Stephens Group Asset Management

Stephens Group Asset Management

Stephens Group Asset Management (SGAM) was founded in 2017 by Witt Stephens, Jr. and Elizabeth Campbell alongside Alan and Bill Tedford. The roots trace back to 1966, when Bill Tedford joined Stephens Inc. as its first stockbroker. He later built and managed the firm's fixed-income and equity divisions, while Alan joined in the 1990s and eventually co-developed the all-ETF strategy that SGAM formalized. The RIA emerged as an independent vehicle to serve the Stephens family and external clients under a fiduciary standard, leveraging the Tedfords' institutional portfolio-management DNA. SGAM's core strategy, branded Optimized Portfolio Strategy, relies on proprietary index blends built with ETFs to construct customized client portfolios spanning asset classes including fixed income, equities, and alternative allocations. The firm serves individuals, trusts, corporations, and retirement accounts, adding non-discretionary retirement plan advisory services in 2019. Its investment approach deliberately avoids single-security selection or direct private-equity exposure, instead emphasizing asset-allocation discipline and cost efficiency through indexed vehicles. Relevant sectors include Private Credit, Real Estate, Hedge Funds, and Secondaries & Special Situations as accessed through ETF and fund structures, with a client base concentrated in the United States. SGAM does not disclose its assets under management or total deployment figures. It operates from a single office in Little Rock, Arkansas, at 100 River Bluff Drive. The team is led by Managing Partner Alan Tedford, supported by the foundational presence of Bill Tedford and the ongoing capital and oversight of the Stephens family's co-founders. In 2019, SGAM expanded its service scope to include non-discretionary retirement plan advisory work, which marked the last publicly disclosed structural evolution. No additional adjacency vehicles, external club memberships, or philanthropic structures are disclosed. SGAM's structural differentiator is its multi-decade, two-family operating alliance converted into a fiduciary RIA. Unlike most wealth managers who build client books through broad prospecting, SGAM was purpose-built around a single, deeply embedded relationship between the Stephens family — a prominent Arkansas financial dynasty — and the Tedford family's investment team. That origin produced a firm that markets an institutional investment program developed inside Stephens Inc. but now dispensed independently, a rare governance setup that blends single-family office heritage with an open-client advisory model.