A family-office approach for families focused on wealth across generations.

Founded in 2009 · Independent RIA · Los Angeles

The Practice.

Families managing complex wealth typically end up with a CPA, an estate attorney, an investment advisor, an insurance broker, and a banker — each brings real competence to their piece of the work, but none is responsible for ensuring the pieces fit together. Things fall through the cracks: a private investment isn't stepped up, creating a capital gain that didn't need to exist; a new CPA joins with deeper estate and trust expertise but without the history; a tax opportunity passes between filings because no one was watching for it. Sometimes it's outside any one professional's scope, sometimes it's simply missed — but the cumulative cost of these gaps is often meaningful.

Complex wealth has a coordination problem. That's what we are built for.

Aqua exists to be the family's CFO — the one professional whose job is the whole picture. We coordinate the work the family's existing advisors are doing with the work we take on directly, and keep every piece moving in step. We work with an intentionally small number of households, so we can know each one in depth and build relationships designed to last.

Our Services

In our experience, most financial plans are an accounting exercise: cash flow, retirement projections, a target number. Real planning is more — what the next twenty years look like, what wealth is for, what the family wants to leave behind. The answers reshape every financial decision underneath. We work through this methodically and revisit it as life happens. The plan is a living, changing process, not a one-time deliverable.

A portfolio is not just the assets sitting on our platform. It is every account in the family's name — the 401(k), the inherited IRA, the brokerage account at another firm, the concentrated stock from the founder's company, the cash sitting in a savings account waiting for a purpose. We build the portfolio around the whole picture, with the tax situation, the concentration risks, and the liquidity needs of each member of the household considered together.

The investment philosophy itself is unchanged across decades: diversified, low-cost, and grounded in academic finance research rather than market predictions or product stories. Most active managers underperform low-cost index strategies after fees and taxes,¹ and the families we advise should not pay for what the evidence does not support. What matters is what the family keeps after tax.

Tax work happens in the seams between professionals. The CPA files the return; the attorney drafts the document; neither is responsible for what's possible in between. We watch for what falls through: Roth conversions timed for a low-income year, asset location across spouse accounts, loss harvesting that interacts with charitable giving, withdrawal sequencing that preserves bracket-edge thresholds. We work with the family's CPA — not around them — and we surface what falls between specialists.

A drafted trust is not a funded trust. A signed estate plan is not an executed one. We work alongside the family's attorney in an effort to make sure what was designed actually happens — that the trust is funded, that ongoing administrative requirements are met, that beneficiary designations stay aligned as the family changes, and that the family genuinely understands what was put in place and why. The attorney drafts the document; we keep it operational and understandable.

We manage each family's financial picture the way we manage our own. Full picture, not just a select subset of accounts. Cost-efficient, because fees and taxes compound just as returns do. Long-term, because the decisions that matter most play out over decades.

We are a fiduciary in every engagement — obligated to put your interests first. We hold ourselves to the same standard we set for clients. The principles that guide our advice are the ones we follow ourselves.

The Team.

The firm is small by intention; each family's relationship is anchored in the same small team over time.

No. 01

Jeff Fang

Founder · Managing Principal
CFP®

Jeff founded Aqua in 2009 to advise a small number of families across decades, paid only by the people whose interests he represents.

Before Aqua, he spent seven years at Merrill Lynch as an Assistant Vice President and Wealth Management Advisor. Earlier, he held strategic-leadership roles at several Silicon Valley companies in semiconductor and data-infrastructure businesses — work that informs the way he thinks about technology, capital allocation, and the long arc of an industry.

Jeff serves as the firm's Managing Member and Chief Compliance Officer. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alabama, where he was elected to Eta Kappa Nu. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their three children.

No. 02

John P. DeFonso

Private Wealth Advisor
CFA® · CPWA®

John has worked in wealth advisory since the late 1990s, providing investment management, planning, and counsel to individuals and families across more than two decades of market cycles. He joined Aqua in 2016.

Prior to Aqua, John was Managing Member and Chief Compliance Officer at Arxstone Partners. He serves on the Board of Governors for the CFA Society of Los Angeles and on the Society's Wealth Management Advisory Board. He holds the Chartered Financial Analyst® charter and the Certified Private Wealth Advisor® designation, and earned his BS in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their two children.

No. 03

Wendy Lee

Director of Client Relations
Operations · Relationship Management

Wendy joined Aqua after a career in wealth services that included Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management and OffRoad Capital, where she was instrumental in establishing OffRoad's joint venture in Asia.

At Aqua, she leads client relations and the operational coordination that holds the firm's day-to-day work together — onboarding, account servicing, scheduling, document logistics, and the careful chain of communication between the practice and each family it advises. Wendy is fluent in Korean and received her BA from Cornell University. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two children.

Contact

We welcome a first conversation — by phone, video, or in person.

Office
1901 Avenue of the Stars, Suite 1005
Los Angeles, California 90067