Built from market structure and institutional discipline.
Hard Asset Reserve was founded by two partners whose careers cover both sides of modern wealth — inside the financial system and in the physical precious-metals operation outside of it. The firm exists for the portion of a portfolio that deserves a different structure.
- Morgan Stanley
- EY-Parthenon
- Deloitte
A specific question, asked carefully.
Across a generation, markets became faster, cheaper, and easier to access. The wealth held inside them became increasingly abstract — a sequence of account balances, fund shares, and paper claims resting on counterparty rails nearly invisible to the investor whose name sits on the statement.
Hard Asset Reserve was built to answer a specific question — the one that comes after allocation is decided: what would it actually take to own a physical reserve well, and hold it for the long run. Not a product question. An architecture question. Custody, titling, documentation, continuity, and a planned exit — the work that makes a reserve act like a reserve.
The practice runs on three premises. That a portfolio and a reserve are different jobs. That clarity on the page is more useful than conviction off of it. And that a reserve built with intent deserves stewardship, not a handshake.
The firm is new — deliberately. The private-client precious-metals category has been served for decades by operations designed for 1999: newsletter-driven demand generation, founder-as-oracle voice, opaque fee schedules, and architectures that predate both modern custody standards and modern institutional publication design. Each of those choices made sense when it was made. None of them can be retrofitted without unwinding the business.
A firm built in 2026 can make the inverse commitments from the start. Named refiner provenance (Argor-Heraeus, MKS PAMP, Valcambi). Named depository counterparties (the Utah-based Precious Metals Vault, Brinks, and IDS). Allocated and segregated custody specified in writing. Transparent two-line-item pricing — a competitive metal spread plus a vaulting rate at the chosen facility, both named in writing, with the brief and implementation included. No celebrity endorsement, no paid cable-television media, no numismatic upsell, no fear-marketing. The architecture is coherent because it was designed under current constraints, not inherited from a prior business model. Tenure is a real asset in many categories; in this one, it more often indexes the decade in which the firm’s revenue model was frozen. Newness, paired with institutional discipline, is what lets the practice be the practice it is.
A portfolio is what you have exposure to. A reserve is what you own.
The people who do the work.
At this stage of the firm, engagements are led directly by the founding partners — across intake, brief, consultation, implementation, and ongoing review. Continuity is deliberate, not aspirational.
Eric Roach
Strategy & Implementation
Eric Roach co-founded Hard Asset Reserve after thirty-two years inside the financial system — across an arc that combines three roles most operators occupy only one of: category pioneer, entrepreneur-operator, and senior institutional executive. From 1994 onward, he founded Lombard Brokerage, the firm that pioneered online stock trading. Lombard delivered the first fully electronic trade over the internet, the first real-time account update, and the first intraday price chart available to a retail investor — the features that defined the online-brokerage category as it took shape. The firm reached more than $8 billion in client assets at its acquisition by Morgan Stanley, where Eric subsequently served on the firm’s Executive Management team. He later served as CEO of Elance, now Upwork. He co-founded and led EveryoneSocial as its first CEO and serves today as its Executive Chairman of the Board.
Alongside and after the market-structure work, Eric built extensive experience in the physical precious-metals layer of the wealth stack. Working across the financial system from each of these positions revealed a structural pattern: inside it, clients held exposure to gold through fund structures — efficient instruments for tracking price, resting on several layers of counterparty. Outside it, a different kind of client was asking a different question — what it would take to own a reserve, well, outside the paper layer. Hard Asset Reserve is the firm built for the second question. The arc is the lens that makes the answer specific.
At Hard Asset Reserve, Eric leads strategy and implementation across each engagement — the Strategy Brief, custody architecture, titling and continuity documentation, and the planned exit. His work has been covered in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and on CNBC.
Jose Gomez
Operations & Standards
Jose Gomez co-founded Hard Asset Reserve after a career at EY-Parthenon and Deloitte, where he led operational advisory, mergers-and-acquisitions transaction work, and cybersecurity engagements for institutional clients. The training shaped a working premise: complex capital work demands a written record, a control environment, and a documentation standard that outlasts any single engagement.
At Hard Asset Reserve, Jose leads operations, transaction execution, and the documentation standard behind each engagement. The custody file, titling records, depository storage agreements, continuity documentation, and security posture all pass through his hands before they reach the client’s desk.
The practical effect is specific. What the client receives is complete — the reserve is readable at a glance, the counterparties are named, the exits are written into the brief from the start. What is worth owning is worth documenting.
The standard the practice runs on.
Five ideas the firm holds to. Not a manifesto — a working standard that shapes what the brief looks like, how implementation is run, and what continuity means in practice.
Strategy before product.
No inventory pitch. Every engagement begins with the situation — objective, allocation context, custody constraints, and titling jurisdiction — and the brief is written before any product conversation begins.
Reasoning on the page.
A Physical Reserve Strategy Brief is a document. Tradeoffs, custody architecture, titling choices, and exit posture are named in writing so you and your advisors can read them, press on them, and keep them.
Documentation as a deliverable.
Invoices and trade records, depository holdings statements, titling and storage agreements, and a summary of the depository’s all-risk coverage — assembled into a single file you retain. What you own, where it sits, and under whose name: answerable at a glance.
Continuity across the relationship.
The same people who write the brief carry it forward. Implementation, annual reviews, and long-horizon stewardship are run by the founding partners, not handed off.
Know the exit before you enter.
A reserve that cannot be drawn down on a planned timeline is not a reserve. The brief names the exit path at the start — counterparties, spreads, timelines — so nothing is improvised later.
What the firm is. And is not.
Naming both sides is more useful than implying universal applicability. The practice serves a specific kind of client, on a specific kind of problem, to a specific standard of work.
- A private-client office for the physical reserve layer of a portfolio.
- A documentary practice: intake, reviewed brief, consultation, implementation, review.
- Coordination across acquisition, custody, titling, insurance, and ongoing stewardship.
- A firm that treats the reserve as a multi-year relationship, not a transaction.
- A transactional storefront, a showroom, or an inventory-driven sales desk.
- A registered investment adviser, broker-dealer, fiduciary, or tax professional.
- A substitute for your financial, legal, or tax counsel — the brief is designed to be read alongside them.
- A fit for speculative products, leveraged structures, or digital-asset strategies.
Know the exit before you enter.
The reserve is not in place until it is in place.
The intake captures your situation. The reviewed brief follows. The private consultation comes after you have had time with it. Every month of delay is a month the foundation of your stack is missing.
The metal is yours — not a fund’s, not a claim on any counterparty.
Reviewed brief delivered in five business days of intake. The engagement structure is named in the brief — you proceed only if both fit your situation.
The Office accepts a small number of new engagements each quarter. Selection is by considered fit, not by pace of inbound.