Stretched equity valuations push advisors to semiliquid funds

Public markets have given investors a 15-year run, and the price of that run is now the central argument for private assets. WealthManagement.com reports that wealth managers, facing stretched equity valuations and rising infrastructure demand, are expanding allocations beyond stocks and bonds.

Ascentis Asset Management, working from Federal Reserve data, puts U.S. corporate equities at roughly 230% of GDP. That is 2.6 standard deviations above the long-term trend. At that level, stocks are more expensive relative to the economy than at the dot-com bubble or the 2021 peak, the article says. Robert Shiller's historical market data adds the sobering part: investors who bought at extreme valuations often earned little or no inflation-adjusted return over the next decade, even when the businesses underneath kept growing.

The demand is already reshaping distribution. The number of evergreen private credit funds more than doubled between 2020 and July 2025, according to Preqin. McKinsey puts the assets in U.S. wealth-channel evergreen and semiliquid vehicles at $348 billion in 2024. Interval funds and tender-offer funds are the semiliquid structures built to carry this shift into individual portfolios.

The article names no specific interval or tender-offer fund. That is fine. The backdrop it describes is exactly the one sponsors pitch: when valuations sit 2.6 standard deviations above trend, alternatives start to look less like a diversifier and more like the plan. The same channel also carries new scrutiny of fees, transparency, valuation and liquidity — and the redemption pressure several funds faced this spring, the article notes, is why that scrutiny has teeth.