.
Addepar Releases Its AI Platform ‘Addison’ to All Users
Every SaaS company is rushing to bolt on AI features. But an AI layer on top of a static system of record is still a static system of record. The private markets are driven by complex reasoning that legacy platforms were never designed to capture: Why you sized that position differently What made those terms acceptable Why you chose one manager over another That institutional knowledge is your edge. And it’s been leaking through the cracks of disconnected tools for years.
Is the Modus Family Office Tech Map Doomed?
Liquidity forecasting, finally built for complex portfolios like yours. Why are family offices still playing guessing games with liquidity risk? Unlimited.ai’s Liquidity Modeling tool gives investors clear answers to the most important questions about their portfolio liquidity—all in one interactive dashboard.
We are in a new era of multi-party politics
This is a parliamentary by-election result for the ages, one that sets the tone for its time. It is the first by-election gain by the Greens at the 87th time of asking. Only once before has the party polled above a tenth of the vote let alone gained a seat. Follow live - politics latest Hannah Spencer's 40.7% share of the vote is 27.5 percentage points higher than the party polled at the last general election.
The Access Myth and Everything Else John Samuels Must Explain to Family Offices
The private markets are driven by context that never gets captured. The complex reasoning behind critical decisions — why you sized that position differently, what made those terms acceptable, why one team was preferable to another — fades into the inbox abyss once an investment is made. And in an era of increasing talent mobility, institutional knowledge has become institutional risk. Patchworks of single-point solutions that don’t communicate context produce risks you no longer have to tolerate.
Former BlueMountain Exec Brings Allposit, His Personal Family-Office Software, to Market
Stephen Siderow, the former president and co-founder of BlueMountain Capital Management, the once high-flying, multibillion-dollar hedge fund that became renowned for a huge winning bet related to JPMorgan Chase’s London Whale, has good investment problems. Even as BlueMountain’s performance faltered during the 2010s, the firm made money, and Siderow was a beneficiary.
Multiple challengers affecting election outcomes
A key feature of last year was multiple challengers; in more than a third of cases, ballot papers listed between six and eight candidates. The average percentage of vote share required to win a seat dropped to just 44 per cent, and more than a handful of seats saw the winner poll less than three in 10 votes. Results were often close.
Family Office Access, a Database With Thousands of Professionals, Sells to ISS Market Intelligence
ISS Market Intelligence, a company with data, analytics, insights, media, and events businesses, announced this week that it acquired Family Office Access, a database of thousands of professionals working at single-family offices, multifamily offices, private foundations, and wealth managers. The two companies reached an agreement in 2025, and the all-cash deal closed this month. No other terms were disclosed.
In J.P. Morgan’s Latest Family-Office Report, a 'Delta' Between Objectives and Actions
Streamline Your FinTech Evaluation Process with Dynamo's Due Diligence Checklist Selecting the right FinTech provider for your alternative investments can be overwhelming. Dynamo Software's Due Diligence Checklist simplifies the process by highlighting the five essential areas to evaluate: company history, system compatibility, pricing, security, and client support. This comprehensive guide ensures you ask the right questions and make informed decisions in 2026.
The (European) Family Offices Paying CIOs the Most
Streamline Your FinTech Evaluation Process with Dynamo's Due Diligence Checklist Selecting the right FinTech provider for your alternative investments can be overwhelming. Dynamo Software's Due Diligence Checklist simplifies the process by highlighting the five essential areas to evaluate: company history, system compatibility, pricing, security, and client support. This comprehensive guide ensures you ask the right questions and make informed decisions in 2026.
The Family Offices Paying CIOs the Most
Investment executives at single-family offices are all handsomely paid. But the total compensation for chief investment officers at certain offices is especially lucrative, a new report shows.
Alumni Ventures Is Teaching Future Family-Office Leaders Startup Investing
Alumni Ventures, one of the most active venture capital firms, with about 1,400 portfolio companies and $1.4 billion in assets under management, has created a program to teach startup investing to future leaders of family offices. The program, called NextGen Family Office, is designed to help younger generations of ultrawealthy families learn and build confidence in venture investing by doing it.
Undermining the established order
Each of the final three quarters of the year saw more seats change party control than were held. This level of volatility has only been recorded nine times, and never before over such a long sequence. Seat turnover in the final quarter reached 62 per cent, matching the previous record set between January-March 1986. The latest contests further underline Reform UK’s capacity to undermine the established order as the party took seats from Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and Independents.
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