The appetite for alternative investments is showing up in the businesses serving the wealthy. CNBC reported on November 12 that J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s private-wealth alternative assets in Asia-Pacific had grown 40% over the preceding 12 months, citing regional chief executive Dan Watkins.
That figure measures growth in one manager’s regional business, rather than a uniform change in wealthy investors’ allocations. Still, it raises a practical question for family offices: which investments belong outside the traditional stock-and-bond portfolio, and what should those holdings accomplish?
For families trying to preserve purchasing power across generations, the answer starts with the risks they already own.
What J.P. Morgan’s Family Office Research Shows
J.P. Morgan Private Bank’s 2026 Global Family Office Report, published earlier this year, surveyed 333 single-family offices across 30 countries. Its findings help explain the demand now attracting attention.
Respondents who regarded inflation as their principal risk allocated nearly 60% of their portfolios to alternatives, roughly 20 percentage points more than the survey average. Their combined allocation to hedge funds and real estate was approximately 25%, compared with 12% across the wider sample.
Those are observations about participating offices, not an allocation target for every wealthy family. They also do not establish that larger alternative holdings delivered better inflation protection.
The same research found that 79% of surveyed offices had no allocation to infrastructure. That suggests considerable variation within the broad alternatives category: a family can hold substantial private investments while having little or no exposure to another part of the market.
Begin With the Job an Investment Needs to Do
“Alternatives” is a convenient label for investments with very different economics. A controlling stake in a private company, a commercial building and a hedge fund should not be assessed against the same expectations.
Private equity may provide access to companies and strategies unavailable through public exchanges. But business execution and the eventual exit matter enormously. The SEC’s guide to private equity funds notes that investment horizons commonly extend to 10 years or more and that investors may face substantial restrictions on withdrawals.
For a family office, the relevant comparison is more demanding than a projected return beside a public-equity benchmark. It includes the time until capital may be returned, the manager’s incentives, the fees and the family’s ability to hold through difficult conditions.
The same discipline applies to investments described as inflation-sensitive. An investment committee considering a property or infrastructure asset should examine how revenues reset, which expenses rise with inflation and when debt must be refinanced. A contract’s actual terms are more useful than a broad inflation-hedge label.
Liquidity Belongs in the Investment Decision
A family may have a multigenerational horizon while facing immediate cash demands.
Taxes, distributions to family members, philanthropic pledges and funding needs at an operating business can all compete with investment commitments. Those obligations deserve a place beside expected returns when deciding how much capital to lock away.
Some fund structures offer periodic access to cash, but the details matter. According to the SEC’s investor bulletin on interval funds, repurchase offers generally occur every three, six or 12 months and cover only 5% to 25% of outstanding shares. When requests exceed the amount offered, investors may receive only a proportion of the redemption they requested.
A quarterly opportunity to request a withdrawal should therefore not be treated as a guarantee of quarterly access to the entire investment.
Before adding a commitment, a useful exercise is to model what happens if distributions arrive later than expected while family expenses and capital calls continue. The result may reveal a constraint that an allocation percentage alone misses.
Look Through the Funds to the Underlying Exposures
Owning several managers does not necessarily create several independent sources of return. Investment committees can ask whether different funds depend on the same industry, borrowers, financing conditions or eventual buyers.
For business-owning families, that analysis should extend to the operating company. A family whose wealth already depends heavily on one sector may want to scrutinize investments that add more exposure to it, even when those investments carry a different asset-class label.
Impact Wealth’s coverage of Citi Wealth’s 2026 Family Office Report offers a useful companion: public equities and private markets continue to serve alongside one another in family portfolios.
