J.P. Morgan Private Bank’s 2026 Global Family Office Report has found that 37 percent of respondents expect to raise allocations to private equity in the next year and a half.
This marries up with data collected at II’s 22nd Annual West Coast Family Office Wealth Conference, where three quarters of investors said they planned to increase their private market allocations.
According to William Sinclair, global co-head of the family office practice at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, this is because a lot of families are investing in secondaries.
“We have seen our client base looking to buy LP stakes at discounts to get vintage year diversification,” he said. “You're seeing a rebalance of private equity portfolios from a lot of university endowments and pension funds, which creates an opportunity.”
Separately, the largest number of the 330 families surveyed—all clients of the private bank—ranked geopolitics as their number one investment risk. Sinclair was surprised that only 28 percent of family offices have any gold exposure that might serve as a hedge to the depreciating dollar.
The data showed that investments from family offices into the infrastructure supporting artificial intelligence was also surprisingly low, he said, given the growing interest in the area overall. Although 65 percent of families plan to make AI a priority in the future, 79 percent currently have no allocation to infrastructure and a majority have no growth equity or venture capital.
“A lot of clients have let their public equity market exposure continue to grow,” to get exposed to technology and AI-related businesses. “But what they're missing is some of the picks and shovels in infrastructure,” Sinclair said.
