There’s a conversation happening in wealth management right now that Michael Shoniker, a Charlotte, NC-based financial services professional with over 15 years of experience in private investments and business development, sees playing out repeatedly across the Southeast. High-net-worth clients — the ones who have spent decades building real wealth — are increasingly dissatisfied with traditional portfolio construction. Not because their advisors are doing anything wrong, but because the standard 60/40 framework wasn’t designed with their specific situation in mind.
These clients have longer time horizons than most. They have more capital to deploy. They have less need for daily liquidity. And they’ve watched the public markets long enough to understand that correlation is a real risk — that when things go wrong, everything in a traditional portfolio tends to go wrong at the same time.
What they’re looking for, more often than advisors realize, is a conversation about what else is out there.
The Question Advisors Aren’t Asking
In Michael Shoniker’s experience working with independent RIAs, family offices, and accredited investors with high-net-worth individuals, most advisory relationships are built around a client’s stated risk tolerance and time horizon. Those are important inputs. But for high-net-worth clients, there’s a third question that rarely gets asked directly: how much of your portfolio actually needs to be liquid?
For many wealthy investors, the honest answer is: less than you think. They have income. They have other assets. They have flexibility. And yet their entire portfolio is constructed as if they might need to liquidate everything next Tuesday.
That mismatch — between the liquidity a client actually needs and the liquidity their portfolio is optimized for — is exactly where Michael sees private market strategies becoming most relevant. Not as a speculative bet, but as a rational allocation decision based on the client’s actual financial picture.
Why Alternatives Aren’t Just for Institutions Anymore
For decades, institutional investors — pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds — have allocated meaningful portions of their portfolios to private markets. The reasons are well documented. Michael Shoniker points out that private market strategies offer exposure to return drivers that aren’t available in public markets, diversification across different economic fundamentals, and the potential for long-term capital appreciation tied to real underlying assets.
Independent RIAs now have meaningful access to many of the same strategies. The question is whether they’re using it.
What the Conversation Actually Looks Like
For Michael Shoniker, introducing private market strategies to a high-net-worth client doesn’t have to be complicated. It starts with understanding the client’s full financial picture — not just their investable assets, but their income, their liquidity needs, their time horizon, and their experience with less liquid investments.
From there, the conversation is straightforward. A portion of the portfolio — sized appropriately for that specific client — can be allocated to strategies that aren’t correlated to public markets. Strategies tied to physical assets, infrastructure development, or real property. Strategies with a longer hold period but a different set of underlying drivers.
The clients who respond well to this conversation, in Michael’s experience, are not the ones who are chasing returns. They’re the ones who understand diversification at a deeper level and are looking for an advisor who does too.
The Advisor’s Role Is Changing
Michael Shoniker believes the most valuable thing an independent RIA can offer a high-net-worth client today isn’t access to the same public market strategies available on any brokerage platform. It’s the ability to think more broadly about portfolio construction — to bring strategies and perspectives that a client couldn’t easily find on their own.
Private market strategies, including real assets and land infrastructure development, are part of that broader toolkit. Advisors who have done the work to understand them are in a fundamentally stronger position than those who haven’t.
The Bottom Line
High-net-worth clients often have financial circumstances that differ significantly from those of the average investor. As Michael Shoniker sees it, portfolio construction should reflect factors such as liquidity needs, time horizon, and overall financial objectives rather than relying exclusively on traditional allocation models.
Private market strategies, including real assets and land infrastructure development, may be appropriate considerations for some investors when evaluated within a broader wealth planning framework. The role of the advisor is to assess those opportunities carefully and determine whether they align with a client’s specific goals and circumstances.
This article is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Any such offer may only be made through formal offering documents. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risk, including loss of capital.