Private Markets Reshape Advice, Says Westport’s Michael Gold
Private markets are no longer a niche add-on for the ultra wealthy. According to Michael Gold, founder and CEO of Gold Family Wealth in Westport, Connecticut, roughly 83 percent of advisors now consider a robust menu of private asset offerings essential to serving high net worth families, marking a shift from occasional allocation to a core piece of most portfolios.
Michael Gold has watched this shift play out among his own clients, families generally holding between 20 million and 150 million dollars in net worth. He says technology is simultaneously making basic wealth management more accessible across nearly every income bracket, with AI advisors and digital platforms now handling routine portfolio modeling and financial planning tasks that used to require a human analyst.
Holding the Human Line
Despite that shift toward automation for simpler needs, Michael Gold Westport maintains that his corner of the market, ultra high net worth planning, resists being reduced to a standardized model. “These are not transactional issues,” he says of the family dynamics, legacy goals and multigenerational coordination his clients bring to the table. “They cannot be automated or managed through standardized models.”
His Westport firm has built what he calls its intellectual engine around advanced modeling, enterprise exposure mapping, multigenerational governance and coordinated planning across multiple entities, tools originally developed for the most complicated family situations. Rather than keeping those frameworks siloed for a handful of top clients, Gold says the firm pushes the same standards across its broader advisory work.
Firms across the industry are also responding to generational change by hiring younger advisors who can bridge communication gaps with Millennial and Gen Z heirs, building what Gold calls multigenerational teams designed to keep client relationships intact across a transition. For Gold, private markets access and technology are useful tools, but he insists the judgment that ties them together still has to come from people who have sat across the table from a family for years. Read this article for more information.
See for more about Michael Gold Westport on https://www.youtube.com/@goldfamilywealth