MANAGING PARTNER, CIO & GENERAL COUNSEL

John Pantekidis, JD, LLM, CFA

John is a managing partner at TwinFocus and serves as the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) and General Counsel. John has been with the firm since January 2007, six months after the firm’s launch. In this role, he heads the firm’s investment research and complex tax planning efforts, working closely with clients to help them design and implement innovative family office structures.

As the firm’s CIO, he also leads research efforts to develop new and creative investment policies, oversees due diligence for manager search and selection, and plays a multi-faceted role in guiding the firm’s private investment activities by identifying, negotiating, modeling, and structuring deals from a fundamental investment and multi-generational perspective. John has also designed and implemented the firm’s sophisticated options overlay program.

MANAGING PARTNER, CIO & GENERAL COUNSEL

John Pantekidis, JD, LLM, CFA

As the firm’s CIO, he also leads research efforts to develop new and creative investment policies, oversees due diligence for manager search and selection, and plays a multi-faceted role in guiding the firm’s private investment activities by identifying, negotiating, modeling and structuring deals from a fundamental investment and multi-generational perspective. John has also designed and implemented the firm’s sophisticated options overlay program.

INFLUENCE

John’s family office practice is astutely focused on globally-situated, ultra-high net worth families and institutions. With a keen interest on the formation, cross-border tax/legal due diligence, and structuring of alternative investment funds and direct investments, John has pioneered studies on how to make hedge fund and alternative investing more tax efficient from both an income and wealth transfer tax perspective, especially in light of the recently promulgated Tax Cuts & Jobs Act. He is especially active on behalf of global and offshore clients, developing strategies to overcome cross-border tax, legal, governance and regulatory challenges and ensure multi-generational succession, while also consulting on key operational, organizational, and strategic issues.

John leads TwinFocus’ efforts in formulating a multi-disciplinary approach of seamlessly integrating tax planning with investment management, as he believes both are distinct yet critically inseparable disciplines that cannot be ignored in consulting with the global UHNW client and institution. He has instituted the firm’s industry-leading total balance sheet approach and Hub & Spoke Model for representing ultra-high net worth families with their income, gift and multi-generational planning initiatives.

On the investment and planning side, complex financial modeling plays an integral exercise in John’s analysis of client business activities, as well as diligencing real estate, direct investments, and tax-subsidized investment funds. In a similar fashion, his efforts with constructing pro formas and running heuristics play critical roles in negotiating more effectively for clients and the firm. On the estate and financial planning side, John has designed a proprietary program that affords clients the ability to analyze ramifications of important financial, tax, and investment decisions. More importantly, this software can be fully customized and adopted to isolate and quantify the impacts of different factors and family-specific variables, allowing TwinFocus to provide multi-generational recommendations with surgical precision not otherwise possible.

Additionally, John’s interests in derivatives markets and their financial and tax implications have allowed him to develop a very sophisticated options overlay program that scales the firm’s global macro research efforts and creates unique sources of alpha and risk management using publicly traded derivatives not found with traditional securities and instruments.

DISTINGUISHING ACTIVITIES

In addition to his activities at TwinFocus, John has also sat on numerous company boards and acts as strategic adviser to company executives on issues ranging from cross-border tax and regulatory planning, efficient intellectual property management, corporate reorganizations, and capitalization structuring to captive insurance schemes and executive compensation programs. John quite often works with board members, company management, attorneys, and investment bankers in helping structure and negotiate term sheets, as well as design innovative family office solutions for domestic and foreign families. John currently sit on the Board of Directors of an insurance holding company that is a joint venture between TwinFocus (largest shareholder of the JV), Blackstone/GSO, and Markerstudy Holdings Limited, one of the UK’s largest motor/specialty insurance companies, as well as on the Board of Allos Environmental, a TwinFocus portfolio company and infrastructure play that owns one of the largest landfills in the United States.

John also writes thought leadership commentary on global macroeconomic topics and has participated in numerous round-table discussions on geopolitical and geo-economic topics. To assist with his top-down investment approach, John’s interests are particularly centered on Twentieth Century international relations and how the evolution of the post-war liberal international order is forging secular trends and themes that impact family office practices.

EDUCATION & TRAINING

John holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation and is a licensed member of the Massachusetts Bar, the CFA Institute and the Boston Security Analysts Society. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Boston University where he returned to earn his Juris Doctor degree and his Master of Laws degree in Taxation. John is also a graduate of Boston Latin School, the nation’s oldest educational institution.

Prior to joining TwinFocus, John was a financial consultant with A.G. Edwards and worked as an independent analyst and private investor. He also was a practicing attorney in the greater Boston area, specializing in taxation, corporate law, and estate/multi-generational planning, and has assisted as legal advisor and investment counselor in the start-up of several family-owned businesses.

John is an active member of the Greek Orthodox community and participates in numerous philanthropic organizations. John lives with his family in Brookline, Massachusetts.