David R. Schawel
Chief Investment OfficerDavid Schawel leads investment strategy at Family Management and works directly with a number of the firm’s largest client families, a dual role he has held since becoming Chief Investment Officer in 2017. Because he both designs the firm’s portfolios and sits across the table from the families who own them, every recommendation he makes is one he has to be able to explain plainly and stand behind personally. David works with multi-generational families, business owners, and nonprofit boards on the full range of investment questions they face: building a portfolio around a concentrated stock position, managing taxes across taxable and tax-deferred accounts, deciding whether private investments belong in the mix, and preparing the next generation to be good stewards of what they inherit. Clients value his ability to take a complex decision and reduce it to the few things that actually matter.
His investment philosophy is deliberately simple. Every holding in a portfolio has a specific job and a clearly stated limit on what it will not do. Fees are paid only where they demonstrably earn their keep. Portfolios are built first around how they will behave in a difficult year, not how they look in a good one, and private-market returns are never taken at face value. Guiding all of it is the belief that being approximately right over decades beats being precisely wrong in any single year.
David has built much of the firm’s proprietary research and portfolio-construction framework, and he invests his own capital in the same strategies he recommends to clients.
Before joining Family Management from New River Investments, where he managed private portfolios, David spent seven years at Square 1 Financial as Vice President and Portfolio Manager and a member of the Square 1 Asset Management investment committee. He began his career in equity research and investment banking.
David is a CFA charterholder and earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Management, with a concentration in Finance, from North Carolina State University.
