Mainstay Capital Management

Mainstay Capital Management

David Kudla launched Mainstay Capital Management in 2000, scaling the registered investment advisor from a one-man operation in Grand Blanc, Michigan, into a firm that manages several billion dollars in discretionary client assets. Kudla, a former General Motors engineer who retooled into financial services, built the practice around a thesis that corporate retirement savers needed institutional-quality management that employer-sponsored plans typically do not provide. The firm's client base skews heavily toward GM and Delphi salaried retirees, reflecting its deep roots in the automotive corridor north of Detroit. The firm deploys an active multi-asset approach, blending individual equity and fixed-income selection with tactical ETF allocations across U.S. large-cap, international developed, emerging markets, and investment-grade credit. Rather than outsourcing to model portfolios, Kudla's investment committee runs a proprietary direct-indexing overlay that harvests tax losses across hundreds of individual stock positions. Core sector exposures include industrials, technology, financials, and healthcare — holdings historically skewed toward blue-chip names such as Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, and Procter & Gamble. The firm serves clients across Michigan, Florida, and other Sun Belt retirement destinations. Mainstay discloses 15 professionals on its public ADV filing, with Kudla serving as CEO and Chief Investment Strategist. The advisory operates a single office in Grand Blanc, though Kudla maintains a satellite presence in Naples, Florida, during winter months when a large share of the retiree client base resides there. The firm has launched adjacent educational businesses including a market-commentary publication and financial-literacy workshops for corporate human-resources departments. In March 2024 Kudla published a market outlook emphasizing the Magnificent Seven's continued earnings dominance as justification for concentrated U.S. equity exposure in client retirement accounts (per the firm, March 2024). Mainstay's structural differentiator is its geographic arbitrage. Operating from Grand Blanc keeps overhead well below a comparable RIA in Chicago or New York, allowing the firm to manage smaller account sizes profitably — a critical advantage for serving the middle-market retiree demographic that wirehouses typically shed. Kudla's engineering background also informs a systems-driven investment process uncommon among generalist RIAs in non-coastal markets.