Charter Research & Investment Group

Charter Research & Investment Group

Charter Research & Investment Group was founded in 1988 in Southport, Connecticut, as an independent, fee-only SEC Registered Investment Advisor. The firm explicitly positions itself as an alternative to large financial institutions, structuring its practice to serve a deliberately limited number of affluent individuals and families. This capacity-managed approach is the central architectural choice: by refusing to scale the client base, the firm claims it can maintain bespoke portfolio construction and a high-touch service model that larger competitors cannot replicate. The firm’s investment strategy centers on direct securities ownership within customized, tax-managed portfolios. Charter avoids pooled investment structures, instead building concentrated positions — often managing legacy single-stock exposures — and running a low-turnover strategy designed to minimize realized capital gains. Its website points to services spanning money management, retirement strategy, wealth transfer, and trust and estate planning. The geographic footprint is local: Southport, within Connecticut’s Fairfield County wealth corridor, with no additional offices disclosed. Charter’s scale is deliberately opaque; the firm publishes no AUM figure, no team headcount, and no list of named investment professionals on its public-facing materials. This is consistent with the low-profile, relationship-driven posture it describes. A phone call serves as the only intake mechanism. The firm does not advertise adjacent venture arms, philanthropic foundations, or club memberships. Its website text, last scraped in May 2026, remains static on service descriptions. Charter’s structural differentiator is its pure implementation of a capacity-constrained, direct-securities model for taxable wealth. Most RIAs serving the same demographic have shifted toward model portfolios, ETFs, or external manager allocations to gain operational scale. Charter’s decision to stay concentrated, unbundled, and manually managed — with tax outcomes customized trade by trade — represents an increasingly rare operating architecture in the US wealth management industry.