Tax-aware long-short finds new channel as Vise adds Interactive Brokers

Vise, the AI-powered portfolio platform for registered investment advisors, has added Interactive Brokers as a custodian for its tax-aware long-short strategy, giving advisors another place to run the approach as the industry’s largest custodians make it harder to reach.

Advisors can now implement Vise Long Short in client accounts at Interactive Brokers at all four of the strategy’s leverage settings, from 130/30 to 250/150, the company said. That includes higher-leverage versions that new accounts can no longer open at some of the biggest custodians.

Interactive Brokers joins Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs Custody Solutions, Raymond James, TradePMR and Altruist on the platform.

Vise, which reported more than $160 billion in platform assets across more than 245,000 accounts as of October, said onboarding is fully digital and usually takes about two weeks.

How the long-short strategy works

An extension of direct indexing, tax-aware long-short strategies – TALS for short – holds a core of stocks expected to outperform and pairs it with short positions in names expected to lag, while net market exposure stays at 100%.

Because some positions are usually trading at a loss, daily tax-loss harvesting can capture losses even in rising markets, when long-only portfolios offer little to harvest. For advisors, TALS strategies are often useful for clients with large embedded gains, such as a concentrated stock position or a business sale.

“Long short has been treated as a product for a select few. The problem it addresses is not. Plenty of clients are sitting on a concentrated position or a large embedded gain,” said Samir Vasavada, co-founder and co-head of Vise.

Read more: Beyond tax loss harvesting: why long-short strategies demand a harder look

Why custodians are throttling long-short SMAs

Access has narrowed sharply over the past year. Fidelity stopped opening and funding new long-short separately managed accounts in December last year, and later raised costs for some existing clients.

Schwab capped the strategy at 30% of an RIA’s assets on its platform in April. Several months later in September, Schwab raised its minimum for new tax-aware long-short accounts to $10 million from $1 million and stopped accepting new clients or fresh money into higher-leverage portfolio margin accounts, its third tightening of the year.

In its Q3 2026 earnings call last month, Schwab revealed $60.7 billion of the $187.9 billion in client margin loans outstanding on its balance sheet at the end of September were tied to TALS strategies used by RIAs.

“It was important to us to throttle growth for a period of time to make sure that we can support this from an operational standpoint, from a capacity standpoint,” Schwab CEO Rick Wurster told analysts on the call.

Read more: Schwab’s RIA business keeps growing even as it reins in long-short strategies

The restrictions at Schwab and other large players have forced advisors and asset managers to rethink long-short SMA strategies, and some have moved accounts between custodians.

Demand for tax alpha keeps building

In its most recent independent advisor outlook survey, Schwab found 90% currently offer tax-efficient investing solutions, while 4% had plans to offer them in the next three years. A similar 93% majority of advisors considered improving tax efficiency for clients' investments as a priority.

"Advisors are expanding what they offer - alternatives, private markets, tax-smart strategies - and the good news is that clients are ready for that conversation," said Jalina Kerr, head of Advisor Experience at Schwab Advisor Services. "They're focused on the long term, and they want to know how these strategies serve them."

According to tracking by Cerulli, TALS were the seventh-largest SMA asset class by the first quarter of 2026, with $116.5 billion. Direct indexing became the first retail SMA asset class to top $1 trillion, reaching $1.2 trillion.

Among managed account platform sponsors, improving tax management capabilities was the top development priority for a second straight year, Cerulli found.

“While security selection is encumbered by the reality that ‘past performance is no indicator of future returns,’ tax optimization capabilities are a much more reliable source of post-tax alpha,” said Scott Smith, a senior director at Cerulli.