Kelley Investments

Kelley Investments

Sean Kelley established the firm in 2017 in San Diego, providing investment advisory and wealth management services to individuals, families, corporations, and institutional clients. The founding was built on a financial planning and pension consulting core, positioning the firm as a fiduciary adviser rather than a proprietary fund manager. Kelley Investments constructs portfolios spanning public equities, fixed income, and alternative investments including private real estate and private credit. The firm does not market its own commingled vehicles — it selects third-party managers and direct holdings across multiple asset classes on behalf of each client, calibrating for liquidity needs and tax sensitivity. Its geographic concentration is domestic US, with allocations to global developed and emerging markets through externally managed funds. The firm maintains a single office in San Diego, and team size and assets under management have not been publicly disclosed. Unlike multi-family offices that aggregate capital into internal funds, Kelley Investments functions more like a registered investment adviser building individualized mandates — a structure common among breakaway wirehouse advisers but less typical for firms calling themselves "investments" rather than "advisory." Kelley Investments departs from the standard wealth management architecture by forgoing manufactured products entirely. Its structural differentiator is negative: the absence of proprietary funds, which eliminates the incentive to push in-house strategies. This aligns the firm with the fee-only fiduciary model that has gained share from commission-based brokerages since the Department of Labor fiduciary rule debates of the 2010s.