Morningstar finds 55% of advisors plan no private-markets additions as supply builds

Morningstar's survey of 501 advisors found 40% of them offer private investments and 55% have no plans to add the asset class, a share that held about flat, while the portion describing themselves as optimistic about markets slipped to 36% from 44%. Set against the rest of this week's news, a new private-financing fund from ASB Capital and StepStone and a new product chief at Wendel Investment Managers, the survey describes a channel that has plateaued well short of the middle of its own market.

The survey itself is 501 self-reported advisors and captures plans as much as portfolios: the 40% is behavior, firms that have done the work and are living with the result, while the 55% is intention, which is softer evidence and typically moves faster than the thing it predicts. A market can sit at 'no plans' for four quarters and change its mind in one if the packaging underneath it changes, which is the charitable reading and not an unreasonable one.

The less charitable reading begins from a 55% that did not shrink. A stable bloc of non-adopters inside a survey field that has been marketed to for years says the obstacle is probably not awareness, and the sentiment number points the same way: advisors were less optimistic about markets, 36% against 44%, but a mood measure is the wrong lever for this particular problem because a better stretch in public equities would not by itself reduce the work it takes a small practice to hold an allocation that does not price every day.

The same survey put a number on the constraint that matters more than sentiment, with 56% of the advisors polled naming administrative and operational work as the biggest barrier to the service they want to deliver. That question was not framed around private markets, so the link is inference rather than finding, but an allocation carrying more paperwork and less frequent pricing than a public one lands squarely in the category those advisors flagged. On that reading, the 55% is less a verdict on private markets than a statement about how much slack the average advisory desk has left.

What the reported results do not show is how much of an offering advisor's book actually sits in private markets, and the gap matters because offering the asset class and running a book in it are different commitments: a firm holding a sliver of client assets in a single vehicle is counted the same as one with a real allocation program. That gap is not a flaw in the research, since a survey measures what it asks, but it means the 40% describes the top edge of participation rather than its depth.

That changes what the 55% is telling us. An advisor who wants private markets and cannot staff them looks, in the headline number, exactly like an advisor who has no interest in them at all. The first converts when the operations get easier; the second does not convert at any price, and nothing in the reported findings splits the two, which is the difference between a temporary stall and a permanent one.

Neither interpretation slows the supply side, and the supply side is where the week's activity sits. ASB Capital and StepStone launched the ASB StepStone Private Financing Fund, which PWD's tracking logged on October 5, and the public detail is thin: the vehicle carries both firms' names, but the announcement does not say what it will hold, how much capital it targets or which investors it is built for. The launch nonetheless establishes that two institutions judged a private-financing vehicle worth assembling now, a decision that takes quarters to execute and therefore predates the survey reading.

Wendel's hire says more because of the job rather than the person: Bénédicte Rabier, 49, joins from AXA IM Prime with a start date reported as October 1, 2026, to run product roadmap and marketing for Wendel's third-party asset management platform. Third-party means capital from outside the firm, and a product-and-marketing mandate covers the function that decides what the platform sells, how a strategy is packaged and how it gets described to a buyer. Firms staff for the bottleneck they expect, and this hire reads as a bet that the bottleneck is distribution.

Both moves fit a build-out that runs on its own clock: manufacturing a fund, or assembling a platform to sell one, takes years, and the decisions behind a launch are made against forecasts that stretch out further still. Advisor adoption, by contrast, moves on client conversations, which happen every week and change slowly, so supply keeps arriving well after demand plateaus because the capital and the headcount were committed before the plateau was visible. If the 55% turns out to be a ceiling, the evidence will show up as soft fundraising, not cancelled products.

A friendlier version runs the other way: the RIA market has a packaging gap as much as a demand gap, since the advisors who say yes tend to be the ones whose platforms hand them a wrapped allocation instead of a diligence project, and product and platform hires are precisely the tools for closing that kind of gap. On this reading, 40% adoption is a queue, and the firms building now are positioning for the moment it clears.

The trouble with the queue theory is that the gatekeepers are not the fund managers: approval for a private-markets sleeve tends to run through a platform, a model-portfolio provider or a custodian, and those businesses are built to support products at scale with the reporting and oversight they already have. An allocation arriving with more paperwork and less frequent pricing than a mutual fund asks that layer to absorb real cost, and whether it will depends on the layer's economics, not the fund manager's enthusiasm. That negotiation is slower than a roadshow and harder to win with better marketing, though better marketing is a rational first move.

Three things would count as evidence the queue is moving, none of them decisive alone: an offer rate that rises above 40%, a 55% that finally shrinks, and private-markets vehicles turning up in the lineups of platforms that already sell them. The first two arrive with Morningstar's next reading, while the third shows up in shelf announcements and product filings, and it is the one that would tell you the packaging layer has made up its mind.

If none of it happens, the capacity has a fallback that does not require advisor education: institutional allocators are the other buyer for private-markets product. The inference that some of this build-out would rather wait for them than convert the RIA middle is mine, not the sources', since nothing in either announcement says a pivot is coming and the ASB StepStone vehicle may have been built for institutions from the start. But the arithmetic is uncomfortable either way: supply has been added to serve a channel in which a majority of the surveyed field says it has no plans to participate, and one side of that has to move.

Rabier's start date is reported as October 1, 2026, and the ASB StepStone launch came October 5. Morningstar's next reading will show whether the 55% holds again, and if it does, the capacity going into the private-markets gateway will need buyers outside the advisor channel, because the announcements this week do not say where those would come from.