The conversation around private markets has shifted. What once centered on whether to add an allocation has evolved into something far more rigorous; a debate about portfolio design, client suitability, and the deliberate trade-offs that come with illiquidity.
Brian Griggs, head of portfolio strategy group at Nuveen in New York, works directly with registered investment advisors, wealth managers, and family offices navigating that shift. In a conversation with InvestmentNews, he offered a candid assessment of how advisors are approaching private market allocations in 2026 and what they still get wrong.
For years, private markets were treated as an add-on to a traditional stock-and-bond portfolio – a way to seek incremental return for select clients. That framing, Griggs says, no longer holds.
"Today, the conversations are centered around portfolio design: what role the allocation is meant to play, how it affects liquidity, and whether it improves the client's after-tax, risk-adjusted outcome," he said.
That requires a more unified risk framework that spans both public and private holdings. Advisors must now account for liquidity terms, valuation methodology, tax treatment, and correlation across the full portfolio, not just expected return in isolation.
Education, Griggs emphasized, remains the limiting factor. "The success of private markets implementation often depends less on access and more on whether the allocation is properly sized, funded, and explained."
One of the most consequential decisions advisors face is how to fund a private allocation and which public assets to trim. Griggs argues that question should start with client objectives, not generic target allocations.
"The source of capital should start with the client objective, not with a generic target allocation," he said. "If the private investment is intended to generate income, it may make sense to fund it from part of the fixed income sleeve. If the goal is long-term growth, the source may be equities."
That logic sounds straightforward, but the trade-offs are layered. Private allocations can improve income, diversification, or inflation sensitivity while simultaneously introducing illiquidity, manager dispersion, valuation lag, and cash-flow uncertainty. The goal, Griggs said, is not to displace traditional holdings wholesale, but to build a more resilient portfolio less dependent on any single return source or on the traditional stock/bond relationship functioning in every market environment.
Even with public fixed income yields well above long-term medians, advisors are still finding a role for private asset classes such as core real estate, middle market direct lending, and farmland.
Griggs is careful to distinguish between them. Direct lending can offer contractual income, floating-rate exposure, and access to corners of the credit market not fully represented in public fixed income. Core real estate brings potential inflation sensitivity and exposure to property supply-and-demand fundamentals. Farmland and other natural capital strategies add differentiated real asset exposure tied to land productivity, commodity demand, and long-term inflation dynamics.
"These should not be viewed as interchangeable yield substitutes," he said. "Each private asset class plays a different role, and the allocation has to be evaluated in the context of the full portfolio."
Client concerns about illiquidity are often valid but Griggs says the framing advisors use matters. Rather than starting with a target allocation, he recommends building a liquidity budget first.
"Advisors should start with a liquidity budget, not a target allocation," he said. "That means identifying near-term spending needs, emergency reserves, required distributions, potential capital calls, lockups, redemption terms, and the client's behavioral comfort with not being able to access capital during market stress."
From there, the allocation should be stress-tested against the client's broader financial plan.
"The right question is not simply 'how much can the client allocate?' but 'how much illiquidity can the plan comfortably absorb?'"
As access has expanded – through interval funds, evergreen structures, and lower investment minimums – suitability has become the central challenge. "As access has expanded, suitability has become more important, not less," Griggs said.
Private markets, he explained, are generally well suited for clients with stable liquidity needs, a long investment horizon, sufficient portfolio size to diversify across managers and vintages, and the ability to remain committed when pricing is less transparent or exits are unavailable. That profile does not describe every high-net-worth client, let alone mass affluent investors newly entering the space.
Misconceptions compound the challenge. The most persistent, Griggs said, is the belief that private markets are simply higher-return versions of public assets.
"In reality, the return profile comes with different liquidity terms, valuation practices, fee structures, and manager-selection risk," he said. "Another misconception is that lower reported volatility always means lower economic risk. Appraisal-based valuations and infrequent pricing can smooth the ride on paper, but they do not make underlying credit, property, leverage, or business-cycle risk disappear."
Addressing those misconceptions requires side-by-side portfolio analysis and clear expectation-setting. Advisors need to show clients how a private allocation changes the full portfolio: income, risk, liquidity, taxes, concentration, and downside exposure.
"It's important for advisors to help clients understand what they own, why they own it, and what trade-offs they are accepting," Griggs said.
Nuveen's nSights platform is designed to support exactly that conversation putting public and private investments into one portfolio context so advisors can evaluate both the opportunity and the trade-offs together.
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