Equity Group Investments owns a bluefin tuna fishery in Baja California. It owns a John Deere shop. It owns a foot bridge that links San Diego to the Tijuana airport.
That is not a portfolio built to chase the AI boom. That is the point.
The Trade Has A Name
Wall Street is calling it HALO. The acronym means "heavy assets, low obsolescence." In plain English: stuff that does not go stale.
The idea is to buy firms that AI cannot replace. The kind that throw off steady cash. The kind that do not live or die with the next tech cycle.
Family offices have been doing this for years. Now bigger investors are catching on.
Mark Sotir runs EGI. He said it this way: "If you're thinking out 10 years, 12 years, you have to start with picking a company in an industry that you know will be around." Hard to know where software lives in a decade. Easy to know people will still need tractors.
The long view is the edge. Buyout firms have to sell in 3 to 7 years. Family offices can wait.
That patience pays off. Asset-heavy firms tend to scare off short-horizon buyers. That leaves room for family offices to scoop them up cheap.
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The Tax Code Is Helping
The new "one big beautiful bill" law brought back a tax break called bonus depreciation. That lets firms write off the full cost of new gear, like machines and trucks, in the first year they are used.
For asset-heavy firms, that is a big deal. Brian Hans at UBS called it "a very material change that can make a big difference in terms of the tax benefit."
It gets better. If a family takes an active role in the firm, the write-off can offset income from other holdings. That includes stock with big gains.
For families sitting on years of stock market gains, that is real money.
The same logic pulls in auto and gear shops. Joe Mowery, who works on dealership deals at Stephens, said: "They like a tax-advantaged income stream."
What Is Coming Next
Sotir says EGI is looking at U.S. farms. Rising costs for fuel and fertilizer are squeezing them. He is also getting more calls from owners hit by tariffs and price hikes.
"The amount of uncertainty that people are dealing with has oddly turned into a benefit for us," he said.
EGI does just one or two deals a year. It is in no rush. It has time on its side.
Some of those firms are also fenced off from new rivals. EGI's John Deere shop sits in a spot where no other John Deere shop can open nearby, thanks to the brand's rules. Its tuna fishery runs into hard fishing quotas that keep new rivals out.
While the rest of the street fights for the next chip stock, family offices are buying the things AI cannot touch.
It is a quiet trade. But it is real. And it is growing fast.
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