Dallas, Texas · Established 2017
We serve ultra-high-net-worth entrepreneurs, executives, and family offices with the institutional expertise and personal discretion their wealth demands.
Minimum Assets
$5M+
Client Type
UHNW Individuals & Families
Structure
Independent RIA · Fiduciary
Our Approach
Every engagement begins with a deep understanding of your situation. What we build together is tailored exclusively to you — never templated.
Family Office Services
We act as your virtual family office — coordinating investments, tax strategy, estate planning, philanthropy, and financial administration into one coherent framework.
Explore →Investment Stewardship
Access the same caliber of investment thinking reserved for endowments and pension funds. We build diversified portfolios designed to protect and grow multi-generational wealth.
Explore →Legacy Planning
Preserve what you've built across generations. From irrevocable trusts and family limited partnerships to succession roadmaps for operating businesses, we plan with permanence in mind.
Explore →USA Today
Ranked among the top 1,000 RIA firms nationwide based on AUM growth and independent peer recommendations.
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Newsweek
Selected from over 16,000 SEC-registered advisory firms based on asset performance, client growth, adviser expertise, breadth of services, and independence.
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InvestmentNews
Recognized among the 75 fastest-growing fee-only registered investment advisors in the nation.
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Rankings and recognitions are not indicative of future performance, do not guarantee any specific level of results, and do not represent an endorsement by any publication. Methodology details are available directly from each ranking organization via the links above.
What We Do
From the first liquidity event through decades of stewardship, we bring every dimension of your financial life into alignment. As a Dallas wealth management firm, we serve families across the Metroplex with the partner-level attention significant wealth demands.
View All Services →The Vaquero Team
Our advisors bring decades of experience from institutional investment management, private banking, and family office practice. When you work with Vaquero, you work directly with the partners.
We maintain a deliberately limited client roster — ensuring each relationship receives the attention and continuity it deserves.
Meet Our Team →Managing Partner & Founder
CIMA®
Managing Partner
CFA®, CFP®
Director, Wealth Management
CFA®, CFP®
Director, Wealth Management Services
CTFA, AEP®
Real-world wealth planning solutions for ultra-high-net-worth families. Explore how we approach estate restructuring, executive equity compensation, concentrated stock diversification, and more.
Three generations, four trusts, and no coordinated plan. We unified the family's estate architecture, eliminated redundancies, and saved seven figures in projected estate taxes.
We restructured a client's private aviation bookings from an entrenched broker relationship to a direct-to-operator model, averaging 30%+ savings annually.
A C-suite executive was leaving millions on the table with her RSUs, ISOs, and deferred compensation. We built a tax-optimized exercise and liquidation plan across multiple tax years.
Perspectives on markets, estate planning, tax strategy, and wealth management from the advisors at Vaquero Private Wealth.
Estate planning may be the hardest professional hire to evaluate, for a structural reason: the work is graded long after you can do anything about it. A trust structure gets tested at a death, a divorce, an audit, or a sale — sometimes twenty years later, by which point the drafting attorney may be retired. Ten questions calibrated for an estate with entities in it. Why the conservative-versus-novel framing is the wrong question, and what a 2026 Fifth Circuit decision on a completely conventional family partnership says instead. What board certification and ACTEC fellowship actually verify, and what a clean State Bar profile does not show. How a signed plan ends up in the probate it was built to avoid, and why the beneficiary form beats the will and the trust. Who the attorney’s client is when your interests and your company’s diverge. Plus three more questions if a transaction is ahead — including whether the letter of intent matters as much as you have been told, and what a unanimous 2024 Supreme Court decision did to buy-sell agreements funded with corporate-owned life insurance.
Hiring a CPA is one of the few professional decisions where the interview works against you: technical mastery of the tax code and a fluent presence in a conference room are independent traits. Ten questions built for a balance sheet with entities in it. What a CPA license actually certifies and what it does not. Why peer review tells you nothing about the tax planning you are buying, and why a tax-only practice generally is not enrolled in it at all. Why an October filing is the normal result of holding K-1 positions rather than a sign of a disorganized firm — and why the payment date does not move with it. What the FTC Safeguards Rule requires your preparer to have, and which four elements most small practices are exempt from. Who can actually represent you in an examination. Plus three more questions if a company sale is on the horizon.
Equities rose on the broadest earnings growth since 2021 — ten of eleven sectors, nine in double digits — while payrolls fell and revisions took another 103,000 jobs off the prior two months. The more consequential shift is in private markets, where the binding constraint is no longer the rate of return but the return of capital: a fourth consecutive year of distributions at a third to a half of the normal pace. Much of it is duration rather than distress. Where private equity, venture, credit, real estate, infrastructure and energy stand — and why the dispersion that matters is now between managers rather than between asset classes.
You searched for an RIA in Dallas and got a list. Every firm on it is registered — which is the problem with the list. Registration with the SEC is a filing, not a license: there is no exam at the firm level, no experience minimum, and Form ADV Part 1A has no educational field at all. What the letters do guarantee is a fiduciary duty that cannot be waived and that covers the relationship rather than a moment in it. Which words are legally defined and which are pure marketing, why more than half of FINRA-registered representatives wear two hats, and the five Form ADV items that answer all of it in about ten minutes.
Two firms quote you 1% and 0.75%, and you cannot tell from those numbers which one costs more. The advertised advisory rate is one line in a longer bill — at every kind of firm, including ours. Where the rest of the money comes from: cash sweep spreads, product revenue sharing, alternatives platform fees, bundled trustee pricing, lending spreads, principal trading markups. What the firms publish about their own compensation grids. What investment management alone actually costs when an institution buys it. And the conflicts that survive in a fee-only model, named rather than denied.
Roughly $166 billion was collected under tariffs the Supreme Court struck down in February, and about $100 billion has been certified for payment. Refunds are not automatic, they go to the importer of record rather than whoever bore the cost, $1.6 billion is undelivered because of stale bank details, and the filing clock on the earliest entries starts expiring February 4, 2027. What that means for an owner — and what the $40 trillion debt milestone does and does not mean for a portfolio.
Begin a Conversation
An initial conversation with a Vaquero partner is confidential, complimentary, and without obligation. We want to understand your situation — and you deserve to understand our approach before making any commitment.
Custodied by Pershing Advisor Solutions, a BNY Mellon Company and Fidelity Investments.
