Private markets' next fight is the construction question

Peter Aliprantis spent more than 25 years on private-markets distribution desks at FrontPoint Partners and TPG Angelo Gordon, a firm PWD's records put at $115.9 billion in regulatory assets, and now runs the private wealth business in the Americas for EQT, the Stockholm investment firm with roughly €341 billion across private capital and real assets. His diagnosis of the channel's most expensive habit is specific: the biggest mistake, he told InvestmentNews, is treating a private markets allocation as a single product decision rather than a portfolio construction decision—writing one check into one product and calling the job done. The habit persists because a ticket is what a distribution machine is built to sell, and a sleeve with vintages, wrappers and a sizing rule is not.

He rejects the standard framing that advisors are pushing clients into private markets; as he told InvestmentNews, this is less a temporary rotation than client demand catching up to a structural reality, on the premise that most economic growth happens in companies that might never end up in public markets. That premise is a manager's claim and should be read as one, since EQT sells the exposure, though it points the same way as the buyer data.

Hamilton Lane's 2026 Global Private Wealth Survey, covering 390 financial advisors worldwide, found that 86 percent of private wealth professionals plan to increase private market investments in the year ahead, and that the top motivator they named was portfolio optimization. That answer is more revealing than the headline, with the usual caveats about a sample of 390 advisors stating plans in advance. Return-chasing describes a buyer shopping a shelf; portfolio optimization describes a buyer asking who will do the construction. If the second buyer is the real one, the sale is advisory capacity, and a manager who arrives with a fund list is answering a question nobody asked.

The questions landing on the desk have changed shape, which is Aliprantis's own evidence for the construction thesis: advisors who once had to explain what private equity was now field queries about vintage diversification, GP track records and deal flow quality, and they have grown more sophisticated at working between evergreen structures and individual GPs to find quality that fits a client. Vintage diversification is a portfolio-level attribute, and no single subscription into a single vehicle, evergreen or otherwise, produces it.

The strategy preferences are where the averages start hiding work: infrastructure drew 46 percent of respondents as a target for higher allocations in 2026, a hair behind venture capital and growth at 47 percent, but Aliprantis splits that label. EQT runs an active, private-equity-style infrastructure approach rather than the traditional passive model of collecting yield from toll roads, ports and regulated utilities, typically buying companies earlier in their lifecycle, in what gets called value-add infrastructure, and underwriting growth, scale and operational improvement. Those are two businesses with different cash-flow shapes, different fee loads and different hold periods, and the buyers are different people with different questions. A plan-to-allocate number that does not specify which one is a plan to buy a label.

That leaves the vehicle, where this publication has argued the private-markets gateway has become the product rather than the delivery mechanism, with named, wrapper-first raises clearing while blind pools sit. Alternative ETFs have already shown that the wrapper is a liquidity decision before it is a strategy decision, and the 86 percent planning to add private markets exposure are in practice buying something that has to hold in a client account and behave on a client's timetable. The construction work does not stop at the fund list; it continues into the interval and evergreen structures that decide when a client can get out and at what price.

The timetable makes that urgent rather than theoretical, because private equity's record first half is a distribution test: with deals taking 274 days to close and holds running past five years, the cash from that rebound arrives in the early 2030s. An advisor who writes one ticket in 2026 and files it under alts has committed a client to a cash-flow schedule that will not be tested for years, by which point the client will have opinions about it.

The number to watch is the share of that 86 percent that funds into a sleeve holding more than one vintage with a stated sizing rule, and whether next year's survey still ranks portfolio optimization first or starts ranking liquidity. Aliprantis's seat is itself part of the test: a distribution-desk veteran running an Americas private wealth business that will be judged on construction answers to construction questions. If the questions keep sharpening the way he says they have, the fund list will be the least interesting thing on his desk.