Single Family Offices: Five-step guide to navigating the multi polar world 

National security increasingly overrides economic efficiency, supply chains are realigning along geopolitical lines, and shocks from conflict or trade disruption can arrive without warning. For single family offices, whose desires are wealth preservation with intergenerational growth, this backdrop requires discipline and clarity. 

Here are five steps family offices can take to position effectively.

1. Stay invested and resist tactical reactions
History shows that markets typically price geopolitical events quickly. The median equity sell-off around major geopolitical crises have lasted only 18 trading days , with recovery to prior levels within about a month. Investors who attempted to sidestep volatility often crystallized losses or missed rebounds. Over two decades, missing the ten best trading days cut cumulative returns by half. For families with long term investment horizons, the first step is resisting the temptation to trade headlines and maintaining disciplined exposure through crises.

2. Build resilience through portfolio design
Resilience should be embedded at the construction stage rather than added after the fact. Capital market assumptions must be updated regularly to reflect shifting fundamentals, while scenario stress-testing across outcomes such as stagflation, trade wars, or major conflict clarifies potential vulnerabilities. Our perpetual portfolio is designed for this purpose: it combines return-seeking assets with structural protection, enabling families to withstand shocks while remaining aligned to long-term objectives.

3. Use private markets to capture strategic shifts
Private markets are positioned to benefit from the realignment of global trade and security. Infrastructure and private equity managers can deploy capital into ports, logistics hubs, and national-security-linked technologies - assets that may attract policy support in a more factionalized world. Family offices, with their longer time horizons and capacity for illiquidity, are natural candidates to hold such positions. Within a perpetual portfolio, private allocations serve not only as growth drivers but also as exposure to the structural opportunities created by geopolitics.

4. Diversify globally and manage liquidity
Global diversification remains essential, but its role has changed. In a fragmented world, return dispersion between regions and sectors is likely to increase. Maintaining balanced global exposure reduces structural blind spots, while active management can tilt portfolios toward beneficiaries of supply-chain diversification or regional integration. Alongside this, liquidity must be managed. Family offices should maintain sufficient cash equivalents or low-risk assets to meet capital calls and spending needs even in stressed conditions. Far from being a drag, this liquidity buffer allows the broader portfolio to remain invested and provides optionality when markets dislocate.

5. Treat operational resilience as an investment strategy
Geopolitical risk extends beyond asset prices. Cybersecurity threats, the jurisdiction of custodians, and the domicile of assets all carry heightened importance. Overseas holdings can be exposed to sanctions, investment bans, or even expropriation. For family offices with global allocations, operational due diligence must be treated with the same rigour as investment analysis. Protecting data, verifying manager resilience, and assessing jurisdictional risks are integral components of long-term portfolio security.

For single family offices, these steps do more than safeguard capital - they position portfolios to capture the new opportunity sets emerging from geopolitical realignment. Crises may trigger short-term volatility, but history shows that markets recover faster than fear anticipates. Families that commit to discipline, diversification, and resilience will not only preserve wealth but also potentially sustain its growth across generations in a world that is being rewired.