About Pantile
We started as a hedge fund. We built what its clients had.
Pantile began in 2021 as a quantitative hedge fund, and its clients were family offices. What David saw working with them was not a product but a service model: one team handling investments, tax, estate, lending, and private deals for a single family. Pantile exists to bring that model to the broadest group of people possible.
Why we founded Pantile
Three things we took from the family office.
Each one is a constraint the industry treats as normal. The platform exists because we did not.
The whole picture
A family office sees everything. Most advisors see a slice.
A family office works because one team holds the whole balance sheet: the operating business, the trusts, the private deals, the lending, and the cash. Most advisors can only see the accounts they custody, so the plan is built on a fraction. We started by integrating the whole chain, because everything downstream depends on it.
Depth for everyone
The service model was reserved for the largest families
Estate structuring, tax strategy, equity comp analysis, liability management, and private markets were priced per engagement, so households below the threshold got a portfolio and a phone call. Building those services into the platform is what makes the same depth affordable for a $400k household and a $40M one.
Two ways in
The broadest reach runs through the advisors people already trust
Clients can work with Pantile directly. But most families already have an advisor, and most of those advisors are owner-operators who would run a family office for every client if the platform existed. So advisors affiliate with Pantile and bring every service on it to their book, and the model reaches far more people than we could serve alone.
Our investing philosophy
The investing came from the hedge fund. It runs every portfolio on the platform.
The standard advice in wealth management is to buy a diversified mix of index funds and hold. That advice is easy to give, easy to defend, and frequently leaves significant value on the table.
Passive funds don't manage risk: they just spread it across more names. They don't optimize taxes: they generate them indiscriminately. And they certainly don't adapt when the macro environment shifts.
Our team holds doctoral-level training in finance and quantitative methods, and the portfolio construction we ran for family offices as a hedge fund is what the platform runs today. It applies to every client account, whether the client came to us directly or through an advisor who affiliated, regardless of account size.
Risk-managed portfolio construction
Most advisors put clients in passive index funds because it is simple and defensible, not because it is optimal. We build portfolios using quantitative methods that actively manage factor exposure, correlation, and downside risk, reducing drawdowns without giving up meaningful upside.
Returns that hold up across market conditions
A passive S&P 500 fund works great in a bull market. It works terribly when volatility spikes, rates rise, or correlations break down. Our portfolios are designed to generate consistent returns across full market cycles, not just the easy years.
Tax strategy woven into every decision
The average investor loses 1 to 2 percent of annual returns to avoidable tax drag. We build tax efficiency into the portfolio from day one: asset location, tax-loss harvesting, and multi-year planning that treats your tax bill as a cost to be actively managed, not accepted.
The people behind Pantile
Advisors and engineers, building the family office as a platform.
David Baines
CEO, Founder, and Chief Investment Officer
- –MBA in Finance, Boston University
- –Doctorate in Finance, Washington University in St. Louis
- –PhD in Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder
- –Series 65 Licensed Investment Advisor
- –10+ years in quantitative portfolio management
- –Former Leader, Corporate Finance at Verizon
- –Published researcher in portfolio optimization
- –Founded Pantile Investments in 2021
Why I Started Pantile
Pantile started in 2021 as a quantitative hedge fund, and the clients I worked with were family offices. What struck me was not the portfolios. It was the service model. One team saw everything a family owned and handled all of it: the investments, the taxes, the estate, the lending, the private deals, the cash. Nothing fell between specialists, because there was no between.
Before that, I spent over a decade building products in finance and running quantitative strategies for large institutional investors, and I had already seen that institutional-grade portfolio construction did not need to be reserved for endowments and pension funds. Working with family offices showed me the same thing about the whole model. Almost nobody gets it, not because it is complicated, but because it has only ever been delivered by hand, to families large enough to pay for the hands.
So we built the family office as a platform, and we opened two doors to it. Clients can work with Pantile directly. Owner-operated advisors can affiliate with us and bring every service on the platform to the clients they already have, with the back office run by us. Either way, the goal is the same one I started with: bring the all-in-one service model to the broadest group of people possible, with real advisors and evidence behind every decision.
