Welcome to the Third View Perspectives Newsletter—your monthly source for financial intelligence and trusted advice to help you make more informed decisions on behalf of you, your family, and your legacy.

Forwarded this newsletter? Subscribe here to receive future editions.

📅 January 14th, 10:30am-11:30am EST

Join us for a live fireside chat as Third View co-founder Jerry Sneed will be joined by John O’Shea of Loomis Sayles Growth to discuss investment strategy & identifying growth stocks in an up market.

More details and a registration link will be emailed in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

At our core, we believe individuals and families deserve the same level of rigor and sophistication typically reserved for large institutions. Our goal is simple: bring institutional discipline to personal wealth.

Here’s how we approach investing at Third View…

Our approach focuses on four things:

Alignment of investor interests: The people we entrust with our clients’ capital have to understand the responsibility instilled in them to put clients’ needs first.

Intensive risk management: Intelligent risk-taking, position sizing, and knowing when to exit matter more than bold predictions.

Efficiency: Investing needs to be efficient. Far too many “good investments” are riddled with layers of fees, have too broad of a mandate, or have too much turnover. All these factors contribute to inefficiencies that reduce returns.

Access to insight: We prioritize access to diverse, high-quality thought leadership, which allows our team to understand and digest market events for the benefit of our clients.

We build our clients’ portfolios in accordance with modern portfolio theory, utilizing a core-satellite approach. That means we use a mathematical framework to weigh the exposure within the portfolio so the expected return is maximized for the given level of risk.

We build a core asset allocation utilizing top-tier investment managers accessed at an institutional level and then complement the core holdings with tactical tilts to take advantage of short-term opportunities within the markets.

Finally, we use cash and alternative investments to reduce volatility and take advantage of longer-term structural shifts and trends across asset classes and sectors.

Value stocks are not high-dividend-paying, sluggish, dinosaur companies. Value stocks are stocks that can be bought at a price cheaper than their fundamental value.

We don’t question whether markets are efficient or inefficient. Over the long term, we believe that markets efficiently and accurately price all market factors, but over the short term, markets can become mispriced, oscillating between overvalued and undervalued because of positive or negative reactions to events.

Many market participants are too influenced by the “noise” of day-to-day headlines and an abundant stream of financial news. They tend to lose track of factors that truly affect long-term intrinsic value, so they make short-term decisions.

We believe carefully selected managers can take advantage of those short-term dislocations, creating long-term value for our clients.

Markets are complex, and we embrace that. Howard Marks suggests there are two different types of “thinkers”: first-level and second-level.

First-level thinking is simply reading the headlines and believing you are well-informed enough to make a decision. Second-level thinking is significantly more intricate and arduous. It involves going beyond headlines and taking many different things into account to derive a sound opinion.

The workload between first-level and second-level thinking is clearly massive, and very few people have the dedication to continually commit to the process.

Our team is committed to being second-level thinkers. We have spent decades studying how markets react to earnings, policy shifts, and unexpected shocks. We’re especially comfortable when markets are dislocated—because that’s often where opportunity lives.

As David Swensen put it, risk varies inversely with knowledge. We take that idea seriously and remain committed to being students of the markets so we can provide the best service and most value to each of you, our clients.

Many people know that Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) are useful. Far fewer understand the unique planning opportunities they create within the tax code.

HSAs are the only accounts that offer triple tax benefits:

⬇️ Contributions reduce taxable income

📈 Growth is tax-free

💰 Withdrawals are tax-free when used for qualified medical expenses

If you have the cash flow, the optimal long-term strategy isn’t simply using the HSA to pay this year’s doctor bills. It’s to contribute, invest, and let the account grow.

Here’s the general approach:

1. Contribute the maximum each year.

2. Invest the HSA just like you would a retirement account.

3. Pay medical expenses out of pocket and save receipts.

4. Allow the HSA to compound over decades.

5. Reimburse yourself tax-free in the future, whenever it makes sense.

The IRS allows you to keep receipts indefinitely. That means a $2,000 medical bill today can translate into a tax-free withdrawal decades from now, after years of potential growth. Essentially, the HSA becomes a stealth Roth IRA.

And given that a typical couple may spend more than $300,000 on healthcare in retirement, this strategy can meaningfully strengthen long-term planning.

A: For many of the families we work with, the question isn’t whether they can pay for education…it’s how to allocate capital most strategically.

The primary benefits of using a 529 plan are efficiency and optionality. When used correctly, it allows education dollars to grow tax-free while keeping higher-returning or less predictable assets invested elsewhere. That matters, even for families with substantial liquidity.

We also view 529s through an estate planning lens. Contributions can move assets out of an estate while the donor retains control, and the beneficiary can be changed across siblings—or even generations—if plans evolve.

The other thing a 529 creates is intentionality. It earmarks capital for a known future liability while reducing the temptation to make reactive decisions when tuition bills arrive during volatile markets.

As with most planning tools, the value isn’t in simply maximizing the account. It’s in using it deliberately, alongside the rest of the balance sheet, to support long-term family objectives.

Have a question you’d like us to answer in a future newsletter? Simply reply to this email to submit it to us.

Each year, our team comes together to support several local families during the holidays. This year, we partnered with the Mid-Fairfield Community Care Center to make sure households in our community receive the living essentials, school supplies, and gifts needed for their children for the holidays.

Packing up Spider-Man toys and notebooks for one little boy we sponsored this year brought more than a few tears to our team. Moments like that remind us why giving matters.

More Posts & Press

📖 Forbes: Zoltan Pongracz contributed to an article on the evolving role of CPAs and advisors.

🎧 Jerry Sneed on the Futureproof Advisor Podcast: The Importance of having a “why” behind building wealth

That’s all for this month. If you enjoyed the newsletter, the greatest compliment would be to forward it to someone you think would find it valuable. We’ll be back with more next month.
- Frank, Jerry, and Zoltan

Sign up here to receive future newsletter editions in your inbox.

Any media logos and/or trademarks are the property of their respective owners and no endorsement by those owners of the advisor or firm is stated or implied.

Past performance is not indicative of future results. The material above has been provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as legal or investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security or strategy. The investment strategy and themes discussed herein may be unsuitable for investors depending on their specific investment objectives and financial situation. Information obtained from third-party sources is believed to be reliable though its accuracy is not guaranteed, and Third View Private Wealth makes no representation or warranty as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, which should not be used as the basis of any investment decision. Information contained on third party websites that Third View Private Wealth may link to is not reviewed in their entirety for accuracy and Third View Private Wealth assumes no liability for the information contained on these websites. Opinions expressed in this commentary reflect subjective judgments of the author based on conditions at the time of writing and are subject to change without notice. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form, or referred to in any other publication, without express written permission from Third View Private Wealth. For more information about Third View Private Wealth, including our Form ADV brochures, please visit https://adviserinfo.sec.gov or contact us at (203) 408-0098.