Partners in Wealth Preservation

  • Maximizing Your Returns
  • Reining in Risk
  • Capitalizing on Opportunity

The markets have been on a remarkable rise.

So has risk. So has volatility.

You must prepare for what comes next.

Partners in Wealth Preservation

The markets have been on a remarkable rise. So has risk.
So has volatility. You must prepare for what comes next.

The markets have been on a remarkable rise.

So has risk. So has volatility.

You must prepare for what comes next.

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What We Do

Building your wealth takes patience, perspective, discipline and wisdom.

Preserving your wealth requires that and more: poise under pressure, bulletproof portfolio protection, and sage advice on what to do in all situations—and what not to do.

Prattes Wealth Partners is an SEC Registered Investment Advisory Firm in Newport Beach, Calif. We specialize in helping athletes, entrepreneurs, and executives build and protect wealth that can last them a lifetime and beyond. We make you our partner in constructing the strategy for growing your personal fortune and securing it against the volatility and the “unknown unknowns” of these hyperactive markets.

We ensure you are knowledgeable, educated on the issues, and involved in all key investing decisions—and then we do it all for you. So you can get back to business and doing what you do best.

Investing Philosophy

Money wants to grow. That’s why business exists. It is why we exist, too. 

We specialize in building and protecting your wealth by crafting a customized portfolio of traditional and alternative investment strategies, tailored to your life goals and your comfort level for taking on risk. Investors today are awash in too much information, and too often it comes from dubious or slanted sources. The challenge is to process, analyze, and interpret the vast amounts of data and insights coming in, and to separate the smart and reliable from the wild and crazy—and then act on it.
We combine our insights with best-of-breed advice from some of the smartest minds in hedge funds, private equity, family offices, and financial intelligence. To help you insulate your wealth against sudden market disruptions, and use smart tools and hedges to turn volatility into opportunity. Prattes Wealth is guided by three overarching investment principles: Be patient and disciplined and take a long-term view. Seek growth and balance in your portfolio, and in your life. And rein in risk, so as to pre-empt it to your benefit. Trees don’t grow to the sky, the old Wall Street adage says. The next phases of investing will be more difficult, more volatile, more unpredictable, compounded by he economic disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic. This is when our clients can benefit the most from our advice and our connections to rare investment situations for multiplying their returns on assets as yet undiscovered by other investors Quality companies and investments will be even more important; so will free cash flow and efficient uses of capital. Even in this tougher environment, opportunity abounds. The chances for dramatic upside will be compelling.

Services

Beyond the Basics

When your wealth reaches the next level, we go beyond the basics to focus on market-beating returns and preservation and protection. Our Seven Protective Services (SPS) include: 

When your wealth reaches the next level, we go beyond the basics to focus on market-beating returns and preservation and protection.
Our Seven Protective Services (SPS) include: 

Bulletproofing your portfolio

We start with a top-to-bottom inventory of your assets, assessing risk and diversification, and help you adjust as needed.

Assessing the “risk of risk”

The world feels more unpredictable and divisive. Unanticipated, risk can turn into crisis, suddenly and ferociously. We help you get out in front of risk—and turn it to your advantage.

Customizing your hedges

We tap proven and tested hedge fund managers to provide customized hedging that can balance your best-case investments with things what “zig” when the market “zags.”

Spotting early opportunities

We tap our network of independent sponsors, family offices and private fund managers to invest in category-dominating companies in software, technology, and consumer goods which can provide superior returns with little or zero correlation to the stock market.

Rebalancing for protection

Volatile markets can create a lopsided portfolio with too much exposure to stocks or other assets. We provide constant monitoring and correction.

Avoiding rash decisions

When fear fills the markets, the human response is to sell. At the worst time. We provide calm reassurance and contextual counsel to help you navigate the turmoil. And you can call on us 24/7.

Blocking you from bad investments

The temptation is to invest in people you know. Of a thousand startups that get venture capital, only one becomes a hit. The chance that your brother-in-law knows of one is almost zero. We help you say no, graciously.

Helping you spend smarter

Spending is the opposite of investing. Once you spend it, it is gone. When you invest it, it can grow forever. We provide Spartan counsel: buy two homes, at most, and two cars; avoid giving lavish gifts to friends and family.

Full List of Services

The Personal Touch

We provide you with personalized
service, individual attention, and
customized advice and insights.

You get the human touch from someone who knows you well, rather than being greeted by an automated voice-mail menu at a giant Wall Street bank. For PWP founder Jason Prattes, the calls come in the middle of the night. In early 2009 amid a global meltdown, he advised a frightened client to avoid selling with his retirement account down 50%. The client’s 401(k) rebounded 60% in the ensuing months. A similar pattern emerged in the pandemic meltdown of March 2020.

Running Lean

We take pride in our Spartan roots (our founder is Greek American). We run lean to the benefit of our clients. We also tap the best outside advice and investment opportunities from an array of unrelated sources, picking and choosing among various strategies from our circle of portfolio managers. Our loyalty is to our clients rather than to any particular viewpoint. One of our advisors is highly sophisticated in creating bespoke hedges to protect your portfolio against dramatic market plunges. When other investors are losing a lot more, you can lose less—or even turn a profit. We also work with the designer of counterweight hedges that go up in value when the markets begin a slow, steady slide. The opportunities are abundant, the choices endless. The key is to have a trusted, sage advisor with perspective, experience, and a fresh eye, who can assess the risks and their potential payoff. This is our strong suit.

Executive Team

Jason Prattes

President and Co-Chief Investment Officer

Jason Prattes, founder and President of Prattes Wealth Partners, has spent 20 years advising clients in how to create, grow, and safeguard their rising wealth. He is guided by three investing principles: 1.) Be patient. Over the long term, once your portfolio is set, the less you do and the fewer changes you make, the better your results. 2.) Pre-empt risk. Rather than something to be avoided, risk can be evaluated, contained, and pre-empted to your benefit. 3.) Seek balance. In your portfolio (in assets, diversification, hedges, and exposure to market crashes); and in your life (in work, family and freedom).

An Intense Desire to Win

He is driven by an intense desire to win, whether in investing, serving clients, or playing as a scratch golfer in a golf tournament.  

Golf was his strongest sport as a high school athlete who also played football, baseball, basketball and soccer. The competitive streak in him grew when he earned a double-major degrees in economics with finance and public policy at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. 

His zeal for winning intensified as he went to work for merchant banks, spotting acquisition opportunities for corporate clients, and then entered the fiercely competitive software industry. 

When Jason joined National Retirement Partners in 2002, he was employee #3. He recruited advisors and learned the business—fund monitoring, Modern Portfolio Theory, how to analyze and scrutinize fund managers in a deeper way.

The Power of Compounding

Once a year, he would meet on-site for a full day of one-on-one sessions with the employees of a big client he still serves to this day. 

He marveled at how much wealth they had been able to build up. 

“All these people, just by putting in a little money every two weeks through their paychecks, just by dollar-averaging, they had a very good performance,” he says.  

Gradually, it occurred to him that too many wealth managers at big Wall Street houses fail to recognize the upside of patience, discipline, and slow-and-steady. 

“They try to do too much. They move around money too much. They think they are smarter than they are. And they don’t know how to analyze risk, what to look for,” he says.  

At the same time, he saw that some clients were falling short of their investment potential. They were playing it too safe, taking on too little risk. So, he began looking for a better way.

The company he helped build, NRP, got acquired by LPL Financial, a publicly traded company in 2010. Three years later he formed what is now Prattes Wealth Partners.

Warrior Investing

Jason links his competitive drive to his Greek American heritage. He grew up in Capistrano Beach, Calif. in a large, extended family. 

Holiday celebrations were crowded affairs, drawing aunts, uncles, and cousins by the dozens.  

He was baptized as a one-year-old in the local Greek Orthodox Church, and 35 years later he was married there. He is the father of three daughters (with a fourth due in early 2022). 

“For thousands of years, Greeks were warriors,” Jason says. “Greeks have grit. They work very hard, and they grind hard to accomplish something. I fall into that category.”

Investing for clients, he says, “works the same way.”

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ANDY PREIKSCHAT

Co-Chief Investment Officer

Imagine what it is like managing the wealth of one of the richest men in the world. That was the first investment job held by Andy Preikschat, who served as employee #5 in the Family Office of Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft. The year was 1998, and Andy, who grew up in Seattle as the oldest of three sons, had recently graduated near the top of his class at Stanford University with a bachelor’s in management science and engineering. In his job, he was tasked with selling $5 billion in Bill’s Microsoft founder stock. Back in those days, Andy did it over the phone, reinvesting the proceeds in media and cable companies, among other things. Preikschat (pronounced “PRYK-shat”), who is a CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst), went on to join SoundView Technology Group, where he focused on consumer systems stocks, like Apple.

Then he moved to Los Angeles, his hometown for the past 20 years, to manage the portfolio of a long/short small-cap investment fund. The fund doubled investors’ money in two years.

Now, as chief investment officer for Prattes Wealth Partners, Andy searches off the beaten path for private investments in companies, countries, and industries that are still affordable compared with record-high prices in the U.S. stock market.

Three “filters” guide his search: look for firms that are #1 category leaders in their vertical business or geographic market; with high growth potential; and, lastly, with strong management.

In less developed regions overseas, a rich untapped market lies in upgrading businesses for B2B (business-to-business) digital capabilities, he says.

“It’s like the U.S. in the Nineties.” He looks in faraway places for private software companies that promise at least a ten-fold return in five years.

In early 2021, he invested funds to buy a significant stake in a B2B software company that helps digitize retail stores in Pakistan. The company has digitized 35,000 retail stores in one year.

The company’s value started at $10 million, and in less than a year it is up nine-fold to $90 million. It may become Pakistan’s first unicorn.  

Elsewhere, he has made client investments in the #1 peer-to-peer marketplace for motorcycle rentals and has completed a 100% buyout of a top-20 RV dealership in California.

“We have to look longer and harder now to find undervalued businesses with untapped growth potential,” he says, “but the rewards for those efforts can still be special.”

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LARRY YU

Senior Vice President, Chief Compliance Officer

Containing risk and protecting clients in a market plunge are job priorities for Larry Yu, vice president of Prattes Wealth. Larry grew up in Orange County, then graduated in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and spent the first seven years of his financial services career in San Francisco. He worked in private wealth management for Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley and handled clients with accounts of $10 million or more. He was impressed by the riches they reaped from stock options, and learned the best ways to manage options exercises, minimize taxes, and invest the proceeds. When he joined Prattes Wealth, the clientele shifted from high-net-worth people with long-term earnings to professional athletes with shorter careers and a lower appetite for risk.

Thus, he focused on preserving their wealth and growing it to make it last. He partners with banks to design custom “structured products” with built-in downside protection for specific clients.

They are based on a mix of bonds, options and futures (puts and calls), and ETFs for stock indexes such as the Russell 2000, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq.

The protective vehicles pay out a reliable, regular stream of consistent distributions of profits and dividends every three months. 

More importantly, if the stock market falls as much as 10%, the structured products hold on to their value, securing and preserving clients’ capital while other investors worry.

“We’re still sleeping at night when other financial advisors might not be,” he says.

At Prattes Wealth, Larry has developed a flexible and highly adaptive approach to investing, adjusting and making changes from week to week when necessary.

Especially for athletes, building trust in investing is paramount and painstaking. In daily conversations with clients, he encourages them to get deeply involved and glance at their accounts every morning, or at least once a week.

In client relations, he adds, “As cheesy as it may sound, we believe in transparency and honesty. And no surprises.”

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ANN P. CHEN

Director, Investment research

When investors look at fund performance, they focus mainly on two things: how much did the fund rise or fall in the past year, and how much can it grow in the year ahead? Ann Chen goes deeper. She scrutinizes a fund’s composition and churn, its Sharpe ratio and exposure to volatility and risk, the expense ratio for fees, its performance vs. peers, and short-term and long-term track records that reveal whether a stellar rise was a fluke or a habit. She became fascinated with investing as a young girl growing up in San Francisco, the youngest of four children. Her earliest memories of stock picking included family lore about her grandfather’s investment in Standard Oil in the 1940s, which he held for decades as the company grew into BP Amoco. By the time she was 13 years old, her parents had opened her first DRIP account (Dividend Reinvestment Investment Plan), and she started preparing her own tax returns. At age 22, she bought her first stock, Intel, investing her savings from her first summer job.

As Senior Fund Analyst at PWP, Ann specializes in fund assessment and selection, examining why funds perform the way they do and what drives their outperformance. 

One surprise: just how important the human factor is in the equation. “I’ve seen funds grow astronomically because of strong and consistent performance, but if that fund stays true to its style, then it’s a keeper. It has a lot to do with the portfolio managers,” she says.

Before joining PWP, she worked in Silicon Valley as a Pension Investment Analyst for Hewlett-Packard, after serving as a portfolio manager for Newport Pacific Management, analyzing investment opportunities in the Asian region.

Ann Chen graduated with a bachelor’s in economics and finance from the Wharton School, and she is a Chartered Financial Analyst.

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Our Clients

Senior Executives

Climbing the corporate career ladder and performing at the highest level is an all-consuming challenge, leaving little time to manage your own your portfolio. Prattes Wealth helps executive clients reinvest the multimillion-dollar windfalls from their stock-option plans to diversify their range of investments. Sophisticated investment vehicles can let you borrow against future options exercises to invest now in other areas, expanding your exposure to alternative assets that can offer higher growth and reduce risk.

Entrepreneurs

At PWP, we recognize the hard work, sacrifice, and commitment it takes to build your business from scratch. Entreprenuers are heroes of innovation, harnessing the profit motive and the faith of angel investors to devise new products and services that make the world a better place. Right now, the next generation of future billionaires is reinventing business. The same hustle, disruptive focus, and innovative thinking they deploy in growing their companies also must be applied to their investments. We help you get there, searching out attractive, stable options for growing and securing your wealth. You pursue your passion. We preserve your legacy.

Professional Athletes

Athletes share a winning attitude and a commitment to excellence, leveraging hard work, sacrifice and discipline to get to the top of their game. At PWP, we have special insight into their financial needs and opportunities. Your sports career can generate incredible wealth in a short time, especially if you start investing early in your career. The younger you are, the more risk you can take on, and the more you can afford to invest with a long-term view.

Our offerings are:

HOLISTIC. We take time to comprehend your comfort level with risk and the broader concerns of the pro athlete. EASILY ACCESSIBLE. For selected individuals, we can bypass our minimum requirement. COLLABORATIVE. We are transparent in every way and communicate with you in a language you understand. BUILT ON PERFORMANCE. We take the time to understand your specific financial needs, educating you every step of the way.
An estimated 80% of NFL players end up going bankrupt several years after retiring. We arm our clients with education, information, and options to help them to make smarter, safer decisions and take a greater role in their own finances and investing. We help you protect yourself.

Our offerings are

HOLISTIC

We take time to comprehend your comfort level with risk and the broader concerns of the pro athlete.

EASILY ACCESSIBLE

For selected individuals, we can bypass our minimum requirement.

COLLABORATIVE

For selected individuals, we can bypass our minimum requirement.

BUILT ON PERFORMANCE

We take the time to understand your specific financial needs, educating you every step of the way.

An estimated 80% of NFL players end up going bankrupt several years after retiring. We arm our clients with education, information, and options to help them to make smarter, safer decisions and take a greater role in their own finances and investing. We help you protect yourself.
What People Say

Client Testimonial

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Racky Goaver

CEO of American BDS

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Goaver Racky

CEO of American BDS

Free Consulting

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