Bloomberg: As tariff fears bite, RIAs lean into active management

Independent advisory firms are responding to market volatility and tariff-driven uncertainty by leaning harder into active management — a posture that runs counter to the passive-first trend that dominated the previous decade.

As equity markets absorb the effects of an escalating trade policy environment,
a growing number of registered investment advisors are revisiting their allocation frameworks. For firms like SEIA, which has maintained an active management bias throughout, the current environment feels less like a pivot and more like a vindication.

“We’ve never believed that indexing your way through a complex market is a strategy,” said Brian Holmes, Founder and CEO of Signature Estate & Investment Advisors. ​“It’s an abdication of judgment. Markets like this one — where the macro environment can shift in a week — require an advisor who is actually making decisions, not just tracking an index and hoping for the best.”

“Markets like this one require an advisor who is actually making decisions, not just tracking an index and hoping for the best.”

SEIA manages approximately $28 billion across more than 50 offices nationwide. Holmes noted that the firm’s investment committee had been repositioning certain client portfolios ahead of the most recent tariff announcements — reducing exposure to sectors with significant import dependencies and increasing allocations to domestically-oriented companies with pricing power.

The firm’s active positioning is not new. SEIA has built its investment philosophy around what Holmes calls ​“explainable judgment” — the idea that every allocation decision should be able to be articulated to a client in plain language, without relying on model outputs or historical correlations that may not hold in the current environment.

“We tell clients what we own, why we own it, and what would cause us to change our mind,” Holmes said. ​“That’s not a complicated idea. But it turns out it’s a differentiating one.”