Since I’ll soon be somewhere in Brooklyn losing a wrestling match with a car seat, I wanted my last newsletter for a while to be an impactful one.
As I think forward to the months ahead, I’m excited to unplug and see what has happened upon my return to the real world.
Like what will Rudy Giuliani get arrested for next? Or will we have solved the AI water supply issue by feeding them1 Gatorade instead?
In This Issue
Firm Updates + our new mission
People moves
By The Numbers
Resources for You
Portfolio Updates
🏛 Firm Updates
If you don’t know it by now, I should explain that we approach the financial planner to client relationship a little different than most.
Contrary to others, I believe we are in the hospitality business just as much as we are in the financial services business. A life of serving is a noble one, not one to be looked down upon.
With that in mind, I feel it’s important that you, as our shareholders, get to share in our wins too.
If you stop and think about how much you genuinely want your financial planning team to make, the honest answer lands somewhere between "I hope they stay in business" and "I hope they're not buying a yacht with my money." We're aiming for that exact middle.
We are wrapping up our 6th year as a firm and I want to walk you through a few milestones I haven’t shared before.
🎢 Enjoy The Ride
We sat down to define our core mission statement recently and, if you’ve ever had to do this, it sucks. How dare you try to define everything we stand for and our complex existence as humans into a short phrase? Shakespeare could never.2
After many arguments, there is no better mission statement for Icono Capital than “Enjoy the Ride”.
One of the reasons our approach is different than most is that we are actively growing our organization and willingly taking less profit per person. Why? Because building something meaningful that outlives our careers together is more valuable than extra income.
That sounds like a lot of lip service, but the truth is I need this framing so you understand how we think about the future.
What is the point of building a hyper efficient, high stress firm with 1-2 people just to make a shitload of money and burn out early with nobody to share it with? I’d rather enjoy the ride baby, and that ethos shines through to our approach to financial conversations with our clients too.
People
With our core mission in mind, I had to take a hard look at how we were currently operating to find opportunities to improve. Here is what changed:
Gene Thompson, CFP® promoted to Lead Financial Planner
As the founder of our company, I was kind of the presumed defacto lead planner despite Gene’s knowledge base always being ahead of mine. Making the title official gives you the signal of trust we’ve always had in him to deliver the best we can offer.
Matthew Scott promoted to Chief Operating Officer
Matt is the reason the trains run on time around here. We often joke that we never had an adult in the room until Matt showed up and bestowed upon us all of his corporate jargon experience.
We couldn’t be more excited for him to help shepherd Icono into its new chapter of growth. I’m not much of a religious or cosmic person, but I do believe Matt found us at the right time for a reason.
Matthew Snider hired as Cryptocurrency and Analytics Consultant
Have you ever met somebody who just seems to know a lot about everything? That's Matt. I met him on a cryptocurrency panel we did in Chicago last year, and since then he's quietly become one of the most valuable resources our team has. So we made it official. We've partnered with his firm, Block 3 Strategy, to bring Matt on as a part-time consultant, available directly to you for the complex cryptocurrency and financial-analytics work most planners politely pretend doesn't exist. Cold storage, on-chain yield, tax lots scattered across a dozen wallets, the stuff that makes a normal CPA's eye twitch. If it lives on a blockchain or needs a sharper analytical brain than the rest of us can offer, Matt's your guy. If you want to know more about him, subscribe to his substack below.
📊 By The Numbers
So, how is Icono Capital doing as a whole? I think it’s important to be transparent about our situation given how trusting our clients have to be with their livelihood in exchange.
Below are 3 numbers measuring across different areas of our business you should find helpful.
155 - Total Client Households
We get asked constantly: how many clients do you have? We count it in households (one for a family, one for a single individual).
Back in 2020 we worked with roughly 600 households at Northwestern Mutual and brought 45 of them with us to start fresh at Icono.
2020 (year end): 46
2021: 57
2022: 72
2023: 88
2024: 112
2025: 140
2026: 155 (through May)
We're now spread across 18 regions now. 77% of you are in New York (89 households upstate, 31 in the city), with the other 35 scattered everywhere from California to Florida to Dorothy’s House (Kansas).
22 - Project Engagements (Since 2025)
Quick housekeeping note for the long-timers: the way we package our ongoing work has changed. We now run two relationship tiers, GWM Essentials and GWM Premier, and you can see the full breakdown at iconocapital.com/services. None of it changes your engagement.
The one I actually want to talk about is newer: Project-Based Planning.
Not everyone needs (or wants) an ongoing relationship. Plenty of people are perfectly capable of running their own plan and just want a sharp second set of eyes, a roadmap, or help with one big decision: a 401(k) rollover, a retirement-income projection, a Roth conversion analysis, an equity comp divest. So we built a one-time, scoped engagement for exactly that. We work together for 3-6 months and off you go.
Since we added it in 2025 we’ve done 22 of these! Every one of them for someone we otherwise would have had to turn away. Twenty-two households who didn’t fit the old all-in-or-nothing mold and now have a real plan, because there was finally a door their size.
Which brings me to my one ask. You almost certainly know somebody who’s sharp with money, allergic to the phrase “hiring an advisor,” and sitting on one gnarly decision they keep kicking down the road. That person is the perfect project client. Send them our way. It’s the lowest-commitment, highest-value introduction you can make.
38% - Six-Year Revenue CAGR
This is the one I’m proudest of, and the one I have to be very careful with how I present it.
There are thousands of reasons Icono shouldn’t be in business still. I’m not being hyperbolic, the three of us had barely enough money to live on when we took this leap. Living that reality has kept our focus clear and gives us the ability to not give a shit about passing up an opportunity that would compromise what we stand for.
Since we opened the doors, our revenue has compounded at 38% a year, six years running. The typical advisory firm doesn’t grow anywhere close to that. We’ve been expanding at more than four times the industry’s pace.
I’m telling you because that growth is exactly what funds the promise from a few sections up. We take less profit per person on purpose, then pour the room that growth creates back into the firm: hiring ahead of where we are, better tools, and a deeper bench than a shop our size has any right to have. Grow the pie, and everyone at the table eats better. Especially because we know what it’s like to live on crumbs.
Resources for You
A few tools we’ve put real money and time behind that you may not be aware of!
📱 Text Us
Easiest one first. You can text us at (585) 504-1616. It goes to a central platform we can all see!
Income Lab
Most people in retirement obsess over whether they have enough. The harder question is how much you can actually spend without blowing it, and Income Lab answers that one in real time. Dynamic guardrails tell you when there's room to spend more and when it's time to ease off.
For anyone that is interested in testing their retirement plan through a different lens, reach out! We can set up Income Lab for you.
Monarch Money
Listen, budgeting tech is inherently lame. But this is the least lame of them all and we will pay for it!
Bonus mention: it now has enabled features for business owners. It is perfect for solo or small company setups that hate Quickbooks as much as I do.
Hazel
This one’s my favorite and the newest. Hazel is tax projection and planning software that our Custodian, Altruist launched this year. It’s so effing good that we were able to cancel three other subscriptions saving us thousands per year in tech.
In one sample review it dug up north of $30,000 in refunds and amendments that were missed. Your old CPA isn’t going back to re-read your 2021 return. Hazel does.
Portfolio Updates by Jack Hills
With Chris heading out on paternity and me not having sent anything out recently, this felt like the right time to cover a few things.
First, I’d like to send out something like this more frequently, covering some of the broader topics happening economically, financially and most importantly NOT politically. But if there are things you’d like to see or topics covered shoot me an email, because chances are you’re not the only one, and I’ll try to bake it into the newsletter.
Next I’d like to cover what’s been going on inside the sleeves that make up your portfolios:
Overall we’ve seen a ton of volatility to start the year; new fed chairs, old wars becoming new, and new wars potentially coming to a cease fire. These have dominated the headlines, and been the driving factor in returns so far this year. BUT volatility can be a good thing too, it can even be an opportunity for us to harvest losses in taxable accounts, get better entry and exit points inside our equity comp plans, and even time Roth conversions too. Meaning there’s always something positive we’re able to do, even when everything else is negative. That being said, lets dive in:
Core equity: This is where the bulk of your assets are invested and it has been incredibly consistent already up over 14% YTD, compared to the S&P 500 which is up “only” a little over 10%.
Rotational: The rotational has been another bright spot for our clients up roughly ~16% YTD and showing no signs of slowing, with the primary thesis of AI related hardware, rare earth elements, digital infrastructure, and the energy needed to power all that leading the returns.
Fixed income: The fixed income sleeve has been steady Eddy, but the bond market still remains pretty chaotic, returning only 1.37% but compare that to the your average total bond ETF that’s up less than ~0.15%. The reason being interest rate and inflation concerns, which has led to a lot of volatility and chop in the bond market specifically.
Inflation and Economy:
First-quarter GDP accelerated to 2.0%, which says the underlying economy is resilient. But consumer sentiment in April fell 6.7% to its lowest level since 1952. Add in that Powell’s term expires in May 2026, with Kevin Warsh (a known proponent of lower rates) expected to be confirmed as the next Fed chair, and you’ve got uncertainty everywhere.
On inflation: it’s running around 3.58%, up from 2.4% before the Iran war. What gives? Energy. Tariffs tied to the Strait of Hormuz and the war in general have pushed broader energy prices up 12.5%, gas up 18.9%, and crude up 44.2%. All of which feed straight into CPI.
Despite all of it, markets have largely looked past the turmoil. The Iran war still dominates headlines and dictates intraday moves, but a ceasefire helped steady things even as energy prices surged. The takeaway: investors are willing to look past oil-price risk in the short term. The AI trade and strong earnings were powerful enough to drown out the geopolitical noise, at least for a month.
Software vs Hardware and “The Great Tech Bifurcation:
Stage 1 Models & Research (~2020–2023) (proof of concept)
Stage 2 Hardware & Infrastructure (~2023–present) (this is the rotational thesis)
Stage 3 Applications & Software (just beginning) (where AI translates into real-world business value through software)
The AI narrative has matured. In early 2026, new LLM releases showed how easily AI tools could replace legacy software companies, and now the question investors are wrestling with is: will SaaS companies be the beneficiaries of AI, or the victims of it? The answer is yes. And no. (I didn’t say that just to sound mysterious.) Some companies will pivot, some won’t, and right now it’s too early to tell. The frame I’d use: whose products are being rewritten by AI, and whose products are being used to write the next generation of it?
For now, investors are aggressively rotating capital out of software-heavy “Stage 3” names and into the “Stage 2” hardware and infrastructure backbone. The logic is simple: hardware demand is tangible and backlogged, while software’s AI payoff is still unproven. Our focus inside the rotational stays on the hardware.
🏁 That’s a Wrap
That’s the everything-update. Be good to the team while I’m out, they’re better at this than I am anyway. As always, subscribe so these land in your inbox the second they post.
Enjoy the ride,
Chris
Who is them? You don’t want to know.
Side footnote: have you watched Hamnet? Don’t, if you hate crying.
Grateful for the opportunity @Christopher Haigh keep up the great work!