For the better part of five years, “Private Markets for Everyone” was the hottest ticket in finance. From high-net-worth individuals to retail investors, everyone was told they could access the high returns of Private Equity and Private Credit through new, semi-liquid fund structures. These funds promised the best of both worlds: the premium returns of private assets with the comfort of monthly or quarterly withdrawals.
But as we move through 2026, the fine print is starting to come to light (again).
Recent headlines from Blue Owl, including a sudden shift away from regular buybacks in a flagship fund and a large $1.4 billion sale of loans, are not just isolated news items. They are part of a broader roadmap that investors need to understand.
Over the last five years, semi-liquid funds raised record-breaking capital. In the fund world, cash is a liability because if you don’t put it to work, your returns (IRR) get dragged down. This creates a forcing function where managers must put money to work as fast as possible, sometimes at the absolute top of the market or into lower quality deals that would typically fall below their underwriting standards.
Today, we are seeing the bill come due on that sprint to deploy capital. When a fund trades at a 20% or 30% discount to its stated Book Value (NAV), the market is essentially calling BS on the math. Investors either don’t trust the carrying valuations (“marks”) or they perceive a level of credit risk that the fund manager hasn’t yet admitted. It’s what we call a Solvency Discount.
It’s easy to blame the recent pummelling of software stocks or AI disruption for these jitters, but the cracks are appearing in real world (“boring”) businesses too.
Jamie Dimon famously warned, “When you see one cockroach, there are probably more.” These aren’t just AI-disruption fears; they are leverage problems. Whether it’s a cloud-software firm or a brake-pad distributor, the combination of large debt, maturing loans in a high-rate environment, business underperformance and broader macro concerns is a universal issue.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding of “liquidity” in these new products.
If the “fast” asset class (Credit) is already hitting walls and throwing up gates (limits on withdrawals), the “slow” asset classes (PE/VC) are in for a much harder shock. You cannot liquidate a 7-year equity stake in a private company on short notice to pay back a retail investor who wants their money on Monday.
We are seeing a predictable, cynical cycle play out:
The rise of new entrants from the giant Private Equity shops is getting a lot of attention, and many are pitching new and improved versions of these funds. We wrote about this in May of last year, and unsurprisingly, the feedback from some large distribution platforms was pretty negative. But the roadmap is already clear: When you promise liquidity on illiquid assets, you aren’t removing risk, you’re just delaying it.
When an investment team brings forward a private markets opportunity, the work does not end with the diligence decision. From an operations and compliance standpoint, everything that follows has to be managed and reproducible. That includes legal documentation like LPAs, PPMs, and subscription agreements. It includes oversight on treasury management, capital calls, what is funded and what is unfunded. It includes statements, reporting, and the full history of capital events tied to the investment.
“All of that has to be reproducible,” Co-founder & CEO of Gridline, Logan Henderson, explains. “When you go through an SEC exam, a key focus point is alternatives. You have to be able to produce every statement related to the investment. All the legal documents. All the capital events that have happened.”
The challenge is not that firms lack this information. The challenge is that it tends to live in many places at once.
Most RIAs manage diligence and documentation across shared drives like Google Drive, SharePoint, or OneDrive. Fund administrators have their own portals. Reporting lives somewhere else. The only way to stitch it together into something resembling an audit trail is often a spreadsheet. According to a 2023 industry survey, only 10% of RIAs say their firm has the technology needed to compete effectively, and portfolio management and data integration are cited as among the biggest tech pain points at firms today.
“If I try to look up a fund,” Logan says, “I get a thousand documents. Unless I remember the exact naming convention, I can’t find what I’m looking for.”
Over time, that fragmentation creates pressure on the back office. In many firms, one person becomes responsible for pulling documents, tracking capital calls, reconciling statements, and responding to requests.
“There’s typically one person who owns all of that,” Logan notes. “At quarter end, you lose them for a week just pulling papers. If they’re out and a capital call comes in with a seven-day turnaround, you have a problem.”
This is where “no” becomes the safest answer. “Most back offices end up saying no because the work product just grows,” Logan says. “Every new investment adds more coordination, more paperwork, more risk.” In that context, saying no is not resistance. It is risk management.
High-functioning operations teams do not eliminate risk. They make risk visible, manageable, and repeatable.
When Ops and Compliance are supported by centralized data and clear infrastructure, the role of the function begins to shift. The work doesn’t disappear, but the friction around it does. A few things start to change across the firm.
More opportunities can be reviewed without compressing standards. Diligence does not restart from scratch each time, because documentation, prior analysis, and historical context are already accessible. Teams can look at a broader universe without adding a proportional burden.
Advisors are not recreating explanations or hunting for materials before every client conversation. The rationale behind an investment is easier to access, more consistent, and easier to stand behind, which changes how confidently recommendations are delivered.
Instead of reacting during exams or reviews, firms can clearly show how decisions were made, what risks were considered, and how suitability and education were handled. The work is already there. It just needs to be surfaced.
New investments no longer automatically imply new headcount, new bottlenecks, or new single points of failure. Complexity still exists, but it’s absorbed by systems rather than people.
As Logan puts it, “If Ops can maintain oversight and centralization, they can actually enable the investment team to move faster.”
Ops can say yes when the firm has infrastructure that does three things reliably. It captures the right data, it structures it the same way every time, and it makes it retrievable in seconds.
That requires more than storage. It requires a system that is built to treat private investments as structured records, not folders.
Not a drive. Not a portal. A single investment record that holds the full chain of artifacts in one place:
This matters because reproducibility is not a filing problem. It’s a linkage problem. The record only holds up if every document and event is tied back to the same investment and the same clients.
Private investments do not report consistently. A venture fund statement and a private credit fund statement look nothing alike. The correct infrastructure converts those inputs into standardized fields:
This is what makes portfolio oversight and reporting possible without manual reconciliation. It is also what enables treasury oversight. When structured data is loaded into standardized fields, funded and unfunded are no longer a spreadsheet estimate. Instead, they’re live numbers that can be readily reported on and pushed to the teammates that need them within your organization.
Ops risks often show up in capital events. Navigating the sensitivity of the situation is something you may not expect from your infrastructure. To ease the burden on your front line, a platform has to treat these delicate situations proactively as part of the data architecture. Said more pointedly: treated as first-class objects, not emails.
This is where Ops gets leverage. The system carries the state of work, so coordination doesn’t rely on individual memory.
The point is not that the data exists. Rather, it is that it can be produced quickly in a way that is complete and defensible:
This is the difference between “we have the files” and “we can reproduce the process.”
AI becomes useful when it is grounded in the actual record, rather than operating on isolated documents or one-off workflows:
When Operations can say yes, it’s not because risk has disappeared. It’s because risk is visible, structured, and owned by the system rather than absorbed by individuals.
That shift changes how the firm moves. Not overnight, and not all at once, but steadily. Decisions carry forward with less resistance. Conversations generate consensus. Reviews become productive and less fragile. Growth feels intentional rather than reactive.
In private markets, opportunity is plentiful. Complexity is constant. What differentiates firms over time is whether they build the infrastructure to carry that complexity while elevating the key resources responsible for driving the success of the project.
When ops has the tools to maintain oversight and continuity, saying yes stops being a risk. It becomes a capability.
Gridline is an end-to-end alternatives management platform built to support how RIAs actually operate private markets at scale. We centralize the full alternatives workflow, from diligence and fund launch through portfolio oversight, reporting, and ongoing operations, so private investments can be managed with the same clarity and control as public markets.
At the core of the platform is purpose-built infrastructure designed for private assets, paired with AI that strengthens decision-making, preserves institutional knowledge, and creates a durable audit trail over time.
AltComply is Gridline’s AI-powered diligence capability. It helps firms structure, retain, and reuse investment analysis so judgment compounds across opportunities, teams, and time, supporting investment committees, advisors, and compliance from a single source of truth. AltComply streamlines private fund diligence by transforming raw documents into structured, AI-generated insights, investment committee memos, and DDQs, creating a repeatable, auditable process teams can trust. It also includes an AI-powered red flag engine that surfaces non-standard terms and areas requiring closer review within private fund documents, along with an interactive Q&A that allows teams to ask natural-language questions and receive clear, cited answers grounded in the source materials.
The result? RIAs that are empowered to move faster and make better-informed decisions. That’s what it means to set a new standard in alternative investing.
A practical field guide for RIAs evaluating a custom private fund strategy.
In public markets, the experience is simple by design. You can implement an allocation quickly, see performance cleanly, and move money with minimal friction.
Private markets are not built that way. Whether you’re a novice or experienced in launching private market vehicles, the opaqueness remains either a barrier to entry or an impediment to scale. Advisors underscore this: more than two-thirds cite the inherent complexity of private markets as a key challenge in client discussions, especially around mechanics like pacing, liquidity, and performance reporting.
That complexity is not what draws RIAs to private funds in the first place. It is simply part of the terrain. The question is less whether complexity exists, and more whether it is understood and planned for ahead of time.
A “custom fund,” as we define it, is a closed-end drawdown vehicle containing private funds or individual investments designed to give dozens of underlying investors easy access to private market exposure into a single, firm-aligned allocation. One that reflects your philosophy, your manager preferences, and the client experience you want to deliver. Instead of asking clients to evaluate and subscribe to a new private fund every time an opportunity appears, a custom fund creates a repeatable structure you can build on over time.
These vehicles are not new. They have been around for decades and have long been part of how institutions and many sophisticated RIAs allocate to private markets. They may not be the most talked about structure today, with evergreen funds capturing much of the attention, but there is a reason closed-end drawdown vehicles continue to represent a meaningful share of private market allocations. When implemented well, they have historically delivered strong outcomes and allowed wealth managers to access the best private managers.
At the same time, custom funds still feel like a big step, especially in the wealth channel. And that hesitation is rational.
When I speak with advisors who are considering this path, the concerns tend to be consistent:
This field guide exists for one reason. To make the requirements, tradeoffs, and ongoing expectations visible before you commit, so you can avoid common pitfalls, learn from peers who’ve been through it, and approach a custom fund with a clearer plan and fewer surprises.
How to use this guide
This is not a checklist you need to complete before moving forward. In practice, very few RIAs hit all of these signals at launch, and many successful custom funds were built while firms were still working through one or more of them.
Instead, think of this as a maturity map. These signals reflect where firms tend to arrive over time as they gain conviction, experience, and infrastructure. Some will resonate immediately. Others may feel aspirational. That’s expected.
The goal of this field guide is not to tell you whether you’re “ready” or not. It’s to help you understand what becomes important, when, and what tradeoffs you’re implicitly making at each stage.
Before thinking about structure, vendors, or managers, most firms find it helpful to get clear internally on one foundational question. How much illiquidity clients can bear and want to bear. That decision influences pacing, client segmentation, and which private strategies make sense, whether venture, credit, real estate, or a mix.
Why it matters: This is not just an allocation question. It is strategy-defining. In practice, RIA firms that have not aligned on illiquidity often find themselves revisiting core decisions later in the process, debating whether venture belongs in the mix, how much cash flow matters, or how patient clients truly are.
What we see in practice: Firms that handle this well are not guessing. They have had explicit internal conversations about how different client segments experience illiquidity, and they accept that not every private strategy fits every client, even within a custom fund.
What it affects downstream: Illiquidity assumptions shape portfolio construction, capital call pacing, and client communication.
Signal of progress: You can articulate a target private allocation range for the right clients and explain why.
Closed-end drawdown funds do not behave like public market allocations. Capital is called over time. Distributions arrive unevenly. Early performance can look unintuitive. It is not bad. It is simply different.
Why it matters: If you’re not managing the liquidity operations around the purchase of sale of private companies, the fund you’re investing in is. Avoiding dealing with them purely for the sake of convenience usually means they show up in the form of lower returns down the road.
What we see in practice: Clients rarely ask for drawdown funds explicitly. They care about results. Advisors who struggle here are often trying to make private markets feel like public markets, rather than setting expectations for how private investments actually work.
What it affects downstream: Client education, performance conversations, and confidence during early quarters when capital has been called but results are not yet visible.
Signal of progress: You’re aligned on the results you’re trying to achieve for clients and comfortable setting client expectations for their experience with private markets.
A custom fund only works if the client base supports it. In most cases, that means meaningful accredited investor density and, ideally, a material base of qualified purchasers. Your ability to access differentiated opportunities is partially a function of size, and banding your clients together can offer each of them a better deal than going it alone.
Why it matters: Eligibility is not just a legal box to check. It determines whether the vehicle can be diversified properly and whether capital can be deployed at the intended pace.
What we see in practice: RIA firms that underestimate this often rely too heavily on a small number of clients to make the math work, which introduces fragility if even one large investor chooses not to participate.
What it affects downstream: Portfolio construction, concentration risk, deployment timing, and the long-term viability of the vehicle.
Signal of progress: You know the percentage of clients eligible to participate and have evaluated the client portfolio implications to reach your target fund size.
Across the custom fund launches I have been involved in, investment leadership not being aligned on whether private funds can produce above market returns is perhaps the largest impediment. This challenge does not always show up as open conflict.
Why it matters: Misalignment does not fail loudly. It fails quietly. Capital raises underperform expectations, conviction weakens, and timelines stretch.
What we see in practice: Instead of refining strategy and communicating clearly with clients, firms spend energy internally debating whether the approach is right at all.
What it affects downstream: Fundraising success, advisor confidence in client conversations, and speed to steady state.
Signal of progress: There is consensus on the why and the how with key stakeholders identified and engaged to support execution.
Multi-manager custom funds often feel hardest at launch because the work is front-loaded. Identity documents, accreditation verification, client education, and onboarding all happen at once.
Why it matters: The upfront effort is what creates leverage later. Without it, firms often end up repeating the same work fund after fund.
What we see in practice: Launch quarter friction is frequently misinterpreted as a structural flaw, often accompanied by a flurry of emails, calls, and internal questions, when it is actually the cost of building a repeatable system.
What it affects downstream: Operational drag, tax complexity, advisor time, and the ability to scale commitments with ease over time.
Signal of progress: You are willing to invest effort upfront to gain long-term efficiencies.
Most firms we work with don’t hit all of these signals before they begin, and still launch custom funds successfully. Yet, even when the signals are there, some firms still hesitate. Usually, because they have seen or heard about custom fund launches that went sideways.
In practice, the most common failure points when launching a custom fund are not investment ideas. They are tied to execution.
The patterns that show up most often:
How firms de-risk these issues in practice:
Even if you don’t check every box today, reading through these risks and patterns gives you insight from peers who have already been through it—context many firms don’t have going in. You don’t have to start perfect to start informed.
Private markets will always be more complex than public markets. Yet, if the goals and strategy are aligned with your firm’s ethos for both the near term and long-term, navigating to the “how” becomes manageable. More than that, it becomes an org-wide action plan.
When the responsibilities are clearly understood, and the right infrastructure is in place, a custom fund becomes a practical way to deliver differentiated exposure, scale your process, and create a client experience that feels institutional.
This is what it means to set a new standard.
Gridline is a turnkey alternatives management platform built to set a new standard for private market investing. We work with RIAs to make private markets as easy to operate as trading stock, without sacrificing rigor or control.
Through our Custom Funds, Gridline helps RIAs launch and manage closed-end drawdown funds by providing a single platform for fund formation support, subscriptions, capital calls, performance reporting, and ongoing operations. The goal is simple. Absorb the operational complexity so advisors can focus on investment decisions and client relationships.
For a closer look at how Gridline supports RIAs launching closed-end drawdown vehicles, you can view our Custom Funds one-pager here.
Charles Patton leads manager selection, portfolio construction, and General Partner (GP) relationships at Gridline as Investment Director. Prior to joining Gridline in November 2022, Charles worked on Wells Fargo’s Investment Portfolio team and previously served as a Summer Associate at the University of Virginia Investment Management Company (UVIMCO). While earning his MBA at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, he was Chief Investment Officer of Darden Capital Management. Charles holds an undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina and is a CFA charterholder.
Lately, there has been a ton of buzz around leveraging AI in the wealth space. As the co-founder of a tech startup, but also a product guy at heart, I feel the pressure to keep up with the conversation. Especially when nearly 60% of RIAs are planning to leverage AI in the near future (McDonald, 2024.) When my team and I started mapping out what AI might mean for our roadmap, it forced me to pause and think carefully. What’s hype, and what’s here to stay?
Artificial intelligence often dominates the news with grand visions of reshaping industries, even suggesting it could replace human advisors. In wealth management, however, the real opportunity of AI lies not in flashy front-end features but in solving infrastructure-layer challenges. When addressed at this level, AI enables advisors to focus on their core goal: delivering trusted, personalized guidance.
Wealth management is, above all, a business built on trust. Clients may appreciate sleek interfaces, but they rely on the reliability and relevance of the advice they receive. That reliability comes from strong infrastructure, systems that optimize investment diligence, portfolio aggregation, and long-term financial planning. It is in these areas that AI delivers sustainable value.
So, where does AI actually create staying power for advisors? We kept coming back to a simple truth: AI creates lasting impact when it strengthens the relationships advisors hold. These are three areas where AI can fit neatly into the infrastructure advisors rely on every day, and ultimately help them deliver a consistently positive experience to their clients.
Recommending a private investment is a long-term commitment with high stakes. A poor choice can lock clients into years of underperformance, jeopardizing their financial goals and eroding the advisor’s credibility. Nothing damages trust more than a failed, illiquid investment. With the rapid expansion of retail access to alternatives, regulatory scrutiny is also intensifying. The SEC is sharpening its focus on whether due diligence is documented, repeatable, and defensible.
Advisors must access the alpha potential of private markets to remain competitive, yet diligence is often burdened by operational risk, compliance demands, and analytical complexity. A traditional fund diligence process can take 3 months or more, but AI can reduce much of the heavy lifting to under an hour. From performing red flag analysis, benchmarking against previous cohorts, and generating investment committee-ready diligence memos, AI can accomplish this in minutes. This helps make the process efficient, data-driven, and defensible, one that turns diligence from a burden into an advantage.
Once clients commit to private investments, complexity multiplies. Advisors, RIAs, and multi-family offices often manage dozens of LP interests across multiple managers, each with different reporting formats. Tracking capital calls, distributions, NAV, and performance quickly becomes manual and error-prone. Without a consolidated view, it is nearly impossible to deliver accurate oversight or timely insights.
AI-powered infrastructure within a turnkey platform can address this by extracting and reconciling data from capital account statements, delivering a centralized, accurate view of all LP holdings. With better data, advisors gain the transparency and oversight needed to serve clients more effectively and scale their practices with confidence.
Forward-looking portfolio modeling is central to the advisor’s role, yet traditional tools often fall short when it comes to incorporating alternatives. Traditional tools rely on static assumptions and overlook the realities of private markets, where capital calls, liquidity timelines, and vintage diversification can fundamentally alter outcomes. Advisors are looking for higher standard models that reflect these constraints while still aligning with each client’s goals, risk tolerance, and liquidity preferences.
AI can power planning tools that are both dynamic and scalable. Advisors can design and implement portfolios that incorporate real-world private market constraints, then apply those models consistently across multiple accounts. This reduces guesswork, ensures allocations stay aligned with objectives, and allows firms to manage complex cash flow dynamics more efficiently at scale.
Advisors have been clear: they’re looking for a better way to navigate private markets. They’ve asked for an infrastructure reset that gives them tools that reduce complexity, increase control, and give back confidence when advising clients. We listened.
At the heart of this transformation lies Gridline’s mission to set a new standard in private market investing as the industry’s first Turnkey Alternatives Management Platform purpose-built for advisors. My team and I have reimagined the infrastructure of alternatives to make private markets faster, smarter, and more accessible. We’ve built a comprehensive platform that brings AI into fund diligence, portfolio management, and portfolio modeling, turning complexity into clarity and inefficiency into precision.
By providing an intelligence layer for due diligence, a centralized dashboard for portfolio oversight, and dynamic planning tools that incorporate the realities of private markets, we’re equipping advisors to reduce risk, scale their practices, and align more closely with client goals. Most importantly, the platform empowers them to do what they do best: build trust and deliver meaningful guidance. With Gridline, AI in the wealth space does not replace the human element; it amplifies it, creating a future where transparency, intelligence, and opportunity go hand in hand, and where each client’s experience is not only more sophisticated but more human.
We’re always happy to show off our hard work. Let us show you how we can deliver a seamless alternatives experience where private markets operate with public market standards. Reach out to our team here.
Wealth advisors have never had more technology at their disposal, and yet, many have never felt more constrained by it. Before joining Gridline, I spent years in CRM and marketing automation, helping clients implement new tools meant to create efficiency and clarity. Each started with good intentions, adopting software for every function. But over time, the cracks appeared. Integrations broke. Data was manually exported, imported, and reconciled. Dashboards didn’t match. No one could say with confidence what was accurate or even where “the truth” lived.
That disconnect has real consequences. Investment News reported this year that 82% of Advisors with subpar tech lost prospects and 67% lost clients. When data lives across multiple systems, it’s harder to see the full picture and easier to miss opportunities for stronger client engagement.
That’s where the power of platforms comes in.
It’s a strategic blueprint that transformed industries like CRM and marketing automation. The companies that broke through weren’t the ones who cobbled together point solutions. They were the ones who adopted platforms: unified systems where data, automation, and workflows finally hummed in sync.
When technology works together, the downstream impact has tangible business implications: efficiency rises, operational costs fall, and client satisfaction, growth, and retention follow.
The “platform edge” isn’t about having the most tools or even upgrading your tech stack. It’s about investing in infrastructure that creates a unified operating model, one that’s dynamic enough to support the business needs of today, while also maintaining a view to the needs of the future. That ensures the most cost-effective and least disruptive path towards achieving the next critical growth milestone.
Wealth management infrastructure, especially in private markets, is on the cusp of massive consolidation and transformation.
Alternative investments have gone mainstream, and advisors are expected to manage everything from diligence and fund selection to onboarding, subscriptions, capital calls, and performance reporting. Each of those functions has its own specialized tool, and the result looks a lot like the early CRM sprawl: too many systems, too little connectivity, and rising operational friction that ultimately slows growth and erodes client retention.
Ask any advisory operations lead:
If your answers mirror most firms, you’re not alone. According to the 2025 Connected Wealth Report, advisors say “bad data” is their #1 technology challenge, and “integration gaps” are the top obstacle to upgrading their tech stack.
Modern advisory firms don’t struggle for lack of technology; they struggle to make it work together. The firms pulling ahead are the ones building connected infrastructure that scales with them, not against them.
Here are four practical principles advisory firms assessing their tech stack can apply now:
Advisors are raising expectations in private markets, seeking the same clarity and control they’ve long had in public investing. The next era of growth will come from firms that turn technology from a cost center into a growth engine, choosing infrastructure that makes that possible through connected systems, seamless data, and workflows that build trust instead of friction.
That’s the role of a Turnkey Alternatives Management Platform like Gridline, a foundation built to bring public-market discipline and transparency to private markets. Gridline connects the entire private investment lifecycle, from discovery and diligence to subscription, capital calls, and performance reporting, so advisors can manage every stage in one integrated platform. With open architecture that supports data flow with custodians, it fits within the ecosystem advisors already rely on while creating the operational efficiency and confidence their clients feel.
For advisors, the impact is tangible: less manual work, cleaner data, faster execution, and stronger client confidence. This is the new standard for advisory infrastructure, one built on connection, confidence, and clarity. It’s a foundation that scales with you, built for where you are today and ready for wherever your growth takes you next.
If your practice is gearing up for the shift, let’s explore how Gridline can help you lead the transition from technology as a cost center to a growth engine.
Jana Ferguson is a seasoned leader in client experience, currently serving as the VP of Business Operations at Gridline since July 2022. Prior to that, she was the Director of Customer Enablement at SugarCRM, where she played a pivotal role in professional services and client success for over three years. With extensive experience in client services and marketing automation at Salesfusion, Jana has a strong background in customer onboarding, relationship management, and driving product adoption, particularly in the marketing and tech sectors.
What does Q4 mean to you? For most registered investment advisors (RIAs), it’s an opportunity to prove their value. Often, Q4 is a flurry of client meetings and emails covering rebalancing, cash gifts, tax payments, capital calls, and charitable giving plans.
Every conversation, from rebalancing to charitable giving, becomes an opportunity to reinforce trust and show clients how calibrated portfolio management translates into tangible after-tax value.
That’s where tax-loss harvesting (TLH) comes in.
TLH isn’t just a technical exercise; it’s a marker of professionalism. Done right, it reflects an advisor’s ability to turn market volatility into lasting advantage, both for client portfolios and the relationship itself.
The growing focus on systematic, technology-driven tax management isn’t anecdotal. According to Cerulli Associates’ 2025 Customized at Scale white paper, 82% of managed account sponsors now rank improving tax management capabilities, including loss harvesting, as a top priority for their firms.
In this piece, we’ll explore:
TLH is both a portfolio management discipline and a client-relationship differentiator. As more advisory firms compete on cost and technology, tax efficiency has emerged as one of the cleanest ways to show ongoing value and create alpha. When TLH is integrated into rebalancing systems, risk controls, and personalized investment policy statements, advisors can demonstrate measurable after-tax value. Done systematically, advisors can potentially add ~25 bps or more in annual after-tax return. Often enough to more than justify fees, while reinforcing trust through a visible, repeatable process.
The payoff depends on:
Over time, compounding is where TLH really earns its keep.
Effective tax-loss harvesting goes beyond a once-a-year sale; it’s a year-round system integrated into portfolio management. Leading advisors:
TLH pairs naturally with giving strategies. RIAs can advise clients to use highly appreciated securities when making donations to charity, avoiding capital gains taxes altogether, while using harvested losses to offset other income.
This “gain/loss match optimization” is particularly useful when loss opportunities dwindle in bull markets. For ultra-high-net-worth clients, RIAs might employ options or derivatives to hedge positions, but this adds complexity and costs.
Direct indexing is an advanced portfolio tactic gaining traction among RIAs. Instead of using mutual funds or ETFs, RIAs construct customized portfolios mirroring an index but allowing individual stock sales for losses. For instance, in an S&P 500 replica, selling a losing tech stock and replacing it with a similar one maintains exposure while harvesting the loss. Integrating AI portfolio optimization with TLH tactics into in-house portfolio management systems is becoming more prevalent. And outsourced solutions, including platforms like Parametric or AssetMark, offer turnkey solutions.
Many successful advisors employ ETF-based allocation strategies for simpler administration and lower costs. Hybrid core-satellite approaches mix individual securities with ETFs in satellite allocations. TLH works well in these constructs, but calls for extra scrutiny when selecting a replacement ETF to maintain the desired asset class exposure within a portfolio. Best practices for replacement security selection include using factor-tilted replacements (swapping total market for large-cap value indices), or using optimization algorithms that minimize tracking error while avoiding wash sale violations. Always use specific identification for tax lot selection rather than average cost methods.
The key consideration for TLH implementation is the wash sale rule (IRC Section 1091). The wash sale rule prohibits claiming losses if “substantially identical” securities are purchased within 30 days before or after the sale. The IRS hasn’t precisely defined “substantially identical,” but the same securities clearly qualify, different share classes of the same company likely qualify, while securities of different companies in the same sector generally don’t qualify. Index funds tracking the same index remain a gray area requiring conservative interpretation.
Why TLH Is Harder Than It Looks
Even for sophisticated firms, tax-loss harvesting breaks down at the system level. Most advisor tech stacks weren’t built for daily monitoring, multi-custodian data, or real-time coordination between portfolio management and client reporting. TLH demands precision: accurate cost-basis tracking, wash-sale compliance, and seamless integration into rebalancing and trading workflows. When those systems operate in silos, opportunities get missed and execution becomes reactive instead of routine.
The push toward automation isn’t theoretical; 82% of managed account sponsors now cite tax management capabilities like transition analysis and tax-loss harvesting as top strategic priorities, according to Cerulli Associates (2025). Yet most platforms still lack the unified systems needed to deliver them at scale.
The Limits of Point Solutions
Standalone TLH tools and spreadsheets can automate trade ideas, but they rarely account for the full picture: capital call timing, liquidity management, or portfolio-level exposure shifts. They help capture losses, but they don’t operationalize discipline across accounts or teams. That’s where many firms stall: strong intent, limited infrastructure.
The Case for a Turnkey Platform
A unified, purpose-built platform connects TLH with every other part of portfolio management: trading, cash management, and real-time performance visibility.
Advisors gain:
Gridline’s infrastructure eliminates many of the operational friction points that make portfolio management difficult to scale. As the industry’s first Turnkey Alternatives Management Platform built specifically for private markets, Gridline helps advisors integrate alternative investments into broader portfolio oversight — linking capital calls, rebalancing, liquidity, and reporting — so advisors can maintain precision across accounts without extra manual work.
While Gridline does not execute tax-loss harvesting, its unified data and reporting infrastructure provides the clarity advisors need to align private market activity with their clients’ broader, tax-aware strategies. The result is a disciplined, scalable process that strengthens client trust and operational efficiency.
Gridline simplifies portfolio management so you can scale with confidence and set a new standard for your clients. Use the Modern Private Markets Oversight Checklist to evaluate your current oversight and see what “great” can look like when your infrastructure matches your ambition.
Logan Henderson, Co-Founder and CEO of Gridline, recently joined Avidian Wealth Solutions ($4B in RAUM) for a conversation on the future of private markets on the podcast Ask Avidian. As one of the fastest-growing boutique family offices in the country, Avidian has been a respected name in wealth management for more than two decades.
In his discussion with Avidian’s Chief Investment Officer, Jake Borbidge, Logan shared his perspective on the current state of the alternatives market, why quality matters more than ever, and infrastructure—not hype—is shaping the future of private market investing.
🎧 Listen to the episode: Spotify | Apple | YouTube
Logan opened the conversation with a clear read on the current market dynamics. After a long stretch of easy capital and sky-high valuations, the environment is normalizing.
“The market has broadly accepted the new rate environment. Money was free, valuations were crazy, but there has been a normalization. There are still some hype cycles… but when assessing opportunities, now the focus is back on quality of revenue and quality of earnings across the board.” — Logan Henderson
Headlines like OpenAI’s $500B valuation reflect an environment where innovation drives excitement—but also one where selectivity matters. As hype cycles flare, the question is increasingly less “Who’s raising?” and more “Who’s built to last?” The conversation framed this as a turning point: fundamentals are back in focus, and investors are seeking clarity, control, and durable strategies rather than simply chasing access.
While market normalization sets the backdrop, dispersion of returns is what makes private markets uniquely powerful and uniquely challenging.
“Anywhere there’s dispersion, you can do a good job and win big. But you can obviously do a poor job and lose big.” — Jake Borbidge
Private market outcomes vary widely, especially compared to the relatively tight bands of ETF performance. Top-performing funds are often sector-specific and differentiated. Identifying the Alpha from the Fluff requires infrastructure, underwriting discipline, and informed access to elevate confidence in the investment strategy.
This is where Gridline’s approach comes in, pairing technical infrastructure with differentiated investment sourcing to give advisors more visibility and confidence across the full lifecycle.
“There are really two parts to our business. One is technical… The second component is on the asset management and alternative side. Our thesis is really around finding those differentiated investment opportunities.” — Logan Henderson
He also highlighted how Gridline is increasingly leveraging AI and advanced data modeling to evaluate opportunities more efficiently and identify fund managers with consistent performance signals—bringing institutional-grade analysis to the advisory channel.
As dispersion creates opportunity, confidence elevates and often begets elevated allocation to private market investments. The dynamics of scale can creep up, exposing a structural gap that may have otherwise gone unnoticed at 10-15% allocation to alternatives, but now at >15-20% allocation to alternatives, advisors are feeling the growing pains of access without infrastructure.
Jake captured this familiar pain point for many advisors:
“We actually… see a lot of clients coming our direction that have got burn marks on them from prior things that they’ve had. It just wasn’t a good experience. And sometimes the experience isn’t necessarily the return side of it. It’s just the inability to see what you own.” — Jake Borbidge
Historically, advisors have had to navigate opaque, fragmented systems to participate in private markets. Logan emphasized that those legacy frictions don’t have to define the future.
Today, technology and more sophisticated underwriting processes are closing those gaps. What used to be manual, scattered, and uncertain is becoming data-driven, transparent, and continuously updated. Through AI-enhanced deal evaluation and real-time portfolio monitoring, advisors can now see performance and exposure across every investment as it happens, clarity that simply didn’t exist in private markets before.
Today, technology and more sophisticated underwriting processes are closing those gaps. What used to be manual, scattered, and uncertain is becoming transparent, structured, and controllable.
“Gridline is the first turnkey alternatives management platform. And our focus is bringing efficiency into the alternatives ecosystem.” — Logan Henderson
The platform pairs infrastructure (to manage and monitor investments) with asset management (to identify and underwrite quality). Together, they aim to help advisors deliver better outcomes without the operational drag. Unlike much of the industry, which focuses on front-end access and transactions, Gridline is built for the long arc:
“It’s the next ten years that matter.” — Logan Henderson
Both Logan and Jake reflected on just how operationally cumbersome private markets have been. Even after gaining access to deals, inefficiencies stack up fast.
“Everyone has made an investment and has been through the lifecycle of managing PDFs in Excel and trying to understand, ‘what do I own?’ There are a lot of inefficiencies that technology can solve for, like knowing what you own and how much it’s worth. It’s a powerful thing to be able to say the totality of your portfolio, but also what your unfunded commitments are.” — Logan Henderson
Jake summed it up with a laugh:
“That’s important. It’s almost like quantum physics at this point.” — Jake Borbidge
Gridline consolidates those scattered workflows, from subscription through reporting, into a single, integrated turnkey alternatives management platform. Instead of advisors juggling portals and spreadsheets, they get real-time visibility across the full investment lifecycle.
This is how firms shift from managing chaos to allocating intelligently.
Looking into the future of private markets, Logan and Jake discussed the mismatch between product wrappers and underlying asset classes, particularly as interest grows in semi-liquid or interval structures.
“Ultimately, it is still an illiquid product because the underlying assets are illiquid. So I think there’s going to be some innovations… but so much of that inefficiency largely comes down to what we’ve solved through technology already by building our own ledgering system.” — Logan Henderson
Logan cautioned that making it easier to get into private investments doesn’t address the structural realities of the asset class, and can create problems when markets turn. More specifically, you may not be able to get your dollars out when you want to, so does the investment strategy truly meet your near-term financial priorities?
The conversation closed with a look toward the future, including the potential integration of alternatives into 401(k) plans.
“401(k)s are a great use of capital for alternatives. It’s got a long, long holding period. So long duration on both sides. So that’s a huge benefit.” — Logan Henderson
But he also raised concerns about governance and quality control:
“What I don’t want to see is an open market for someone to take their 401(k) out of a low-cost ETF that tracks the S&P 500 and go find random opportunities that someone services to them.” — Logan Henderson
For many RIAs and family offices, alternative investments remain a high-potential but operationally complex asset class. In his conversation with Avidian, Logan detailed how Gridline’s platform leverages AI for smarter deal evaluation, delivers real-time transparency across portfolios, and maintains a disciplined focus on high-quality fund managers — a combination designed to mitigate the liquidity and structural risks emerging in today’s rapidly evolving private markets.
Logan’s conversation on the future of private markets with Avidian underscores the growing emphasis on:
The information presented in this podcast and blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or solicit any investment product or securities. The views expressed are the participants’ own and do not necessarily represent the views of Gridline or Avidian Wealth Solutions. All investments carry risk, and past performance is not indicative of future results. Private market investments are not suitable for all investors and may only be available to those who meet specific eligibility requirements. Attendees should consult with their financial advisors or conduct their own research before making any investment decisions.
Client trust is earned through discipline. Asking the right private fund due diligence questions is essential because private funds demand more scrutiny than any other asset class. The universe of investible opportunities is vast, opaque, and often closed off. The challenge and opportunity are finding the funds that truly fit your clients’ risk and return expectations.
And in alternatives, the stakes are high: returns follow a power law, with a small number of investments generating most of the gains. That means the ability to source and win the right deals matters far more than broad exposure.
81% of advisors say private markets help differentiate their practice (Cerulli/Invesco/IWI, 2023). Yet as access to alternatives expands, the job of evaluating them gets harder, not easier. The rise of alt marketplaces means every fund looks accessible. But that doesn’t make them equal. And when performance is opaque or operations break down, it’s the advisor who’s left explaining.
Here’s a simple, practical checklist: five questions every advisor can ask before recommending a private fund. Whether you’re vetting a single manager or navigating a curated platform, this framework helps you cut through the noise and reinforce the trust you’ve built with clients.
In a crowded marketplace, it’s easy to mistake repackaged strategies for innovation. Look past the marketing veneer and ask: What actually sets this fund apart? Is there a proven edge in sourcing, execution, or timing, or is it simply tracking a trend?
Differentiation is best when it’s structural and repeatable, built on a manager’s ability to source and win the kinds of deals that consistently drive outcomes. Most advisors only see a half-built data set, a marketing deck, and some historical performance, but you need to compare the fund to firms of similar size, stage, and strategy to truly evaluate it.
What to Look For: If the marketplace doesn’t show you how a manager compares to peers—by vintage, strategy, or return profile—it’s not really helping you evaluate. Look for platforms that offer fund-level benchmarking and structured performance insights, not just a logo wall of access.
Not all “curated” platforms are actually vetting every investment opportunity. Some just aggregate. You deserve to know who underwrote the fund, how the manager was evaluated, and what risks were flagged—not just see a link to a PDF.
If you can’t articulate the diligence behind the fund, you can’t stand behind the recommendation.
What to Look For: The best platforms have dedicated investment teams doing institutional-style diligence on your behalf, and they’ll show you what they looked at and why it passed. Gridline was built from the ground up to bring operational discipline and deep manager rigor to every fund on the platform, not as a wrapper, but as an extension of your investment team.
Private investments demand patience. But that doesn’t mean performance has to be a black box. Advisors need a clear, consistent view into how a fund is performing and what’s driving the returns.
Are quarterly reports comprehensible? Do you have real-time dashboards? Is the data reconciled and client-ready, or cobbled together from scattered fund updates?
Your clients expect clarity. It’s worth expecting it in your tools as well.
What to Look For: Ask whether the platform delivers real-time, consolidated reporting and aggregation across all funds, down to the underlying holdings. Managing investor expectations with PDFs and guesswork can be avoided when your performance data is as transparent and openly available as possible—continuously updated, reconciled, and ready to share with clients. Gridline gives you the tools to show up sharp, not scrambling, with visibility built to power client confidence.
A private fund isn’t a strategy. It’s a vehicle. The real question is whether it fits your client’s objectives, income, liquidity, diversification, and complements their broader portfolio.
Too often, alts are bucketed into portfolios just to show sophistication. But sophistication without alignment creates more risk than reward.
What to Look For: The right platform can help you go beyond access and support thoughtful portfolio construction, built around your firm’s investment philosophy and client needs, not product pushes. Gridline’s approach brings clarity to construction, pairing recommendations with real risk alignment—so your client portfolios scale with intention, not guesswork.
Alternatives is a complicated business; operational drag at the subscription, capital call, or exit stage can undermine even the best investment. If the fund works but the operations don’t, everyone loses. You need to know:
Friction in onboarding or surprises at exit erode trust. Operational fluency is just as critical as investment performance.
What to Look For: Modern marketplaces often offer digital subscriptions, automated capital call tracking, and centralized document management. If the process still feels manual or patchworked together, you may end up carrying the operational burden. Gridline gives you a streamlined, scalable alternative, an integrated platform that grows with you, not around you.
There’s no shortage of private funds. The hard part is knowing which ones are worth recommending and which ones are just noise. In alternatives, returns tend to follow a power law; a small number of investments generate most of the gains, which means the ability to source and win the right deals matters far more than broad exposure.
As Logan Henderson, Gridline’s CEO, puts it: “The best returners are going to be a small subset of companies. You need to find firms and people who have access to the best possible opportunities that are going to deliver the outcomes your clients are demanding.”
That’s why we built Gridline, a turnkey alternatives management platform that matches your ambition with infrastructure. We help advisors bring institutional standards to private market investing, with clarity, control, and confidence built in.
Our Managed Marketplace gives you curated access to institutional-quality funds across venture, buyout, private credit, and real assets, paired with performance data, portfolio-aligned recommendations, and end-to-end operational automation. It’s everything you need to offer better alternatives, without adding complexity.
Because setting a new standard in private markets starts with asking better questions and having the right platform behind you.
Get access to institutional-quality alts, without the complexity. Create a free login to get started.
→ Explore the Managed Marketplace
Gridline, LLC is a technology platform and the owner of the software platform referenced herein. Gridline Advisors, LLC, is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the state of Georgia. The content in this post is for informational purposes only and is not an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security. Alternative investments are speculative, involve a high degree of risk, including the possible loss of your entire investment, and are not suitable for all investors. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Interests in funds managed by Gridline Advisors, LLC, are available only to accredited investors. This material may contain forward-looking statements; actual results can vary materially.
Private markets are becoming a bigger part of the investment conversation among the fastest-growing RIAs, and a material driver of HNW and UHNW portfolios. Transparency and reporting quality now outrank track record as the #1 expectation LPs have from GPs (SS&C, Embracing the New).
Advisors are facing the same demand as they expand oversight in private markets. Today, they’re designing more sophisticated allocations, overseeing more fund exposure, and navigating more complexity than ever before. And they’re partnering with intelligent infrastructure that delivers the white glove service their clients demand and the operating levels their firm’s scale requires. Whether you’re managing a few funds or a firm-wide alts program, here’s a simple checklist to help you evaluate your current oversight and what “great” can look like when your infrastructure matches your ambition.
Ask yourself: Can I…
Instead of piecing together PDFs or spreadsheets to understand your private investments, a modern platform can collect, store, and standardize all of your fund documents and data, providing NAV, IRR, DPI, commitments, capital calls, and distributions in one place, continuously updated and reconciled across every fund and client. View performance instantly at the firm, client, or fund level, with metrics that are continuously updated and ready to share.
→ Real-time performance visibility and drill-down reporting fuel better conversations and smarter decisions by putting a complete, organized picture at your fingertips anytime you need it.
Documents and data can be centralized and reconciled automatically. From clean, client-ready reports to audit trails and compliance workflows, a modern platform is designed to remove friction, so you can focus on managing strategy, not formatting spreadsheets.
→ A back office that scales as smoothly as your investments keeps growth sustainable and creates more room for high-value client engagement and strategic planning.
Advisors don’t have to dig through a lengthy diligence document to understand why a fund is unique, they can have a short document that lays out the key points to answer client questions. Similarly they don’t have to compare two quarterly reports side by side, they can have a straightforward summary that provides key talking points without sifting through dozens of pages.
→ Confidence comes from a quick read through the right information, rather than sifting for what you really want.
Your private market platform can integrate with the reporting, billing, and custodial systems your team already relies on—like Orion, Black Diamond, Schwab, and Fidelity—to deliver a unified, end-to-end experience.
→ Integration makes private market investing feel as seamless as the public side while ensuring your team and clients always work from the same accurate, up-to-date information.
Oversight doesn’t have to slow you down—it can set you apart. The fastest-growing advisors are raising the bar, not by working harder, but by leveraging infrastructure built for what private markets demand.
Gridline is setting a new standard for private market oversight.
We’re bringing the transparency and reporting ease you’d expect from public markets to your alternatives portfolio with dedicated help on sourcing and structuring challenges unique to private markets. Designed as a Turnkey Alternatives Management Platform, Gridline rearchitected the entire system so you can give clients a clear, unified view of what they actually own.
Most legacy platforms were built to raise capital for fund managers, not to help advisors build and manage an alternatives portfolio. Gridline was purpose-built for advisors, streamlining the entire process, from portfolio construction to reporting. Its unified dashboard tracks capital calls, distributions, and NAV in real time, with AI-powered reconciliation and automated workflows that eliminate manual drag, so you spend less time preparing for meetings and more time showing up client-ready with comprehensive, up-to-date insights.
Whether you’re overseeing a few LP positions or scaling a full alts program, this checklist is a practical place to start elevating your oversight without adding complexity.
Gridline, LLC is a technology platform and the owner of the software platform referenced herein. Gridline Advisors, LLC, is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the state of Georgia. The content in this post is for informational purposes only and is not an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security. Alternative investments are speculative, involve a high degree of risk, including the possible loss of your entire investment, and are not suitable for all investors. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Interests in funds managed by Gridline Advisors, LLC, are available only to accredited investors. This material may contain forward-looking statements; actual results can vary materially.
The business of sports has never been hotter. Once upon a time sports ownership was considered a trophy asset for local bigwigs, who purchased the team to see and be seen as much to generate a return. While there are still plenty of vanity ownership projects out there (Dallas Cowboys fans can certainly attest to Jerry Jones’ proclivity to make himself the center of attention), the ownership of major sports franchises has become considerably more professionalized over the past decade. After the NFL announced that it would allow private equity funds to purchase stakes in teams a few months ago, it completed a clean sweep of major American leagues who allow funds to invest minority growth capital into teams.
Why are investors interested?
It comes down to eyeballs, which drive dollars. Over the past couple of decades, the rise of streaming and smartphones has sent traditional TV viewership spiraling downward. Only 45% of TV watching households in America still subscribe to cable or satellite, down from a peak of almost 90%. This shift to streaming (which recently topped 40% of TV usage for the first time) depressed viewership for traditional cable, and importantly for advertisers puts a large chunk of viewership out of reach given the no or limited ad models preferred by streamers like Netflix. The result is that sports broadcasts now stand alone as the most viewed TV windows that are open to advertisers, averaging over 91 of the 100 most watched telecasts in 2023 and 2024.
Advertisers are unsurprisingly willing to pay top dollar for this rare content. That in turn means that networks pay the leagues an ever-increasing amount for content, for example NFL rights increased more than fourfold from 2006 to 2022 (the first year of the current contract). These broadcast rights are split amongst the teams, meaning that those team valuations have shot up alongside a bumper crop of revenues. The University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business tracks an index of Sports Franchises in concert with investor Arctos, and they estimate team values have risen at 14% annually over the past 20 years, doubling the annualized return of the S&P 500.
Why are existing owners willing to sell?
If the assets are so great, why are existing owners willing to part with them and make it easier for Private Equity to buy in? Part of the reason is succession planning. As many older owners pass away their children might not be able to or want to continue in a lead ownership role. Another is increased capital expenditures. As stadiums get more and more expensive (the NFL now has 7 stadiums that cost over $1B), existing ownership groups might not have the capital to afford new stadiums without institutional backing. Finally the valuations on teams are getting so high that even the wealthiest individuals don’t have the bankroll to purchase teams on their own or with a limited number of co-investors. Institutional pools of capital are required, hence the multi-billion dollar private equity fundraises.
Is there another way to play it?
While plenty of groups have lined up to take minority stakes in longstanding enterprises, others have sought to avoid the high valuations by purchasing stakes in teams from upstart leagues or creating new competitions from scratch. Monarch Collective and Ariel Investments are great examples of the former, investing exclusively in women’s sports at valuations in the hundreds of millions rather. New leagues abound, from TGL in golf to King’s League in soccer, often using the transformative celebrity of a founder like Tiger Woods or Gerard Piqué to draw eyeballs to a new league offering a less formal wrapper to a well-known sport. Other leagues like LOVB have attempted to put professional structure behind sports that usually receive significant attention around the Olympics, often using social media and behind the scenes footage to connect with fans directly. Plenty of ancillary businesses have benefitted from the rise in sports enterprise values, like data-driven sports marketer Two Circles who has been able to expand into a global sports marketplace. As valuations continue to increase and more professional ownership groups seek to drive value at these teams, it seems likely that outsourced specialists will gain market share from internal franchise by franchise efforts.
Any way you choose to view sports investing, what seems clear is that the business of sports has never been bigger and seems unlikely to slow down anytime soon. Given the dearth of public market opportunities to invest in the sports ecosystem, we remain believers that private markets should be an instrumental part of any sports investor’s toolkit.