The Chicago Firm That Sold Wall Street's Playbook to Families Who Aren't Endowments

Every wealth manager promises diversification. Most deliver a slightly different mix of the same two things - stocks and bonds - and call it a plan. Vivaldi Capital Management, a Chicago registered investment advisor founded in 2012, made a different bet. It decided the tools that pensions and university endowments use to grow money for decades - hedge funds, private equity, private credit, real estate - should be available to families too, and should sit at the center of a portfolio rather than at the edges. Fourteen years later that bet was worth roughly $5.6 billion in assets under management, and in April 2026 the wealth firm Corient agreed to buy the whole thing.

The idea is simple to say and hard to build. Institutions have long leaned on alternative investments because they can tolerate illiquidity and want returns that do not move in lockstep with the public markets. Individual families, even wealthy ones, historically got a watered-down version: a brokerage account, a few mutual funds, maybe a token allocation to something exotic. Vivaldi's founders looked at that gap and decided to close it. Their pitch to high- and ultra-high-net-worth families was that alternatives could be a core building block, engineered into a custom portfolio alongside equities and fixed income, not bolted on as an afterthought.

01 / OriginsFrom the trading floor to the family portfolio

To understand Vivaldi, start with its co-founder and chief executive, David Sternberg. A Wilmette, Illinois native and University of Iowa marketing graduate, Sternberg did not begin in wealth management. He started as a market-maker specializing in spread trading at the Chicago Board Options Exchange - one of the traders standing in the pit, quoting prices, managing risk in real time. He retired from that world at 37, then spent several years building a diversified portfolio of alternative investments for himself before co-founding an earlier alternatives business, Iron Partners.

That background matters. People who come to investing from the options floor tend to think in terms of risk, correlation and structure rather than stock tips. When Sternberg and co-founder Randal Golden launched Vivaldi in 2012, they were not building a stock-picking shop. Golden had spent since the early 1990s managing money with a philosophy centered on capital preservation and absolute returns, previously as a managing director at firms including Mesirow Financial. Between the two of them, the firm's DNA was set: preserve capital, build custom portfolios, and use alternatives the way institutions do.

02 / The productWhat "building blocks" actually means

Vivaldi describes its investment process as a building-block approach. In practice, that means constructing each family's portfolio from a menu of components - public equities, fixed income, hedge-fund strategies, private equity, private credit and real estate - weighted to that family's goals, tax situation and appetite for illiquidity. The traditional pieces provide liquidity and growth; the alternatives are there to smooth the ride and add return streams that do not simply track the S&P 500.

The harder part is access. Many alternative strategies are illiquid or come with high minimums, which makes them awkward to hold in an ordinary account. Vivaldi's answer was to build vehicles. The firm runs privately offered allocation funds, and it works with an affiliate, First Trust Capital Management, which advises closed-end interval funds and tender-offer funds. Those wrappers let an advisor hand a client exposure to private markets in a form that can actually sit in a portfolio and be reported on cleanly. It is plumbing, not glamour - but it is the reason the strategy scales.

03 / CustomersWho this is actually for

Vivaldi serves high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth individuals and families, along with family offices and select institutional clients. These are households with balance sheets complicated enough to justify the machinery - multiple entities, concentrated positions, estate and tax questions that never quite resolve. For them, the firm layers wealth planning on top of investments: tax planning, estate planning, retirement planning and family-office services such as consolidated reporting and coordination across advisors.

The scale tells the story. Roughly $5.6 billion under management, spread across a team of about 62 professionals, works out to a business built on deep relationships rather than a high volume of small accounts. This is a firm that grows through referrals, reputation and, notably, acquisition.

The family-office side is where the two halves of the business meet. A family with operating businesses, real estate, trusts and heirs does not experience investing and planning as separate problems - a decision about private equity is also a decision about liquidity, taxes and what gets passed on. Vivaldi's headquarters at 225 West Wacker Drive sits in the middle of Chicago's financial district, and the firm's structure reflects the same idea its portfolios do: keep the pieces under one roof so the coordination is built in rather than bolted on. For clients, the promise is less about any single product and more about having one team that sees the whole balance sheet at once.

04 / GrowthBuying practices, keeping their funds

One of the clearest windows into how Vivaldi compounds came in 2020, when it acquired Cornerstone Wealth Management, a San Diego firm founded in 1999 that ran a multi-family-office practice with about $182 million in client assets. Both firms were independent, fee-based advisors that already believed in alternatives, which made the fit natural. With Cornerstone added, Vivaldi's assets were expected to top $3 billion.

The detail worth noticing is what came with the clients. Vivaldi did not just absorb accounts; it became the general partner of the Cornerstone Diversified Portfolio, a private fund invested largely in real-estate strategies. That is the acquisition playbook in miniature - buy a like-minded practice, inherit not only its relationships but its investment vehicles, and fold both into the platform. Do that a few times over a decade and $3 billion becomes $5.6 billion.

05 / The marketWhere Vivaldi fits

Vivaldi operates in a crowded but fragmenting corner of finance: the independent RIA. It competes with other alternatives-focused advisors and multi-family offices, and, further up the scale, with the private-wealth arms of large banks and brokerages. Its differentiator is not that it invented alternatives - plenty of firms offer them - but that it built its whole identity and infrastructure around treating them as central, complete with the fund vehicles to deliver them.

That focus is also what made Vivaldi attractive as an acquisition. The wealth-management industry has been consolidating for years, with larger platforms buying successful RIAs to add assets, capabilities and talent. In April 2026, Corient announced it would acquire Vivaldi, adding the firm's $5.6 billion to its own book. Under the deal, Vivaldi's principals are set to become Corient Partners, gaining access to a broader suite of wealth-management and family-office services, with the transaction expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.

06 / The takeawayWhat a founder can copy - and where it breaks

The Vivaldi story is unusually clean for anyone trying to learn from it. The playbook: pick one contrarian thesis and commit to it (alternatives belong in the core), build the unglamorous infrastructure that makes the thesis deliverable (funds, wrappers, reporting), then grow through a mix of referrals and acquisitions of practices that already share your worldview. Keep the vehicles, not just the accounts. Do it for over a decade without blinking.

It is worth being honest about the conditions where this does not travel. The model depends on serving clients who can tolerate illiquidity and have enough assets to justify custom portfolios - it is not a mass-market strategy. Alternative investments carry their own risks and fees, and the returns that look attractive in calm markets can behave differently under stress. And growth-by-acquisition only works if the firms you buy genuinely share your philosophy; bolt on the wrong practice and the culture that made the whole thing work starts to fray. Vivaldi's answer to that last risk was to buy slowly and buy like-minded - and, ultimately, to hand the keys to a partner built on the same idea.