Editorial companion

What stands out

Bloomberg lays out a simple, unsettling fact: the rich are treating the tax code like another asset to be optimized. The clip traces the rise of “tax alpha,” born of a decade in which the S&P 500 roughly quadrupled and left huge, concentrated gains in a few tech names. Wealthy investors now use strategies from tax-aware long-short trades to Section 351 conversions, and firms like AQR turned aggressive tax-loss harvesting into a competitive moat. Technology plus obscure, century-old provisions mean tax engineering is no longer niche, it is scaleable.