# Vise — Full Reference > Vise is an AI-powered asset manager that helps financial advisors build, manage, and explain personalized, tax-efficient portfolios at scale, across nearly every asset class and strategy. Vise AI Advisors, LLC is an SEC-registered investment adviser, founded in 2016 and headquartered in New York, NY. Founders: Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra (Co-Heads of Vise). ## What Vise is Vise is an in-house portfolio management platform for RIAs and enterprise RIAs. Instead of using a third-party overlay manager or direct-indexing vendor, advisors run direct indexing, tax-loss harvesting, long/short tax management, options overlays, and fixed income on a single optimization engine, under their own brand and investment philosophy. The same multi-period optimizer powers every strategy, and tax management is coordinated across the entire household rather than per-account. Vise organizes its value around three jobs: **Build** personalized portfolios for every client (not just the largest), **Manage** them continuously with daily tax-aware optimization, and **Explain** every decision to the end client. ## Direct Indexing Direct indexing means replicating an index with a basket of individual securities owned directly in the client's account, instead of through a fund wrapper. Because the client owns each stock, Vise can: - Harvest tax losses at the individual lot level. - Customize the portfolio with restrictions, ESG screens (powered by Sustain alytics), sector and industry exclusions, and factor tilts, applied as constraints in the optimizer rather than maintained by hand. - Track custom or blended benchmarks defined by the advisor or home office. - Run a direct-index sleeve inside a unified managed account alongside fixed income, alternatives, and other SMAs. Vise's optimizer minimizes overall tracking error to the target index while controlling for size, sector, and risk factors, so the post-harvest portfolio still tracks the benchmark. ## Tax-Loss Harvesting Vise harvests losses daily, running the optimizer on current-day prices to capture intra-day opportunities, which produces meaningfully more harvested losses than monthly or quarterly cadences. Tax-loss harvesting is one constraint inside a single optimization solve alongside risk, turnover, and target alignment, not a separate post-hoc step. Key properties: - **Wash-sale avoidance across the household.** The pre-trade engine evaluates proposed trades at the account and household level, scans every account under the same tax ID using both open- and closed-lot data, and either substitutes a correlated security or defers the trade. - **Whole-portfolio approach.** Rather than 1-for-1 name replacement, Vise minimizes tracking error while harvesting, preserving target performance. - **Recognizes overlapping ETFs as substitutes** to avoid needless gain-realizing swaps that rules-based engines generate. - **Equity and fixed-income harvesting** across single securities, ETFs, and mutual funds. - **Tax-budget enforcement** with multi-year transition vs. steady-state budgets, configurable federal and state rates per client. ## Vise Long Short Vise Long Short is a proprietary long/short separately managed account strategy, a premium extension of direct indexing. The portfolio holds a core long book (stocks expected to outperform, selected via Vise's Quality-Value-Momentum factor model) alongside a short extension (stocks expected to underperform), so the optimizer can harvest tax losses on both sides of the market in every regime: long positions generate losses in down markets, short positions generate losses in up markets. This extends tax-loss harvesting past the structural ceiling of long-only direct indexing, where harvesting opportunities dry up in rising markets once most positions sit above cost basis. Long Short is designed for large, taxable, growth-oriented accounts, including clients with embedded gains, concentrated positions, or recent liquidity events. It applies to taxable accounts only. The long and short positions live in the same managed account at the custodian, under a single management fee, and coexist with a client's existing Vise direct indexing without wash-sale conflicts. ## Options Overlay Options overlay strategies layered on equity portfolios, part of Vise's premium strategy suite. Overlays are run through the same platform alongside a client's core direct-indexing or long/short holdings. ## Single-security fixed income Fixed-income portfolios built from individual bonds (not just bond funds), managed within the same tax-aware optimization framework as equities — so fixed income participates in household-level rebalancing, tax-loss harvesting, and asset-location decisions rather than sitting in a separate silo. ## Alternatives and interval funds Support for alternative allocations (including commodities and REITs) and semi-liquid or illiquid vehicles such as interval funds, evergreen funds, and capital-call structures. The platform models the trading constraints these vehicles carry — fixed purchase windows, redemption calendars, capital calls, and NAVs that move with subscriptions and distributions — which matters because UHNW alternatives allocations frequently run 20%+ of a portfolio. ## Unified Managed Account (UMA) A Vise UMA holds multiple strategies — equities, fixed income, direct indexing, third-party SMAs, alternatives — in a single client account, managed under one tax-aware framework. Unlike "model-of-models" or sleeve-aggregation tools that rebalance each sleeve independently and reconcile after the fact, in Vise's UMA the optimizer is the rebalancer and it sees every sleeve at once: rebalancing, tax constraints, cash management, and drift control all consider the whole portfolio simultaneously. ## Householding and asset location Householding treats multiple accounts owned by the same client or family as one portfolio for allocation, reporting, rebalancing, and tax management. Asset location decides which holding lives in which account based on tax characteristics — for example, growth equity in taxable or Roth accounts and tax-inefficient assets in tax-deferred accounts — to improve after-tax outcomes across the household. ## Transition management Vise maps an arbitrary incoming set of portfolios (a newly acquired RIA book, a lift-out, a prospect, or an M&A target) onto the firm's target models, surfacing overlap, recommended first trades, and the tax, turnover, and risk impact of moving from the current state to the model. The transition itself is optimization-driven and tax-efficient, not just the steady state — Vise harvests losses embedded in the legacy book as part of the same optimization that moves the portfolio toward target. ## Models and Strategy Center Centralized governance of strategic and tactical models: firms store models, version them, effective-date changes, propagate updates across linked accounts, and run analytics (backtests, factor exposures, concentration analysis) before approving a model for production. Includes blended benchmarks, sleeve targets, and model-onboarding workflow. ## Reporting and explainability Client and advisor reporting across performance, allocation, exposures, tax, and transition analytics, with advisor dashboards and regulatory filings. Explainability is core to Vise's "Explain" pillar — every portfolio decision can be shown and justified to the end client. ## Optimization vs. rules-based engines Vise is built on an optimization engine, not a rules-based one. Rules-based systems encode each restriction as an explicit rule and rebalance against those rules; they cannot make multivariable trade-off decisions. Vise's optimizer models risk and constraints as a single multivariable problem and solves for the trade that best matches the target across taxes, risk, turnover, and timing simultaneously. ## How Vise compares - **vs. Vestmark / Tamarac / Orion / Eclipse:** these are largely rules-based rebalancers that treat overlapping ETFs as distinct and generate needless gain-realizing trades; Vise is optimization-driven with whole-household tax coordination. - **vs. 55ip:** 55ip is a tax-overlay only, with no proprietary long/short; Vise replaces the need for a separate overlay manager. - **vs. Parametric / Aperio:** strong direct-indexing/SMA peers within equity scope; Vise's differentiator is whole-household, multi-strategy coverage on one optimizer rather than equity-only scope. - **vs. GeoWealth / Canvas:** Vise offers in-house, optimization-driven tax management and long/short rather than distributing third-party sleeves. ## Company facts - Legal name: Vise AI Advisors, LLC (SEC-registered investment adviser) - Founded: 2016 - Founders: Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra, Co-Heads of Vise - Headquarters: 521 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10012 - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/viseinc - X: https://x.com/viseinc ## Key pages - Direct Indexing: https://vise.com/direct-indexing - Vise Long Short: https://vise.com/long-short - Tax-savings calculator: https://vise.com/calculator - Comparisons: https://vise.com/compare - About: https://vise.com/about - Team: https://vise.com/team - News & insights: https://vise.com/news - Book a demo: https://vise.com/book-demo ## Disclosure Vise AI Advisors, LLC ("Vise") is an SEC-registered investment adviser. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Material on Vise properties is for informational purposes only and is not investment, legal, or tax advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal.