Morningstar survey: 40% of advisors offer private markets as optimism falls

Morningstar's 2026 Investor Perspectives survey describes a profession adding private-market investments to client portfolios at the moment its confidence in public markets is thinning. Among the more than 500 U.S. financial advisors who responded, part of a larger multi-country study, 40% said they now offer private-market options to clients, up from 35% in 2025, while the share who described themselves as optimistic about the market in general fell to 36% from 44%.

The finding an RIA principal should sit with is about hours: respondents reported spending 27% of their time on investment strategy, the same share as in 2025, and said they would rather spend 23%, while given a free hand they would put more than 60% of the week into nurturing client relationships and 14% into operational and strategic initiatives. A year of platform launches, model-portfolio resets and AI assistants has not moved the 27% at all. That could mean the tools are still arriving at desks, that investment selection is a judgment advisors resist handing off, or that the question was never the tools; the survey reports the percentages and not the reason behind them.

Firms do have a lever for the gap, and it is not software: outsourcing investment selection to model portfolios is what the platforms have spent years selling, and Vanguard's model-portfolio reset this summer traded revenue and control for market share while Orion, Black Diamond and Vestmark collected the overlay fees. If the 27% has not moved, the survey is at least consistent with advisors buying the wrapper without changing the work behind it, an inference the time data permits but cannot confirm.

The mood numbers are less ambiguous. Optimism at 36% sits eight points below 2025 and well under the 59% to 63% range reported by surveyed advisors in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, while another 37% of U.S. respondents called themselves steady about where the market was heading, 21% uncertain and 7% nervous. Joe Agostinelli, Morningstar's senior director of market research, read the cohort as still mostly steady or optimistic but less so than a year ago, and a little more uncertain.

That sentiment matters more in a client meeting than in a model, where the 21% who call themselves uncertain and the 7% who call themselves nervous form a cohort that has to explain markets to clients while unsure of its own read, and it is the same cohort telling the survey it wants more than 60% of the week with those clients.

What they worry about has shifted more than how much they worry: geopolitical tensions drew 50% of respondents as a top market concern, up from 37%, inflation followed at 44%, and an economic downturn at 35%, while tariffs and trade policy, named by 41% in 2025, dropped to 14%. A fall that steep is unlikely to reflect new comfort with trade policy; a likelier reading, untested by the survey, is that tariffs have been folded into the wider geopolitical category.

Private-market adoption carries the more consequential tension, because the three numbers the survey reports do not point the same way: adoption climbed to 40% from 35%, but the share of advisors who plan to add the options fell to 5% from 8%, while the 55% with no plans to do so sits roughly where it stood a year ago. An installed base can grow while the pipeline behind it narrows, and whether those advisors have weighed the asset class and declined it, lack the capacity to diligence it, or hear no demand from clients is not something the percentages settle. As this publication noted in September, asset owners plan to lift private-market allocations from 19% to 23% of assets. Advisors are a different population with a different constraint, and the constraint the Morningstar data points to is intent more than access.

If the 60% aspiration is real, it is the demand side of the software race that has consumed the past year, from Vanguard's Altruist tax-AI deal to LPL's Latitude launch to Morningstar's Gemini deal, each aimed squarely at the conversation between advisor and client. The survey puts a size on the budget those products are selling against: about four points of the working week that advisors would move out of strategy work. Four points will not be won by a better dashboard. Time of that kind comes back when a firm changes who does the work, which is an operating decision, and the survey offers no evidence that many firms have made it yet.

Next year's survey will say whether this year's private-market number was a waypoint or a ceiling. A rebound in the 5% who plan to add the options would settle it in one direction; a second consecutive decline would leave the 55% with no plans as the largest group in the study and make the 40% look less like a trend than a resting point. Meanwhile the 27% of the week that goes to investment strategy has not moved in a year, and the tools built to move it are only now reaching the desks.