Salient Partners has emerged as a leading Houston wealth-management firm with a geographic reach that spreads across the country and world. Investors in our funds and services represent nearly every state in America and many foreign countries, and our investment portfolios are structured to capture returns across the globe.
Our roots date back to the 1990’s when wealth managers who later became Salient’s principals were among the first to recommend and allocate investment in alternatives. The strategy worked well until 2001-2002, when interest rates reached their historical lows.
At about that time, Haag Sherman, Jeremy Radcliffe, and Andrew Linbeck founded Salient Partners, and were later followed by John Blaisdell, Matthew Newtown, John Price, and Adam Thomas. A year later, Salient merged with Pinnacle Management & Trust, a subsidiary of the Southwest’s largest independent banking investment firms. The merger brought Stephen Reckling, Stephen Strake, and their team to Salient, establishing our current management group.
The merged firm recognized that the old strategies did not provide the consistent level of returns clients wanted or protection against market volatility they needed. So it began researching additional options for portfolio diversification.
The result was a two-fold approach that continues to shape our strategy.
First, Salient and its clients began to broadly diversify within alternatives, investing in less traditional asset classes such as real estate, enhanced fixed income, natural resources, and emerging markets.
Second, we identified the large university endowment model as being the best portfolio construction approach for accessing and capitalizing on a multitude of strategies within alternatives. It has been successfully used by institutions such as Harvard, Notre Dame, Rice, University of Texas, and Yale.
The endowment model represents a “democratized” solution that provides smaller investors with access to top-tier fund managers who would otherwise be unavailable to them.
Our strategy and approach continued to fuel Salient’s growth, and in 2005 we enhanced our presence by adopting the current name: Salient Partners. As part of this change, Pinnacle Trust Co. became Salient Trust Co., LTA. The new name underscores and reinforces the firm’s commitment to innovation; client-focused service; and performance-driven, solution-oriented investment strategies.
Today, Salient has nearly 70 professionals, many of whom have long ties with the Houston community. Combined with the firm’s investment in common philosophy, this provides significant generational breadth and depth and a superior combination of experience, continuity, service, and performance to clients.
While based in Houston, Salient Partners has a broad geographic reach that stretches across the country and the world.