STQ is a modern investment advisory firm focused on tax-aware investment strategies, institutional-quality portfolio construction, and a conflict-free fiduciary model.
Institutional Depth. Personal Focus.
We build each portfolio from the ground up – optimizing assets, accounts, and vehicles to maximize what you keep after tax.
We start with asset allocation – what to own and why – built around your full financial picture: income, real estate, business interests, estate plan. From there, we determine where each asset lives. The same investment in the wrong account type can cost years of compounding.
Finally, we select the vehicle. Structure has real tax consequences, and we choose the one that minimizes taxable events and maximizes after-tax compounding for your specific situation.
Your portfolio is a bank. Box spread borrowing lets you use it like one.
Box spreads are a four-leg options structure that creates a fully hedged position with a known payoff at expiration. The spread between what you collect today and what you owe at expiration is effectively your interest rate – set by the market, typically close to Treasury rates.
The result: access to capital with no credit check, no bank approval, and no forced selling of appreciated positions. The interest is potentially tax-deductible, and your portfolio stays fully invested throughout.
Index exposure with a tax engine built in.
Direct indexing means owning the individual stocks in an index rather than a fund. You can harvest losses at the security level – even when the broader index is up – and use them to offset gains anywhere in your portfolio: a real estate sale, a business exit, an RSU vest.
Most firms offer direct indexing as an off-the-shelf product. At STQ, the index itself is built around you. Your existing holdings, your sector views, your tax situation, your concentrated positions – all of it shapes the construction. No two clients hold the same portfolio.
Turn volatility into a tax advantage without changing your strategy.
We go beyond standard harvesting, using long-short strategies that generate losses regardless of market direction – creating a richer opportunity set that a traditional long-only portfolio simply can't match. The earlier you start building the bank, the more powerful it becomes.
Think of it as a loss bank. Every time a position dips below your cost basis, we harvest that loss and deposit it. Those banked losses accumulate and sit ready to deploy against gains whenever you need them – a real estate sale, a business exit, an RSU vest, a private equity distribution.
You can't just sell. But you can't just hold either.
A concentrated position is both an asset and a risk. Managing it requires balancing upside preservation, diversification, and the tax cost of either. Move too fast and you hand a significant portion to the IRS. Move too slowly and a single bad quarter can erase years of gains.
The toolkit is deep: collars, variable prepaid forwards, box spread loans, long/short tax-loss harvesting, direct indexing to build a loss bank, and 351 exchanges for tax-deferred diversification. The right answer depends on your situation – and finding it requires looking at the full picture.
Options don't add risk. Properly structured, they remove it.
Options are precision instruments – among the most powerful risk management tools available and one of the most tax-efficient ways to adjust a portfolio without selling. Most investors never use them this way. Most advisors can't execute them this way.
At STQ, we use options overlays to protect downside, generate yield on existing positions, and reshape return profiles without triggering a taxable sale. Protective put spreads, cash-secured puts, covered calls – every structure is evaluated through a tax lens first, because a hedge that creates a tax bill may not be worth putting on.
Private markets don't move with public ones. That's the point.
Public markets give you liquidity and correlation – the tendency for assets to move together when diversification would matter most. Private equity, private credit, venture, and real assets may help address that, though they involve meaningful risks including illiquidity and potential loss of principal.
Placement matters as much as selection. A fund generating ordinary income may belong in a tax-deferred account. A fund with long-term capital gain potential may be better suited to a taxable account. Getting it wrong can erode a significant portion of the return before you ever see it.
Give more. Keep more. Owe less.
A donor-advised fund lets you contribute assets, take the full charitable deduction immediately, and grant to charities on your own timeline. The deduction is immediate. The giving can happen over years or decades.
The real power is in what you contribute. Donating appreciated stock directly eliminates capital gains entirely – you deduct the full fair market value without ever paying tax on the gain. For a concentrated position, large RSU vest, or pending business sale, a DAF can dramatically reduce the tax bill while funding causes that matter to you.
Why we don't ignore tax structure.
Two portfolios. Same investments. Same gross return. One pays taxes annually on every gain and dividend. The other defers, optimizes, and compounds without interruption.
Curious what tax drag is costing you?
See What's Possible →Hypothetical growth of $1M over 30 years. 10% gross return; taxable assumes 37% combined tax rate applied annually. Illustrative only.
← Click to explore →
Akiva Glazerson is the founder of STQ Capital. He brings a rare combination of institutional investment experience and quantitative expertise that anchors STQ's commitment to transparency, integrity, accountability, and excellence.
Before founding STQ, he led investment risk at a $42B+ RIA and built institutional portfolios at PIMCO, after earlier roles at UBS, Deutsche Bank, and the Royal Bank of Canada.
No outside ownership, no product quotas, no conflicts of interest. We answer to one party – you.
Open architecture, full transparency, fiduciary at all times. We don't build products or guide clients into anything that serves us.
Technology-forward operations, cutting-edge tax products, and strategies most advisors can't execute.
Every portfolio is tailored to your tax situation, income, liquidity, and objectives. No cookie cutters.
The diagnostic is free. What we find usually isn't.