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Announcing Asset Location Fully Integrated into Vise to save clients up to 60bps every year in taxes

Vise now puts each holding in the account where it's taxed least, automatically and for every household.

Oct 19, 2026 | 6MIN

Author

Runik Mehrotra

Co-Head of Vise, Co-Founder

Return

Announcing Asset Location Fully Integrated into Vise to save clients up to 60bps every year in taxes

Vise now puts each holding in the account where it's taxed least, automatically and for every household.

Oct 19, 2026 | 6MIN

Author

Runik Mehrotra

Co-Head of Vise, Co-Founder

Return

Announcing Asset Location Fully Integrated into Vise to save clients up to 60bps every year in taxes

Vise now puts each holding in the account where it's taxed least, automatically and for every household.

Oct 19, 2026 | 6MIN

Author

Runik Mehrotra

Co-Head of Vise, Co-Founder

In this article

Advisors add the most value when their tools let them

What is asset location? Locating assets in different accounts to save your client taxes

Advisors are handcuffed by their current tech stack

We built Vise to put the whole portfolio in one place

Asset location, done your firm's way

Location Alpha: quantifying the value of asset location in dollars

One system, one decision: location and tax management now solve together

Better technology for advisors, better results for clients

Advisors add the most value when their tools let them

Hiring a financial advisor is one of the best decisions a client can make. Their value is measurable: Vanguard estimates it at about 3% in additional net returns.¹

When you break that number down, a meaningful share of it comes from tax management, which includes tax-loss harvesting, a tax-efficient drawdown in retirement, and asset location (up to 60 basis points a year).¹

These strategies take real expertise to run well and they are a big part of why a client is better off with an advisor than managing money alone.

The catch is that most advisors, due to a patchwork of bad technology, often can’t run these strategies for their clients at scale.

What is asset location? Locating assets in different accounts to save your client taxes

Every account type taxes returns differently, and different assets have different tax rules. Asset location matches the two, so the holdings expected to grow the most go in the Roth, where growth is never taxed, and the holdings that throw off the most income go in the traditional IRA, where that income isn't taxed each year. The asset allocation across the portfolio stays the same. The positions are just located in the most efficient accounts to help clients keep more of the return.

Advisors are handcuffed by their current tech stack

With so much research behind the benefits, you’d assume every advisor does this. In a recent survey of more than 1,000 advisors, only 54% said they use asset location to improve after-tax outcomes for their high-net-worth clients, compared with 81% who use tax-loss harvesting.²

That means nearly half of advisors don't do it even for their wealthiest clients. And the ones who do, only do it some of the time, often by hand.

What gets in the way is the technology, since most advisors run a client's portfolio across a stack of point solutions that were each built to do one job and were never built to agree with each other.

In practice it looks like this:

The trading system's location rules say the stocks in the taxable account belong in the Roth, the tax management engine says those same stocks carry large gains and selling them this year means a tax bill, and the reporting system can't show the client what location was worth because it doesn't know location happened.

One client gets opposite instructions from the advisor's own tools and the advisor is left to referee between them. Most reasonably pick tax management to minimize the client’s tax bill this year and forget asset location.

We built Vise to put the whole portfolio in one place

This is the problem we built Vise to solve. Our objective has always been one portfolio for every part of a client's financial life, managed in one place (every account in the household, with held-away assets and alternatives included). When everything lives in one place, high-value strategies like asset location can be easy and ready to use for every advisor, rather than a manual undertaking for their largest clients.

Asset location, done your firm's way

There's no single right way to do asset location. Michael Kitces has shown that even the textbook rules can change depending on the client, so the right answer depends on who you're investing for.³

Every firm we've built this with has its own view, and each one is right for its own clients, so we didn't hard-code a set of rules. Instead we built a customizable engine that helps you build your own rules.

On Vise, a firm sets its own asset location rules the same way it can configure an investment strategy, or starts from the rules Vise recommends and adjusts from there.

Location Alpha: quantifying the value of asset location in dollars

When a client asks whether a bigger tax bill this year is worth it, the advisor should have the answer in dollars.

Location Alpha gives them that answer. It's our estimate of what better placement is worth for each household, in basis points AND in dollars, based on the client's own federal and state tax rates, their actual holdings and tax lots, and their gains budget (so the same portfolio gets a different answer in California than in Texas).

Showing that value has always been hard for tax management, because the benefit shows up as taxes the client didn't pay. We compare how this portfolio would have done after tax with a more naive placement of assets compared to the asset located version and quantify the benefits in dollars for clients.

For a hypothetical household with $1 million across three accounts and one 60/40 target, better placement comes out to approximately $7,200 a year (72 basis points), or roughly $144,000 over 20 years, without changing the household's risk.⁴

One system, one decision: location and tax management now solve together

On Vise, asset location runs inside the same engine as everything else.

When an advisor turns it on for an account group, tax management keeps working (capital gains budgets, tax-loss harvesting in the taxable account, locked positions, restrictions, and any direct indexing or Long Short strategy the client holds are all inputs to the same decision) and reporting keeps working too.

The conflict from earlier, where the location rules say move and the tax engine says stay, doesn't come up because one system weighs both and decides. Sometimes that means moving the holding now, and sometimes it means waiting or making a smaller Location Swap that gets most of the benefit for less tax.

The complexity is ours, not the advisor's.

Better technology for advisors, better results for clients

At Vise, we’re building one solution for the whole portfolio, so everything a client owns is managed together in one place. Every asset class and strategy sits in one account, and reporting, rebalancing, tax management, and trading run on one platform. When it all works together, the strategies that used to be reserved for an advisor's biggest clients become easy to deliver for every client.

Asset location is one of several capabilities we're building on that foundation, and more are on the way.

See Asset Location on Vise now.

Learn More

Sources

Vanguard, "Celebrating Vanguard Advisor's Alpha: Clients and their advisors thriving together for 25 years," Advisor's Alpha Perspectives, 2025 (Kinniry, Jaconetti, DiJoseph, Walker, Quinn). Vanguard notes that "about 3%" means additional net return over an unspecified period, not an annual value-add, and that the actual amount of value added may vary significantly depending on clients' circumstances.
BlackRock, 2026 BlackRock Advisor Trends Survey, chart "Underused strategies = missed opportunities" (% of advisors using strategies to improve after-tax outcomes for HNW clients). Survey of 1,023 U.S. advisors fielded by Escalent, August 22 to September 7, 2025.
Michael Kitces, "Asset Location For Stocks In A Brokerage Account Versus IRA Depends On Time Horizon," Kitces.com, April 22, 2015.
Hypothetical household, real methodology, illustrative assumptions. The household holds $1 million in three accounts ($200,000 taxable, $700,000 traditional IRA, and $100,000 Roth IRA) with one 60/40 equity/fixed income target for all three. The comparison is between holding the same 60/40 mix in each account and placing each holding with Vise Asset Location; the household's total allocation and risk are the same in both. Vise's return decomposition projects both placements for 20 years and fully liquidates them at the highest California federal and state tax rates. The after-tax difference is $144,467 in total, or $7,223 a year on average (approximately 72 basis points of the $1 million starting value). This is not a strategy return, a projection of any client's results, or a guarantee of any tax outcome; results for other households will differ based on account sizes, holdings, embedded gains, and tax rates.

Location Alpha is an estimate of after-tax return improvement from asset placement. It is not a return and is not a guarantee of any tax or investment outcome. Hypothetical illustrations do not reflect actual client accounts and are subject to the limitations of modeled assumptions; actual results vary based on starting portfolio, account mix, inflows and outflows, embedded gains, and individual client tax rates. Tax treatment is not guaranteed and may vary based on individual circumstances. Due to the complexity of tax law, not every taxpayer will face the situations described exactly as calculated. Examples are representative of some, but not all, taxpayers. Consult a qualified tax professional regarding your specific situation. Past performance, whether simulated or actual, is not indicative of future results. Third-party research and figures are cited as published by their respective sources and are not Vise's. Investment advisory services are provided by Vise AI Advisors, LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training.

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1 Vise "Platform Assets" encompasses assets actively managed by Vise as well as assets that Vise aggregates, monitors, and uses to generate customized proposals. As of 6/1/2026.

Images and graphs on this page are for illustrative purposes only. Does not represent actual client results. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Tax-Loss Harvesting Disclosures

Vise AI Advisors, LLC (“Vise”) is an SEC-registered investment adviser. The material presented is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. It is not a recommendation of, or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy, any particular security, strategy, or investment product. Nothing on this website should be construed as personalized investment advice, which can only be provided in one-on-one communications.

Investing in securities involves risks, including the potential loss of money, and past performance does not guarantee future results. Historical returns, expected returns, and probability projections are provided for informational and illustrative purposes and may not reflect actual future performance.

Product images shown are for informational and illustrative purposes only and may not reflect how they will appear within the product. Third-party trademarks and service marks referenced are the property of their respective owners.

The portfolio built
for your biggest client.
For every client.

Book a Demo

521 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

+1 201 375 3969

Form ADV

Form CRS

1 Vise "Platform Assets" encompasses assets actively managed by Vise as well as assets that Vise aggregates, monitors, and uses to generate customized proposals. As of 6/1/2026.

Images and graphs on this page are for illustrative purposes only. Does not represent actual client results. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Tax-Loss Harvesting Disclosures

The portfolio built for your biggest client.
For every client.

Book a Demo

521 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

+1 201 375 3969

Form ADV

Form CRS

1 Vise "Platform Assets" encompasses assets actively managed by Vise as well as assets that Vise aggregates, monitors, and uses to generate customized proposals. As of 6/1/2026.

Images and graphs on this page are for illustrative purposes only. Does not represent actual client results. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Tax-Loss Harvesting Disclosures

Announcing Asset Location Fully Integrated into Vise to save clients up to 60bps every year in taxes

Announcing Asset Location Fully Integrated into Vise to save clients up to 60bps every year in taxes

Announcing Asset Location Fully Integrated into Vise to save clients up to 60bps every year in taxes

Advisors add the most value when their tools let them

What is asset location? Locating assets in different accounts to save your client taxes

Advisors are handcuffed by their current tech stack

We built Vise to put the whole portfolio in one place

Asset location, done your firm's way

Location Alpha: quantifying the value of asset location in dollars

One system, one decision: location and tax management now solve together

Better technology for advisors, better results for clients

See Asset Location on Vise now.

Sources

The portfolio built for your biggest client.For every client.

The portfolio builtfor your biggest client.For every client.

The portfolio built for your biggest client.For every client.

The portfolio built for your biggest client.
For every client.

The portfolio built
for your biggest client.
For every client.

The portfolio built for your biggest client.
For every client.