Clearstead

Clearstead

Clearstead was established in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1988 and operates as an independent investment consulting and advisory firm serving endowments, foundations, pension funds, and substantial family offices. The firm does not manage proprietary commingled pools of capital as its primary engine; rather, it functions as an outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO) and discretionary advisor, constructing and monitoring allocations across public and private markets on behalf of each client. David Fulton, the firm's chief executive, anchors a partnership structured to avoid the conflicts inherent in broker-dealer affiliated advisory models. The advisory practice allocates across a deliberately broad opportunity set that spans public equities and fixed income, alongside a meaningful private-market book. Clearstead's investment team covers private equity, private credit, real estate, and hedge fund strategies, deploying primarily through fund commitments and select co-investment vehicles rather than direct balance-sheet deals. The firm's OCIO mandates frequently include pacing models that manage vintage-year diversification within an illiquidity budget, a discipline particularly relevant for smaller endowments and first-generation family-office clients with limited internal manager-research staff. Its real assets research emphasizes core-plus real estate and infrastructure, often accessed via specialized external managers. Clearstead maintains a single headquarters in Cleveland and has not publicly disclosed a dedicated outpost in other major financial centers. As an advisory firm rather than a fund sponsor, its reported professional headcount tends to be modest relative to autonomously scaling asset gatherers. In recent years, the firm has observed a market-wide shift among its endowment and foundation clients toward higher allocations to private credit and lower-middle-market buyout funds, a theme reflected in the manager due-diligence calendars that the advisory team maintains for client-specific portfolios. Clearstead's structural distinction lies in its fiduciary-only posture, which eliminates product manufacturing and proprietary-fund conflicts from advisory decisions. This architecture is increasingly relevant for institutional asset owners who screen for misaligned incentives when hiring an OCIO. The firm's governance and partnership structure suggest a deliberate preference for independence over integration within a larger financial conglomerate, preserving a narrow focus on multi-asset-class portfolio design and manager selection for tax-exempt and taxable pools of capital.